• Dave Satterfield of Sitrick & Co. said that he has texted reporters to answer questions and make clarifications  during major announcement events, while they were all in the room together
• The Vatican has been send text messages to followers and the media since 2003. Kevin Dugan of the Bad Pitch Blog said one of the reasons was to reduce the possibility of Vatican-related hoaxes being picked up by the media as legit.

That’s right, the new thing is to make your pitch via video. It’s certainly simple enough to do — plan your video, shoot it with an inexpensive video camera, upload it to Youtube and spread the link.

Makes a lot of sense, too. Video is such an incredibly powerful medium, and now, through the evolution of technology, we can all be fast and cheap video producers.

The key thing here is that a “vitch” can’t just be you reading your boring, stilted press release into the camera. You need to show something — the newsmakers, the location, something, anything tangible. This, by itself, takes PR people out of their jargon-filed comfort zone.

I just picked up on this word so I don’t have any good examples of video pitches and their results, but the whole thing makes a lot of sense to me. I plan to try it this month just to see what happens.

I’ve been working on the media/PR divide much of my career. I was known as a sympathic media person who helped PR people figure out if they had a story for me, and as a PR person, I’ve worked hard to teach PR people how to do a better job interacting with the media.

I’ve mostly considered it a lost cause to try to educate the media about PR, even though that was one of my original goals. Media people generally split into two camps: those who “get” the role of PR and deal with it, and those who “hate” PR and always bitch about it. Sometimes those in the latter group migrate to the former, but they need to do it in their own time. No use trying to teach them — their ears do not hear.

Despite this persistent divide, some people obviously think it can be overcome. At least, that appears to be the gist of the strategy of a new company, Plato’s Forms, which says is mission is:

developing solutions for companies and journalists that help address some of these challenging aspects of communications in the online media environment.

At this time, they say no more. In Silicon Valley-speak, they are in “stealth” mode, meaning they are developing their offering behind closed doors and plan to make a big splash when they unveil it at a later date. For now, they’ve got a half-mil to work with, partly from the pocket of founder Darryl Siry.

Their name, btw, refers to the philosopher Plato, who, their web site says, “held that we could not comprehend the true form of things, and could only grasp the reflections of their true meaning, as if they were shadows reflected on the wall.” At least one philosophy major disputes this reading, however, judging from the comments about the company on a TechCrunch post.

After starting her blog in 2007, she says she was besieged with free product — full-size samples of everything she could possibly want. She describes being fairly journalistic about methodically trying the products and reviewing them. But more came in than she could handle and she gave a lot of it away to her friends and readers.

Then, the recession hit, and the companies a) got chintzy with the samples and b) wanted more out of sending a sample than the possibility of a post — they wanted guaranteed good coverage.

It’s a good post and worth reading for a firsthand account of how the other half lives. My value-add will be the PR perspective:

There are effectively no barriers to entry in blogging — anyone can be a waitress one day and “fashion and beauty blogger” the next (or both at the same time).

Pre-Internet, the barriers to being a recognized and influential writer were fairly high, which made it possible for PR to figure out who to deal with and what they were getting out of the arrangement.

Now, since anyone and everyone can position themselves as “influential,” PR has a lot more trouble to deal with. Accept anyone’s claim to legitimacy and you end up giving away your products, or set up barriers and get blowback like this.

• Your press releases should contain a “keyword trifecta”: Your keyword search term should be in your headline and your first paragraph, and the keyword in your first paragraph should link to your web site. HT: Sarah Skerik, PR Newswire
• Be generous with your links — people often don’t want to include outside links because users may leave their site when they click on the link. But being generous makes you part of the conversation and is a win-win for everyone. HT: Debbie Weil
• Cowboy up! “Own your space and your authority” — meaning, be the communications expert and stand firm on what’s right and wrong in communications. HT: Skerik

And here’s the real bonus — a twit stream of tips and observations from the session — free!

Miller

Young Times tech reporter Claire Cain Miller discovered the latest it-girl in Sili Valley PR, Brooke Hammerling, who, the story asserts, is at the forefront of a new trend because she is as keen on pitching influential bloggers and other industry leaders as she is on pitching the professional journalists in the mainstream media.

Holy Reporter’s Notebook, Batman — stop the digital presses!

Hammerling

Among Miller’s other “findings” in this 3,000-word stemwinder:

• That Ms. Hammerling is, among other things, obsequious to a fault, folding her strategic tent at the merest assertion of a different idea from her A-list client
• “In the new world of social media, P.R. people must know hundreds of writers, bloggers and Twitter users instead of having six top reporters on speed dial.”
• “Despite all these new channels, it’s still essential to know which mainstream publications to approach. If a start-up is seeking venture funding or new engineers … PR still looks to The San Jose Mercury News, VentureWire or TechCrunch to get the word out.”
• “She drops names like a boat anchor, so shamelessly, but at the same time, it’s, ‘Larry, Larry,’ and I think she’s lying and then I get on the phone and it’s Larry Ellison. She got him on the cellphone; I didn’t,” says a journalist who did not want to be identified.

OK — enough having fun at Miller and Hammerling’s expense. What are my takeaways?

