Micro PR

There’s a big echo in the PR blogosphere around this story but rightly so: Stowe Boyd has written a thought provoking blog post setting out a proposal for micro PR asking PR firms to get out of his in-box and instead engage a conversation using tools such as Twitter.

“Maybe someday, a decade from now, PR flacks will have evolved the new DNA needed to really change. An occasional mutant may pop up even today, but the corporate/pr firm hypocrisy is so general and contaminating to all it touches that even the most enlightened will find themselves turned.”

“So, this is an additional argument for MicroPR: forcing PR firms to approach us in the open, on open social flow apps like Twitter, and in the small, where they have to jettison all the claptrap of the old press release model. In the open, that can't lie easily, or they will be caught on it. In the small, they have to junk the meaningless superlatives, the bogus quotes that no CEO ever mouthed, the run-on phrases, the disembodied third party mumbo jumbo, as if the press release were edited by God.”

Boyd cites a mechanism called Twitpitch that he proposed as a means for companies to pitch to him. It’s on the same lines of Mick Fealty’s tip for pitching bloggers: headline, laconic comment followed by a semi-colon and a URL, plus real world contact details.

I think we may just have seen the future. But it’s a long way off.