Yesterday’s news that the SEC has approved the use of company web sites for the distribution of information in compliance with Reg FD has been met with joy among proponents of the social media newsroom and social media press release, but I think some of this jubilance is misplaced and self-serving.

If you’re not familiar with Reg FD (Regulation Full Disclosure), it’s the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulation governing full and fair disclosure of financial information for publicly held companies. Reg FD governs things like reporting methods, frequency, quiet periods, etc., and publicly traded companies must manage communications carefully to avoid running afoul of the SEC.

The SEC, and chairman Christopher Cox, are to be applauded for bringing the agency into the 21st century so boldly. Cox even recorded a video and referred to “Atom” and RSS!

But going back to my original point, I’m not sure why it is so important to sound the death knell for the press release. I hate to break it to you folks, but company news posted on a company blog IS a press release that happens to be published on Web 2.0 infrastructure. Maybe it also went out on the wire and maybe it didn’t. It’s not important.

I’m sure there was plenty of dancing in the streets when press releases started to go out by Telex instead of surface mail, and then by fax, and then by e-mail…But the excitement (and I use the term loosely) generated by the prospect of the death of the press release over the course of YEARS is a manufactured excitement and is as tedious as the ersatz suspense in an episode of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

What HAS been dead, forever, is lobbing untargeted press releases randomly at bloggers and journalists and hoping they stick. We should not confuse blogger/media relations with random, unfocused pitching.

On the other hand, the press release certainly continues to evolve, and unless you’re trying to impress a handful of very vocal bloggers, continues to be highly relevant. An October 2007 study* by Bulldog and TekGroup International surveyed over 2000 traditional journalists and found that far and way, “receiving press releases by e-mail” was the most popular means of learning about company news, with 78% of respondents preferring it above other methods.

And while TechCrunch links to Cox’s speech on the announcement, many of the posts I have read link to the SEC press release.

Let’s here and now declare declarations of the death of the press release dead. It’s been done. To death.

* Free registration required. The study was conducted on Survey Monkey, and is a little unclear in how the participants were selected, but the results are still worth factoring when deciding whether to dump the press release from your media strategy

Tags: death of the press release, SEC, smnr

Did social media “turn” on us, or has it always encouraged and rewarded mean-spirited behavior? I think it’s the nature of social media, with its perception (and it is only that) of anonymity and its rewards for negativity and controversy (links, blog traffic, comments). That’s the topic of my August column for Talent Zoo, and the inspiration for My Social Media Love Manifesto.

There’s no way to change human nature. Regulatory boards, terms of service agreements and even peer pressure won’t do it. And who’s to say what’s right for everyone else? I only know what’s right for me, and I’ve decided I am going to be even more careful than I have been to date about weighing the facts in every situation, not attacking anyone individually unless it is absolutely necessary (and who am I to make such a decision?), and generally being as kind and supportive in my online interactions as I try to be offline.

Lee Siegel, a former blogger for the New Republic who got so upset about negative comments on his blog he created a pseudonym and fought back with anonymous comments, wrote in his book, Against the Machine, that the Internet is “the first social environment to serve the needs of the isolated, elevated, asocial individual.” There is some truth to this observation, but perhaps the Internet is “the most efficient and widely available environment in history” to cater to the needs of these people. And we didn’t necessarily need the Internet to see aggressive behavior spring up in social groups, which probably started millions of years ago among the lower primates (and to some degree exists in that form today). Wilfred Ruprecht Bion wrote in his 1961 essay Experience in Groups “the individual is a group animal at war, both with the group and with those aspects of his personality that constitute his ‘groupishness’.”

To define my personal rules, I wrote My Social Media Love Manifesto. It is named very deliberately. I wrote it for me. I would not presume to tell others how to behave. If you find it useful, use it, take it, copy it, reprint it, with or without attribution. I’d love to think I gave one person cause to think about this.

Incidentally, since I made this decision, I have found less to blog about, traffic to my site has dropped, and my blog ranking has dropped along with it. Oh well.

