The death of the Press Release - Demo at least

As part of all of the buzz about new "interactive marketing" methods, a colleague forwarded me this article about the evolution of the press release. There's a lot of good stuff in there about the evolution of marketing online, moving towards a more "social" experience between company and customer and so on. I've blogged here on Contentions about some of those trends already. But I have to say, the moment I saw the title, my first thought went to a slightly different direction: the press release as a bane of WCM product demonstrations.

The Press Release has amassed such a bad reputation as WCM demo fodder that recently, when Percussion showed up at a prospect site and started to show a fairly specific example from their site, one of the viewers blurted out "Oh thank God, because if we had to sit and watch another Press Release getting published we'd have to shoot you!" We all laughed but it's true. Why would anyone care about the press release approval cycle today?

It may be a surprise to learn that vendors like us have to tread lightly on this issue. We can get just as exasperated when prospects ASK to see "the press release" scenario or a use case just like it. How do we tell folks tactfully that these use cases are so vanilla and unimportant to the success of their Web site that they can't possibly showcase anything different or interesting about the investment they are about to make?

There seems to be an interesting dynamic at work, where everyone thinks they are doing everyone else a favor by "focusing on a simple use case we all understand" - the dreaded press release. Not surprisingly, the result of most of those types of "simple use case" demonstrations is "gee, all the vendors looked the same" or "ok, but why I am spending so much on that?"

The moral of the story here is: simple use cases don't help you make tough decisions. Ask yourself what you want your Web site or larger Web presence to be known for. Then ask to see THAT in the WCM demo. We at least, will be more than happy to oblige.