Are tweets the new press release?

The following article by Vanessa Horwell, Chief Visibility Officer of ThinkInk, originally appeared on Mobile Marketer on 10/25/12.

Leave it to the wonder and mystery that is the human brain to channel ideas together and combine them into cohesive article-worthy or press release-fit logic. One hour and voilà! Nine hundred and twenty-six words. It is a shame that my computer cannot achieve that independent feat of intelligence and brainstorm client copy on its own.

But, then again, maybe it should not have to. Maybe we all need to embrace Twitter and leave the press release behind?

Arty or RT
Let us face it. For an industry that prides itself on being up on tech-savvy knowhow, playfully – and, sometimes, not so playfully – chiding our distant cousins (print journalists) in their dinosaur-like ways, the press release is often our antiquated little secret.

Of course, we publish them online and they can be written, edited and read across all mobile platforms.

But when you think about it, how much have press releases changed in the course of their 106-year lifespan?

The answer is not terribly much. The basic press release is as formulaic as computer code – and often just as monotonous to this right-brainer.

An obligatory jargon-filled run-on lede sentence that tells the reader what the company has done, and what said company plans to accomplish from now through the next decade.

This is followed by a series of quotes and concludes with marginally relevant big picture data, some contact information and request for interviews.

Apart from the 1.5 line spacing we used to use – back in the day when we still snail-mailed press releases complete with stuck-on photographs – it is a formula that has not ever changed.

So it is hardly surprising that press releases, in this traditional format, have not set the mobile world on fire. And why would they?

Feeling the need for speed and connectivity
Because the reality is that the Internet – once erroneously called the “information super highway” when the 24.4 Kbps-modem Web was anything but fast and efficient – is beginning to live up to that dated moniker.

Compared to 2012, the Internet of, say, 1996, was like a gravel road fit for horse and buggy and the occasional tractor.

Enter Twitter in 2006 with its 140-character space limitations quickening its communicative back and forth and you just might have the fastest and most efficient way to disseminate a message yet.

As of June, Twitter boasted some 400 million tweets per day, marking an 18 percent increase from March and has around a half-billion users.

And it is in this ever-faster space that the press release has tried to remain relevant and itself newsworthy.

But in recent years, social media has been the mover and shaker of all sorts of news: from the 2011 Arab Spring youth-led uprising, to the Twitter-revealed death of Whitney Houston – 27 minutes before mainstream media – and Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps earning top honors not only in the pool, but in the number of tweets he sent out regarding his medals.

Even President Obama got in on the act to congratulate Mr. Phelps as he tweeted back, “You’ve made your country proud.”

If this is where the world’s most Earth-shaking events are getting first light, then it is incumbent on corporate communications and public relations professionals to more completely embrace this medium.

Twitter’s immediacy, combined with its brevity is like instant movie teasers, with 140-characters replacing 140-second television and radio ads.

Add to that their nearly zero production costs, minus the need to pay a staff to generate and monitor multiple tweets across multiple clients, and you are left with an instantly adaptable medium tailor fit for the mobile world that we all inhabit.

Of course, all this Twitter trumpeting begs the question that in part inspired this piece, “Are tweets the new press release?”

Yes. And no.

Despite my press release bashing above, press releases are necessarily written in a predictable format to make it easier for journalists and others who would be interested in the information to gather it quickly and reach out to additional sources. And there is no denying that a 500-700-word release contains far more information than a barrage of tweets.

Tweet this: Press releases and tweets can and should work together
When it comes to the Twitter versus press release tiff, it is likely press releases will undergo two major

changes to keep pace and adapt.

On the one hand, they will likely get shorter and begin mimicking other forms of concise social media communications. Or at least there will be two versions: a complete release, or its lede with a hyperlink option to “expand details.”

It is also likely that they will be relegated to niche markets, and nor will they remain a PR team’s first line of communication defense.

Like the longer, more narrative-feeling second-day news story that expands on the gritty hard news details from a day-one event, press releases will become a secondary form of outreach, but nor will they end up deleted from our collective inboxes.  

At least for now, the press release hard work of crafting a lengthier message, distributing that message and making sure it gets to the right people in a timely fashion is not going anywhere – yet.

And considering the growing popularity of the phablet – tablet and smartphone hybrids – and tablets outright, mobile screen size may not prove the information processing stumbling block for which it is often chastised.

So it is back to writing client copy – Twitter for the head’s-up and press releases for the data that follows.

The following article by Vanessa Horwell, Chief Visibility Officer of ThinkInk, originally appeared on Mobile Marketer on 10/25/12.

Ink and Paper: So Long and Farewell

If you’re of a certain age, born anytime during the age of television and right up until the early 1990s, then it’s likely you’ll remember the iconic educational commercials: kiddies’ faces would light up at the sight of their first encyclopedia collection and parents who would be seen, usually at a kitchen table, considering and calculating the financial investment – which for many, was no small undertaking. Nevertheless, the multi-volume collections stood proud on bookshelves in living rooms and home libraries across the globe. In an age before the Internet, the information superhighway was paved with ink and paper, not gigabytes and downloads.

As a public relations professional who has mailed, faxed and emailed her fair share of press releases and press kits (yes I’m that old) to journalists and clients, I was a bit saddened - but not surprised - by the news that Encyclopedia Britannica, a 244-year-old institution of somewhat portable knowledge would cease production of its print edition. The company, which releases updates every two years, announced that 2010’s 32-volume set was its last, already about two years out of date.

In the Case of Hard Copies vs. Hard Drives Where Do You Stand?

