Attention Social Media Snobs and Whores: Thanks to Transparency (and common sense) We Know Who You Are.

Last week I received a call from one of my favorite – and brightest – colleagues.  He is a truly evolved and elite leader in the marketing industry today, possessing knowledge and experience in virtually every facet of both the traditional and digital/online.

Anyway, he calls to ask me a very serious and fair question:  “Is the news release dead?”

What he meant, of course, is whether the kidnapping and bastardization of the traditional news release by the search and social media industries and their conversion of it into a meaningless cocktail of keywords and links has actually rendered the news release lifeless.

Marketing monkeys like Aaron Perlut and Jason Kintzler have been proudly confirming, advocating and boasting the death of the news release for quite some time.  Like most “inbound” marketers, they smugly proclaim the death of traditional media and anything associated with it… all the while promoting themselves through traditional media.

And so it goes.

The news release is alive and well and functioning far better than any social media junkie would ever want you to know.  But it is critically important to separate SEO news releases (whose only purpose and only result will be search-related) from actual news releases (whose only purpose is to communicate a legitimate, timely news story – one that requires more than 140 characters to tell – to editors, reporters, producers, bloggers, freelancers, etc.).

The news release, like Twitter or Facebook or a gun, is not the issue… it’s the people who don’t use them appropriately.