Michael Arrington is fed up with PR firms and Embargos (The request that information not be posted until a certain time/date), and I fully agree with him. As he describes in this Techcrunch post, the most annoying thing for a news site is if another site breaks the embargo. Instead of producing better content than the competition, sites will break embargos 5-10 minutes early to grab the spot on TechMeme and Google News, leading to more displayed advertising.
Now doesn’t that sound stupid?
One major flaw about the system is that its broken (Think of it as a very big flaw), as Michael points out, almost nothing is done about the
publications who break embargos. This, in and of itself should show you that PRs are simply wasting their time on trying to embargo everyone. The only people that embargos acctually work for are Microsoft and Google , because both companies basically release all of hell on the offender. Google already having banned an offender for an entire year.
So why do they still play the stupid game? Most PR firms want to make sure that the information that they are giving out lands on a certain date. Because of A) The most obvious reason, the site/features won’t be live, or B) They want a lot of sites all writing on the same day, making the news look very important. Louis Gray mentioned on his blog post that not everyone has to write everything. The reading experience of someone who has multiple feeds in his reader (Most all of us), is greatly diminished when you have everyone reporting about the same thing, when they have nothing unique to add.
In my opinion, PR teams need to take a new look at who they give their information to. I think smaller bloggers who are in a niche that suits your product very well are going to do a much better job reviewing a product, will tell you more about what you could do to improve your product, and will have a better type of community you are looking for, rather than the bigger blogs whose audience varys greatly. And with aggregators, your news will still find its way around. Especially given the way things like Friendfeed are structured, it doesn’t take many people to spread the word.
