Scoble eschews PR

When I dropped by Vloggercon on Sunday, I ran into Scoble and Furrier in the lobby, and said hello. They mentioned that they now realised they didn't need a press release. This matches what we do at Technorati - we just blog things ourselves. The press can find them.

I talked with the grassroots FIRST. Against the advice, by the way, of a lot of PR people (they wanted me to break the news to Walt Mossberg or someone "important" first — they thought that's how I was going to get the biggest story going).

They all are wrong. I almost bought into it too. In fact, I did. On Saturday I talked with maybe 20 people and said "can you wait until Tuesday to talk about it?" I wanted to give the story to the Wall Street Journal too. Not to mention I wanted to tell my coworkers before the story hit. I didn't get that chance and I'm lucky, in hindsight, that I didn't. Because the story started on the grassroots first it got far far bigger than if I broke it on a big newspaper.

Of course, the Cluetrain chaps were ahead of us all:

15. In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" of business—the sound of mission statements and brochures—will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.
16. Already, companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone.

Technorati Tags: meme, press, rhetoric, technorati, writing