Micro PR - messages that aren't compensating for something

Thursday, May 29, 2008

There is a general internet and public relations trend emerging...Micro PR.

Micro PR, as its name suggests, is the packaging of press releases and distributed information into small, easy-to-read packages. The old media approach was to send out frequent press releases (before, during, and after a major news story or product launch) that ranged from one page to multiple. As you can imagine, this resulted in media outlets receiving hundreds of pages of press releases a week - and if you where working in the media field you just excepted this as part of the job.

So now you have to ask yourself a question...with every major media outlet receiving hundreds of press releases a week, how can you get your press release heard? How can your message stand out. It turns out the answer is simple (literally). Micro PR.

News editors (and people in general) have been inundated with content for so long that a short concise message is refreshing. Micro PR is about think from the perspective of the news editor. If you send multiple page press releases, you aren't doing them any favors - in fact you are giving them MORE work. Users and editors will read your micro press release that is between 0-200 words because it takes them 60 seconds - which is easy for them to find in their hectic schedules. Another advantage of Micro PR is that it enables you to send out more frequent press releases and updates...after all it only takes 30-60 seconds to get through your Micro PR.

Websites in the "Web 2.0" era have already discovered this, with sites like Twitter.com, and even Facebook to some extend (the status section). With Twitter, users answer a simple question "What are you doing now?", but the catch is you only have 140 characters to answer. Twitter users have the ability to follow other users and to be followed. Any answer to the "What are you doing now?" question is instantly sent out to all of your "followers". At first the idea might seem a bit silly, but if you think about it - it is nothing more than the next step in media communication. You now see major companies creating twitter pages to keep twitter users up-to-date on the latest information from their industries - they can blast out their message to hundreds or thousands of users that ACTUALLY want to hear about updates.

Another application is in political races. The popular and tech savvy Obama campaign has utilized twitter amazingly. Up until recently, Obama had more twitter followers than anyone else. At the time of this article, Obama has 33,944 followers.

This article was not meant to promote twitter, but rather to convey a new and emerging school of though regarding PR. Micro PR is a great way of getting your message heard in a sea of messages; allowing more frequent updates and editors that don't mind reading your content. In modern media, bigger is not always better.


Follow me on twitter at: http://twitter.com/senator32

Labels: micro pr, micropr, press, press release, public relations, SEO, twitter, web 2.0

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