Are Blogs King and Press Releases Obsolete?

UPDATE: As noted in my Is Twitter King and the Press Release Obsolete? post, Brokaw: ‘I Don’t Get Twitter…Just Stuff That Fills Air’ post, and Video Clip of the Month: Conan’s YouTube Choice post, social media has the future of press releases in a flux. Stay tuned!

Blogs are more effective than press releases, Arianna Huffington, cofounder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, said during a Q&A interview in the February 2010 issue of PR Week.

“I think a lot of [PR pros] are recognizing that it is more effective now to blog about something, to have the principals blog about something, rather than send press releases,” she said. “The world of the press release is dramatically changing.”

Huffington also said that press releases are becoming obsolete during a speech last November at the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) International Conference in San Diego, Calif.

“We increasingly know that it’s more effective to give the information to someone with a [Web] site or a blog or another way that is going to immediately get it out into the world that we want to communicate with,” Huffington said.

Are press releases obsolete? In some ways they are. Thanks to the Internet, attracting the media’s attention is no longer the only way people can learn about your press release’s content. Today’s Web. 2.0 world doesn’t mean, however, that you should stop issuing press releases and replace them with business announcements on your blog. Blogs and press releases are not interchangeable.

Blogs

• Blogging is a two-way conversation in a casual voice offering your readers a chance to comment (replying to their comments keeps the conversation going).
• Blogs should offer vital analysis or valuable insights into your core business or niche topic and should not be all about you. If you use your blog to republish press releases, you’ll likely lose your readers’ interest and their trust in your content.
• Your blog can help you establish yourself as an expert in your field (much more so than press releases).
• Blogs generally get better search engine ranking than press releases.

Press Releases

• Press releases are impersonal (written in a more formal third-person news style) one-way conversations designed to communicate information about an event, product, company, etc.
• The intent is to give the editor, reporter, producer, potential customer or client, etc. enough information to get them interested in you (i.e., press releases are purely self-promotional).
• Journalists still use and ask for them because they are generally written in a format that makes it easy for journalists to simply cut and paste.
• Even though press releases generally do not get as good search engine rankings as blogs, you can use them to build Search Engine Optimization (SEO). To do this, you optimize them for search engines (please see my Jan. 30, 2010, Post on “How to Arm a Press Release with Magic Magnets”; disseminate them through free press release distribution sites or paid distribution services, such as PRWeb.com, PR Newswire,or Marketwire; and then link to the releases from a blog post and your online press room. Many press release distribution sites and services also offer Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds of their press releases, which they make available to other sites, blogs, and individuals.

What do you think? Are press releases obsolete? Should you be blogging instead?

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