Press Releases: Soon as Passé as Print?

Posted by on Aug 26, 2010 in Blog, Driving PR Performance | 0 comments

When Virgin Mobile USA’s announcement on its all-you-can eat mobile data plan leaked prematurely this week via Facebook I read a different story into the news: Could it be that the venerable institution of the press release is breathing its last?

To backtrack. . .Earlier this week Virgin’s posting on its flat rate plan went live on Facebook a day or so ahead of the planned press release. Gleeful reporters were immediately all over the story, many noting the social media post that gave the news away. The company’s explanation for the apparent gaffe might be paraphrased, “hey, we goofed.” Well, maybe that’s so. On the other hand, as one of the savviest social media operators on the planet, Virgin may have known exactly what it was doing when that Facebook post popped ahead of schedule.

Calculated leaks and advances are time-honored ways of generating press coverage. Who among us in the PR profession hasn’t dabbled with both somewhere along the line?  With Facebook and Twitter to spread the word, the impact can be immediate and massive.  Net net, by the time Virgin’s release came out, it was virtually an afterthought — the story had already been widely covered in national and trade press. Makes me wonder: Is this a sign of things to come?

The possibility that we’re witnessing the imminent demise of the press release will impact several groups: (1) companies that still look to official announcements as the primary vehicle for news dissemination; (2) wire service companies that make a good living zipping announcements over the Internet; and (3) tracking services that monitor and report on press release postings and coverage.

As more companies like Virgin experiment with new ways to “get the story out,” consider what may follow:

  1. Companies may begin to question their commitment to a news vehicle that, for the most part, ends up in the media dumping zone — those daily feeds of verbatim press release postings that scroll by on a news site home page and are quickly forgotten.
  2. Wire service distribution services that charge to push announcements to search engines may face increasing pressure from social media outlets that deliver the same or better impact for free.
  3. Lastly, given that the vast majority of what they track is just verbatim press release postings — and most of these are available at no cost via Google news — newsclip services could suffer declining popularity.

If any of the above comes to pass, maybe the traditional infrastructure for news distribution will become as quaint as reading hard copy newspapers and magazines. Time will tell, and I have a feeling it’s closing in fast.

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