I’m Maddie Grant, an association/nonprofit industry blogger on social media and online community building. I’m very happy to have been invited to be a regular poster on K Street Cafe.
This is my first post here, so I’m still getting the lay of the land as to what kinds of topics will interest K Street readers. I am an avid blog reader and definitely consider myself a “content curator”; Here’s the kind of stuff I read and write about on my blog.
So I thought I’d do two things. First, I want point you to a few PR/Public Affairs/Advocacy related blog posts I’ve found very interesting recently – and ask you to tell me if these float your boat or not. Check ‘em out.
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It took a recession, but resumes finally are receiving renewed scrutiny. The ability to embellish and obscure shrinks when one out of every six workers is under or unemployed. More than ever, recruiters want to see accomplishments, not responsibilities; numbers, not adverbs. (more…)
Posted by: K Street Cafe Editor
Can the law keep up with technology? (CNN Tech)
As technology lurches forward at an astounding speed, legal issues are emerging just as fast. A legal system at least five years behind developing technology is at a loss for how to handle issues such as lawsuits derived from posts on social networking sites.
Census Turns to Kids for Help (Wall Street Journal)
The U.S. Census Bureau is running an interesting campaign targeted towards children in immigrant neighborhoods as a way to reach adults who don’t speak English.
The staple of public relations is the press release. It’s been around forever; follows generally agreed guidelines for format, content, and length; and still succeeds in its objective to publicize the item in question.
And yet, bound by stale conventions that suffocate originality and don’t play well with multimedia, the press release has become obsolete. It’s not that there’s no longer a need to announce big news formally. It’s that there’s a better way to do it than drafting 400 words of boilerplate.
Indeed, as Claire Cain Miller reported in a much-discussed article last week, the pr agency representing Flickr never issued a release on its behalf—not even when Yahoo acquired the photo-sharing Web site. Similarly, when Google has exciting news to share, it does not use a wire service.
Rather, both companies self-publish blog posts. They do so, I suspect, not because blogs are hipper, but because they’re more genuine, more personal, and more flexible than their old media counterparts. Instead of a flack ghostwriting quotes for a CEO, the individual(s) who managed the project can craft a first-person narrative recounting the project’s past, present and future with pictures and videos and links. Then, as other bloggers pick up the post, “two days later, BusinessWeek calls,” as Donna Sokolsky Burke, of Spark PR, puts it.
When you visit Google’s online “press center,” the first thing listed is not press releases. It’s blog posts. If you think this is accidental, think again.
The press release is dead. Long live the press release.
