David Unleashed

The press release has gotten a lot of attention in the news this year. We started the year with the news that Business Wire was acquired by Berkshire Hathaway. I had the opportunity to sit down and visit with Cathy Baron-Tamraz in July. It was fun to hear her recount the story of the sale. It is not my story to tell, but if you ever have the chance to meet with Cathy, ask her to tell it. It is very interesting.

Next up was Market Wire which sold to CCN Mathews for an estimated USD $30 million, mostly making their investors whole. Marketwire has the distinction of having sold twice in a single year. The company that has been out most of the year with a “retire your old wire service” marketing campaign was purchased by, of all things, a pension fund. Anyone else see a bit of irony in this?

Primezone then sold to Nasdaq, I honestly forget the amount, causing a bit of concern and speculation that Nasdaq may bundle disclosure distribution with their listing fees. Turns out that they have announced plans to increase their listing fees and include limited distribution for their listed companies. Primezone has changed its name to PrimeNewswire.

PRWeb then sold to Vocus, Inc. for USD $28 million in August. This sale was followed by the sale of US Newswire to PR Newswire for about USD $24 million in Q3. PR Newswire is rumored to be for sale but it does not appear that the transaction will be complete before the end of 2006. It has indeed been a busy year for the press release newswire.

I am afraid that those self anointed Ministers of Conversations would have been disappointed with the exchange that I had with another person at the “market” today. Pillars 1-4 of their religion were violated today.

Well it wasn’t exactly the market, it was the Bed Bath and Beyond. I went to pick some pans for the Christmas goose with Mary, my mother-in-law. While we were there we were watching a video loop of the Nicer Slicer. We then picked up the demo unit to examine it closer. While discussing the merits of this product with my Mary a stranger approached and started answering some of the questions we were asking ourselves. He then told us that he had one and recommended another model. We exchanged some additional pleasantries before we all went about our business. It was a very natural conversation.What made the conversation so open and natural. Was it because I provide him with a transparency disclosure or that he provided one for me? After all, I guess he could have been a rep for the other model. Right? No, it is because these things were absent. It was not at all contrived.

Hence we arrive at one of the biggest problems with the eSocialist movement–contrived conversations.

I think I am done for the day. Any yes I digg myself.

I will leave it to you to decide if I should have provided transparency disclosure about Bed Bath and Beyond. Watch out, I could be working for them…spooky.

We are getting close to the Christmas holiday so I was feeling somewhat compelled to be charitable and back off of the Cluetrain Gang until after the holiday. That was until I was sitting down catching up on my industry readings including the December 11th issue of PRWeek.

This is when I read the piece that Erica Iacono penned about Andy Sernovitz. I highly recommend its reading as it is very revealing about the attitudes of these eSocialist, anti-business thugs. (Incidentally and as an aside, I happen to think Erica has proven herself pretty lazy when it comes to pulling a story together anyway. She rarely serves up enough thorough analysis to be of much use to her readers. Read this article alone and you will see mentions of WOMMA critics but without citing a single one. But I digress, this is not a post about Erica. Perhaps some other time.) Of course eSocialists and their Cluetrain bullies are going to get a bunch of love from the mainstream media as their objectives are pretty well aligned.

Let’s look at excerpts from the article. First, Andy is quoted as saying, “I think word-of-mouth marketing is a more important marketing innovation than the Internet was.” What? The Internet is precisely is what has given the Cluetrain lemming movement legs.

He goes on to say, “Word of mouth is saying that we, the marketers, no longer control the message; we’re going to hand it to the people and let them do whatever they want. Nothing like that has ever been done in the world of business.” Huh? People have been talking about businesses, products and services forever. The whole tactic here is pretty Oprahesque, if you ask me, designed to pull you in with a universal “truism” and then dictate or impose their own rules on the population.

He continues, “Companies will make mistakes as they learn…It will keep happening, and we will keep teaching them the right way.” Well thank you Andy, thank you very much. We would be so lost with out….wait, who said your “way” was the right way again? Your “way” which promotes coerced transparency does not lead to open and honest dialogs but rather a contrived unnatural conversation. You cite Edelman’s Walmart blogging as a misstep. According to who? Who made these ideologues the arbiters of right and wrong? Someone aught to step and congratulate Richard and company for their cajones and bold approach. I know I am not alone. Thank you Mr. Edelman.
Wait, he admits it. Sernovitz actually supports my argument. This is too easy. The Cluetrain Gang consists of a bunch of anti-business socialists. He says,

“We probably have more friends on the anti-business front than any other marketing group.”

