Blogger Ideology

(((I always like it when guys in new media loudly assert that their new media isn't like the old media. They're right, too, because the new media isn't like the old media, it's NEVER like the old media. The annoying continuity isn't the media platform, it's the PROFIT MOTIVE. That doesn't change very much. Doesn't change a bit, really.)))

(((I really like reading Stowe Boyd, but what I'd really like to see is a huge, scary, media enterprise the size of Fox News espousing his folksy, one-to-one, no-audience we're all people ideology, and then crushing ad and PR firms. Just eliminating them. Imagine if they all WENT AWAY. Imagine that you walked through an urban environmen and there were NO ADS visible. No, I don't mean Dachau or North Korea, where there were indeed no ads. I mean a prosperous world with no ads. They were all adbusted. They went away and didn't come back. Nobody did that any more. It was over. Hey, I can dream.)))

Link: /Message: Enough Already: Getting Social Media All Wrong.

For those who have missed the idea, a social media press release is supposed to be a webbish/bloggish version of old timey press releases. These will incorporate elements of the now commonplance blog motif: links, tags, comments, and trackbacks, for example.

This all begs the question (which I raised early on in the evening): Why not just use blogs? Why do we need these so-called "social" press releases?

I never really got a deep or usable answer to that question. What I did hear, however, was a widespread misunderstanding of what social media is.

To the participants: Please, please, please don't talk about audiences when you are theoretically promoting social media. As Jay Rosen has suggested, we are the people formerly known as the audience. Blogging is not just another channel for corporate marketing types to push their messages to markets, eyballs, or audiences. Social media is based on the dynamic of a many-to-many dialogue between people. Yes, people: that's the word that should have been used. Not audience. If you'd like to make a distinction between a company and those outside the company, just remember: they are not an audience for your messages, any more than you are an audience for theirs. The whole point is that the people formerly known at the audience – the edglings, as I call us – are participating in the blogosphere, and if individuals within companies want to, they can participate: as individuals. Companies don't blog, or converse: people do.

The "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" complicity of leading PR bloggers around serious flaws in the conventional notions of PR is lamentable. For example, seeing the bloggers acknowledge on one hand that CEOs don't actually provide those quotes that are stuck into press releases while on the other hand promoting transparency and openness in corporate communications was more than painful. We should simply state, unequivocally, that such things are not social media: they are old style, push marketing crap. They are exactly the things that lead us to question the motives, influence, and truthfulness of stupid, old line companies who just don't get it.

I could similarly howl about the disembodied third-person voice of press releases, which also does not translate into social media. Everything is written by someone, or a specific group of people, but press releases read like the stone tablets that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai: written by the omniscient hand of God. Likewise the excessive hyperbole and surfeit of superlatives of press releases is distasteful at the least, and demeaning at the most.

Various comments made to my complaints about the gradual change going on in the world of PR make my head hurt (....) etc etc etc