Tags: Lee Siegel, Against the Machine, New Republic, social media love manifesto, Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, Experience in Groups

Had some interesting discussions here and on Twitter back in April about the spam situation on Twitter, including some spirited assertions from some quarters that spam was impossible on Twitter. The arguments for this point of view, based on semantic technicalities, are several. First, your updates are public, so by merely following you, someone is not spamming you. Second, you can turn off Twitter notification emails, so these are not spam either.

I disagreed with this at the time, and still do, and so apparently does Twitter. The company published a post Monday about its recognition of a spam problem and its commitment to deal with it:

“We are actively engaged in working to defeat the variety of spam that has made its way to Twitter. The main motivation for spammy behavior on Twitter seems to be the usual: driving web traffic to another site. Some account owners will serially create many accounts and then post thousands of links. Others have only one account but still go crazy posting links—usually to the same web site and often in a way that attempts to trick people into clicking.

Posting links to Twitter is great and we encourage people to do so. However, spammers are posting links on a whole different scale and they’re doing something else we call Aggressive Following. This behavior entails following thousands of other accounts in the hope of reciprocation and it really peeves Twitter users because many of us are sensitive to our Follower count—we don’t want email notifications triggered by spammers.”

Last night, which I’ve dubbed The Night of 1 Million Lost Followers, (it’s probably more across all users), Twitter did extensive cleanup on its database in order they say to “remove spammers from the system (which we’ve been doing a lot lately).” As a result, most users are reporting decreased numbers of followers and people they are following.

Tags: twitter, spam, followers, following, clean-up

(Artifact from the future)
July 22, 2092 — Foster City Clean-Up Zone — Silicon Desert — Work was halted earlier this week on remediation of the Foster City Zone when workers discovered a cache of important artifacts from the early Web 2.0 era. Historical preservationists quickly stepped in, hoping to protect the site for its heritage and archaeological importance.

Among the items found was this primitive, laser-printed diary providing a never-before-seen glimpse of the day-to-day life of a hardy social media pioneer.

The author, @socialmediagenius, was apparently a struggling public relations professional lured to the region by tales of vast wealth.

Typical of the heart wrenching and often inspiring entries are:

• September 14, 2007. Preparing for long winter ahead. Laying in supplies of Cheetos, Coke and frozen pizzas.
• February 9, 2008. must. get. coffee.
• February 11, 2008. Cat crawling across keyboard. So cute!*
• March 27, 2008. Facebook IM sucks.
• May 6, 2008. I just don’t get the appeal of Plurk.
• June 10, 2008. I pray each day the good Lord to protect us from the fail whale.
• July 14, 2008. We face more trials and tribulations. Brightkite not updating to Twitter timeline. Not sure I can go on.
• July 21, 2008. Supplies running low. Disheartened to find local Starbucks slated for closing. Womenfolk holding up well, doing more than their fair share. Mapping bug fixed. Now it would appear my file-generation code is borked.

We are fortunate to live today in an era where this kind of adversity threatens our very survival.

* No further mentions of the cat are made in the diary. It is assumed that the author killed the cat and ate it not long after this entry.

If you’re involved with Social Media Newsrooms, Social Media News Releases or any similar Web 2.0-based news distribution method, I’d love to feature your company, service or site in my presentation August 14, from 2:30 p.m.-3:30 p.m. at Ragan Communications’ “Corporate Communications and the Social Media Revolution,” to be held at eBay’s headquarters in San Jose, California. The new deadline for submission of materials is Friday, July 24, 2008! I will give away two stylish Socialized t-shirts to two randomly selected entries.

My session is titled The Social Media Newsroom: News Now. Everywhere. I want to feature the latest and greatest in newsroom deployments at companies of all sizes and types. If you’d like to be included in the presentation, please email me as soon as possible a one- to two-page brief on each newsroom you’d like me to include, along with your contact information. If you have slides that might be useful, you can email those too. I am compiling a resource list to give to attendees, so if your company designs, deploys and manages social media newsrooms, please give me your info for inclusion in that list.

I’ve created a template for submitting a newsroom for inclusion. Download it here, and modify freely. Send materials to joel@socializedpr.com

Thank you!

Ragan Communications is offering a $200 conference discount for Socialized blog readers who register for the August conference. Enter the code SPK8 when you register.

I hope to see you there.

Tags: ragan, social media revolution, ebay, san jose, social media newsrooms, joel postman