I guess I can finish my little rant here; but alas I cannot because he continues,

“What makes our job harder, but more interesting, is that word of mouth and social media are about freedom…[They’re] about real people saying what they want to anyone, yet word-of-mouth is about teaching restraint. It’s not sticking your marketing message in other people’s faces.”

Boy, I am glad that these folks are around. I was really feeling the lack of freedom to speak freely about products, services, companies and politics before the Cluetrain and WOMMA group came into existance. How did we ever get here?

At this point I should state that when I owned the company I actually enrolled as a Governing Member and signed on to their code of ethics. Honestly, I did as I suspect many have done. I signed on not knowing of the socialist underpinnings of the organization. Now that I no longer own the company there is not much that I can do about our membership. My guess is that we will continue to participate as a member unless they remove us. Someone has to bring some sanity to this organization.

I should state that my opinions are mine and I do not know if they reflect the views of my employer or fellow employees.

In an attempt to get to the root of the socialist underpinnings of the blogosphere and conferences like Gnomedex, Blog Business Summit and to a lesser degree, WOMMA, I recently revisited the Cluetrain Manifesto. I invite you to do the same; however I caution you to have a trash can handy unless you have the ability to choke back your own vomit. Here is the link.

If you want to save time I can summarize the entire 95 Theses in 4 points.

1. Capitalism sucks; never mind how we made our fortunes.
2. You’re too stupid to experience the effects of marketing, advertising and PR messages and discern truth so they will establish some hokey rules to protect you.
3. If your agenda does not support ours (the authors and signers), either commercial or political, we will ridicule and debase you. Never mind about our agenda.
4. You want to be treated like the mainstream media. (no kidding folks, its in there)

What we really need is a group to come up with the counter theses to these intellectual bullies.

Anyone want to join me? Let’s get together and fix the Cluetrain. It is time that someone stood up to this threat and saved the blogoshpere for everyone. Let’s inject some integrity into the conversation.

About a week ago I was asked to weigh in on this thread about “the wire”. I have a few minutes tonight, so here we go. By now you know who I am and who I work for so I won’t get bogged down in those details (expect me to blog about why this week).

What is the real value in Wire service distribution? Unlike Paul, I do not think that it’s strength is in media relations. For that you need some of the other platforms he mentioned–Vocus for example. The Vocus platform, which he incorrectly characterized as simply a media list builder, allows you to do much more than build a simple list of media contacts. It makes it possible for you to manage individual media relationships and monitor coverage. How does the Wire help me do this? If the Wire were all about media relations Paul’s company would not be scrambling to implement our direct-to-consumer (SEO and Social Media) press release distribution model.

Paul writes, “Do you really think the wire service industry became the behemoth it is today – distributing tens of thousands of press releases a month, by doing something everyone else could do from Microsoft Outlook?”

I really believe that Wire as defined by Paul has been riding the Sarbanes Oxley comet and SEC disclosure requirements for years which is accounts for most of its growth. Disclosure is their bread and butter. Smarter services like Business Wire (a PRWeb partner), are looking past the discloser space for new opportunities. PRWeb has proven over the past decade that the new frontier for PR and Wire services is in the convergence of PR and marketing.

I recently met with a company that distributes about 150 press releases a year. They only wire about a dozen. The rest of the press releases are individually targeted to the media based on relationships the company has and continues to develop with the media. This company asked us to come down and talk to them about our direct-to-consumer approach which includes our SEO and social media platform. Why? My guess is because their PR department is part of their marketing department; and marketing types see the new opportunities and understand the value of services like PRWeb and Business Wire’s EON.

So, where is the value of the Wire.

a) As Paul points out, it does place your news in media databases that are searched by the media.

b) Disclosure requirements. The tide could be shifting on this one. Although I think it will be a while and Wire services have plenty of time to recast their services to meet the changes.

c) Peace of mind. Major wire services have a vested interest in protecting the distribution network that they have built. This means you get additional editorial scrutiny and targeting for your press releases when they are Wired.

Obviously we think there is still a place for the traditional wire service. At PRWeb we did not set out to build a replacement service. We simply saw the opportunity to lead the convergence of marketing and PR online. Our goal was to build a service where the decision process was not, “Do i use PRWeb or the wire?” We set out to make a case for PRWeb plus the Wire. (See my a+b post here.) Our recent association and integration with Business Wire proves that we are a complimentary services and not competing services.