Rolling Thunder vs. Scoble Style

One last post before I go have some Sunday fun. 

Scoble has a great post on the PR surrounding Virtual Earth:

“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.”

He makes a very very good point that is worth thinking about as you do your PR thing. Sending out press releases and trying to do all the normal stuff in trying to get news may not be the most effective way to get things noticed by the people you care about.  With respect to Virtual Earth, I’m here in Canada, I’ve played with it and have spoken to people about it. Done, old news for me. Seeing it in the newspaper (or cnn.com for that matter) is yesterday.

Mark Evans is a technology reporter for the National Post, one of Canada’s larger national papers. I sent him a note this morning about Virtual Earth. If he writes about it in his blog or the electronic edition of the National Post, he has gone ahead of Microsoft’s PR department but will be considered a go to guy for current events happening around the technology world. Nobody who gets the way people are receiving information will bet their job on waiting for official announcements coming out of corporate headquarters.  And corporate PR departments attempting to control the message, fuhgettaboutit.

In the old days, there was this concept of “rolling thunder” which meant you lined up the noteworthy things for press releases and just rolled forward with one press release after another getting the message out in a somewhat formal but mass method. 

Some people will tell you that the majority of people out there still get news the traditional way. Print still matters, etc, etc.  That’s fine and there should be materials and process that works for that world.

However, it can’t be to the exclusion of today’s evolving conversation oriented world.

I think putting things out there for conversation works better and really does get you the PR you want, i.e. people talking about it.  Scoble made the point that on Technorati, Virtual Earth was up there around number 4, I think, of stuff being talked about.  Seems to me that’s the new way the messages are getting out and having PR departments control things with media embargoes, etc, is the surest way to loose control.

Robert’s post is dead on, go read it.