Rick Segal puts the spotlight on Robert Scoble's take on the official launch of MSN Virtual Earth, which included this rant about the need for news embargoes - an odd but much-used practice in the P.R. world:
“So, why do we have embargoes? I think it's one of those last things that survive from old-school PR. They are trying to give everyone in the media an equal shot at being out at the gate. I personally think we need to reevaluate our rules here. The word-of-mouth network is just getting too efficient to try to live by these rules anymore.”
What Segal and Scoble are trying to get a handle on is how (or if) blogs change the P.R. rules and/or what role blogs should play in the P.R. mix. As a starting point, I think few P.R. agencies have yet to figure out how to fit blogs into their communication strategies. Most of the P.R. world still subscribes to the shotgun approach when it comes to press releases - you compile a long list of journalists from an internal database or an external service such as Bacon's, and then fire off the release into cyberspace. If you're lucky or the release is actually newsworthy, it gets media coverage. Some savvier P.R. firms will try to leverage relationships with journalists to give their message an edge. As for blogs, I would hazard to guess that a small group of P.R. firms are trying to keep track of blogs that mention their clients. But that's probably the extent of it. There is very little evidence blogs have become part of the P.R. eco-system yet. For this to happen, P.R. firms and their clients have to determine how they want to use the blogosphere and what tools/strategies are best suited to do it. This could mean incorporating press releases into corporate blogs, or leaking news to key bloggers and letting the power of the blogosphere carry the message from there. The P.R. firms that eventually crack the nut on how to manage and/or work with the blogosphere will have a huge competitive advantage. In the meantime, many people will find out from blogs about new corporate developments - such as Microsoft's Virtual Earth launch - well before press releases are released.