While Britannica publisher Jorge Cauz tried to soften the nostalgic blow to print fans, rightly pointing out the need to fully adapt to the digital age and that print sales of Britannica’s encyclopedia were less than 1 percent of the company’s total sales, my sadness isn’t based on nostalgia alone.

Rather, the printed end of Britannica is but another sign that the ink and paper world many of us grew up in continues to weaken. While some lament the emotional connections rooted with older paper products – it’s musty, humidity-induced smell, it’s aged, crinkled look, that, like the lines on an elderly person’s face, suggest wisdom as much as years, the print world’s shuttering raises very real concerns over data storage and information preservation, and what people in the broadly defined information industry (including Public Relations) should do about it and how we should advise our clients.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting the first thing we do is advise clients to invest in off-property climate-controlled storage facilities with copies of all their work. Nor am I suggesting a return to the stone tablet and chisel. I’m suggesting that before we all embrace the paperless office connected with our laptops and iPads and smartphones (and any other digital devices that are coming down the pipeline, we should recognize some of that traditional medium’s advantages over digital. And in some instances, there’s still nothing better than a paper back up. It may be cumbersome, it may feel antiquated, but it’s tangible – you can touch it, smell it, hold it. Combined, ink and paper can do a number on almost all of your senses.

Paper’s greatest strength, perhaps, is its ability to degrade slowly. If untouched and kept in a cool, low humidity location that prevents the formation of paper-eating microbial life, the written pages of history can last hundreds of years. And while it wasn’t paper, but rather a mix of parchment and papyrus, the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered from 1947 to 1956, survived in that undisturbed state in caves for more than 2,000 years. I’d give you the odds of my laptop’s hard drive lasting that long, but it’d be impossible. Why? Without near-constant backups, and simply retrieving digitally stored data, the magnetic material that encodes the data will fail. What’s more, digital data needs to be kept in a format that future devices will be able to read and translate into useful information. For the most part all that’s required for a paper “translator” is a human brain and a pair of eyes. Last time I checked there’s a nearly 7 billion stockpile of those resources lying around.

To be sure, at a certain level, print material suffers similar shortcomings as digital. Imagine for instance, that in the distant future, there’s no written translation for English. That means that even if the data is stored properly, there’s no one left who can decipher it – no matter how many billions of brains or eyes are trained on the problem.

But paper also has contemporary benefits when it comes to the environment – and a businesses budget. While today’s gadget makers love to taught the environmentally-friendly and cost-effective nature of digital data storage, the fact remains that paper, made from trees, is considered a renewable resource and can be further recycled. Digital, however, requires a significant amount of raw materials, its parts are often hard to reuse, data recovery, if possible at all, can be costly, and digital’s energy demands are continuous. For businesses, that means even more cost.

While the truly paperless office is probably decades or more away, and data shows the global print industry still grew 1 percent in 2010 and likely will continue growing at a 1 to 1.5 percent rate through 2016 – even without Britannica’s help – it’s a good idea to remind ourselves and our clients that the print medium isn’t necessarily the dinosaur it’s portrayed to be.

In 2,000 years, it’s probable that at least something of the original 244-year printed history of the Encyclopedia Britannica will survive. Maybe a vintage copy of Britannica’s final edition will be read on its 2,000^th birthday in the year 4010? As for what will exist of it’s now all-digital content, remains to be seen. In fact, print out this blog post today, put it somewhere safe and read it to yourself in the future as a 2012 “I told you so.”

To our clients and everyone else: happy reading and happier data storage – in whichever analog or digital format you prefer.

To Like, or Not to Like?

What does it mean to “like” something online? That designation was vague from the get-go, and with the power-punch of overzealous marketing and social media campaigning, we've become veritable liking machines. Every post has a heart, a thumbs-up, or a plus sign next to it, and after it gets published (whether it's a sentence or a full article), there's StumbleUpon, Tumblr reblogging, and Google +, in addition to standard Twitter retweeting and Facebook liking. My brain hurts already…

In reaction to our increasingly noncommittal “liking” trend, Neil Strauss of the Wall Street Journal mourns the loss of the real online opinion. Gone are the those pioneer days of internet nonconformity, which Strauss blames on a blend of general development and advertising, served with dashes of greed and the ever-present search for “opportunity.” Plus, the internet's gone the way of approval-seeking and of time-wasting, he adds. It isn't only the lack of comments and the bland “+1” labels that reek of herd mentality, but the time-suck of retweeting and view counting that could be funneled into worthwhile internet activity – say actually opining in the comment box.

Lest you write off this post as the ranting of a disillusioned blogger, remember last year's drama when Facebook changed its previously-titled “fan” system to the maligned “like.” Critics also rallied against the switch from “Old Facebook,” but this was something different. Instead of aesthetics, this was about definitions - and clever marketing tactics. In Facebook's case, studies showed that people were twice as likely to click “Like” rather than “Become a Fan,” and that's most likely because the word is nonthreatening, bland, and well, noncommittal. Is that the definition of engagement? Um, no.

Sarah Jacobsson, in a PCWorld article, expounded her issues with “liking” things on Facebook: “'Liking' something on Facebook is a quick, easy way to acknowledge something—give it props, say—without having to be involved at all. […] Facebook seems to think that it's the language that's stopping me -- and that I view 'liking' something as less involvement and therefore easier to click on than 'becoming a fan' of something. This, at least, is true -- I do view 'liking' something as less threatening than 'becoming a fan' of something. But that's because it is true.”So really, “liking” is a very lazy direction to take when it comes to online interaction.

Think about it from the other end: if you're publishing an article that took you hours, would you rather see 50 “like” clicks, or 50 comments on the content you've produced?

That question should be a no-brainer, much like the act of “liking” itself.