• Yes, social media and the Internet have transformed PR and are making mainstream media relations less important and multi-channel PR more important.
• It’s still about a) who you know, b) who trusts you and c) whether you have a good story.
• Reaching out to other influencers in addition to journalists has been a PR tactic since, as a friend used to say, God got her ears pierced. I recall writing PR plans in the 90s chock full of such tactics, only it didn’t involve using Twitter and Facebook, it involved snail mail and in-person events. Tools change, strategies are more permanent.

Now, though, the web makes the term virtually meaningless. So many different people and audiences other than the media can access our press releases in real time that calling it a press release is almost a blunder. [If someone's got a better phrase, let me know]

So if reaching many different audiences is now both a given and an objective of our releases, what do we need to know to make the most of the opportunity?

This, in a nutshell, is what we will be talking about on Wednesday at 1 PM ET on the PR University audio conference, “New Ways PR Can Use SEO and Smarter Writing Techniques to Reach Wider Audiences.”

I’ll be moderating and will be joined on the call by:

• Paul Furiga, ABC, President, WordWrite Communications
• Laura Sturaitis, Senior Vice President, Media Services & Product Strategy, Business Wire
• Paul Dyer, eMedia Director, WeissComm Partners, Invigorate Communications
• Greg Jarboe, President & Co-Founder, SEO-PR

We’ll be covering these and other topics:

• SEO Fundamentals: How to conduct preliminary keyword research—plus online tools and new techniques for finding your company or brand’s keyword sweet spot
• Word counts, hyperlinks, headline writing rules and other SEO guidelines for optimizing press release copy without alienating readers
• Using video, audio, photos and multimedia to boost your online footprint
• SMR Update: What a social media news release (SMR) is and how it differs from a traditional press release
• Overcoming the challenges of creating and distributing effective social media news releases
• Online Distribution: How to seed your releases, announcements and ideas in blogs, forums and even Facebook, LinkedIn and beyond
• Measuring your success: new tools for measuring the effectiveness of your press releases

Hope you can join us!

Think about it: aside from pronouncements from the White House, how often are news stories just verbatim press releases from an organization? Virtually never, right? Instead, all news stories are broad stories about a particular situation, with many elements, possibly including you, your boss or your organization.

Yet to this day, the vast majority of press releases are written in that stilted, third-person style (“So-and-so announced today”) as if we were contributing an article to an imaginary media outlet.

Why, just today, I surfed over to PitchEngine.com to check it out — this is a site that intends to help PR people shift from issuing stilted old media-style press releases to new style press releases that are supposedly more user-friendly for the social media environment. But they don’t apparently have editors stopping users from taking their old third-person perspective and jamming it into the SMR format.

A couple of today’s PitchEngine headlines, plucked fresh from the site:

• THE WILMA THEATER Announces Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo as the final selection for its 2009-2010 Season
• Paws Unlimited Foundation Holds their Open House to Raise Awareness and Funding for their No-Kill, Ten-Acre Animal Shelter in the Greater New York Region

Do you care? Why should you?

But, there was a ray of light in this headline:

• Revenue Sharing Cuts from Governor, Legislature to Trigger More Crime, Layoffs Statewide

It’s about Michigan (should have been in the headline) and was posted by the Michigan Municipal League. But at least it’s about other people and not about them!

You name it, and we can shorten it into a tidbit of information. That’s an “infosnack.”

No longer do people want to “digest” a full newspaper article or curl up with a good book. Give me the story in 140 characters (twitter) or even less (TXTing) and let’s get it over with.

So — to get to the point — what sorts of “infosnacks” are you providing to your key audiences? Are they the usual corporate inedible mush, or is it something tasty and brief?

This is one of the main challenges in PR today — in some ways bigger than the Internet revolution itself. People don’t have time, or don’t want to take the time, to understand what you are trying to say. They want it now, fast.

That means:

• Short email subject lines
• Tweets
• Social media style press releases
• 60 second videos
• TXT messages

Give it to them the way they want it, or find yourself asking why you’re being ignored.

Soon after the video hit YouTube and started to make the rounds, Domino’s responded with its own video apology, and they posted apologies on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

Still, online communications pundits seem to believe that the company didn’t do enough, fast enough, to combat this incident and that the video and their response had “damaged” the brand.

You know a story like this is peaking when the New York Times weighs in, and so they did, saying,

In just a few days, Domino’s reputation was damaged.

The proof of brand damage? Found online, of course:

The perception of its quality among consumers went from positive to negative since Monday, according to the research firm YouGov, which holds online surveys of about 1,000 consumers every day regarding hundreds of brands.

An online survey? Is that a joke?

Two observations: Domino’s pizza is terrible: cheese and tomato sauce on cardboard. It’s hard to imagine that their brand’s “quality” image was materially harmed by a sophomoric (obviously) online video. And how many of Domino’s core customers are tracking the brand online? I didn’t do any man-on-the-street interviews, but I doubt that the “average” Domino’s customer cares what is being said about the company online.

Even as powerful as the online world can be at times, it’s still only a tiny fraction of the real world. My advice is to keep that in mind, and in perspective.