On Message Updates -- Wal-Mart, Online Newsrooms And More

Just days after I wrote this post here about Wal-Mart, the news hit that the giant retail chain had created and staffed a PR "war room" -- complete with former political operatives -- to try and persuade consumers that it wasn't evil.

Steve Silvers, in his excellent blog Scatterbox, says using the same tactics with consumers that political campaigns use with voters just won't work. Check out his post here.

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In this post here, I took the new "King of all media" to task for having an online newsroom that doesn't allow you to link to specific news releases.

The prolific -- and always entertaining -- Scott Baradell writes in his blog, Media Orchard, that it's time for PR pros to start using blog software to manage their online newsrooms.

Scott makes an excellent point ... but don't get hung up on the word "blog." Just remember "easy to update" and "RSS."

Don't worry. You'll learn that term soon enough.

Scott gets extra credit for using a picture of Napoleon Dynamite in his post. Made me hungry for some quesadillas.

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And here I whined about how my blog wasn't getting any respect from Technorati. For some reason my numbers shot up after that post, but now there's another ranking I have to lose sleep over.

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I made an impassioned plea for PR folks to stop the jargon here, and Todd VanHoosear at Topez Partners' blog TechPR Gems challenged me (sort of) to come up with some practical suggestions for how to do so.

Todd has a good point, and it's something I've been thinking about since I read his post. Not sure I have any answers ... but I'll keep thinking.

In the meantime, if you guys out there in Readerland have any brilliant ideas, by all means share them here.

Update: Stephen Baker from Business Week follows up his original post with this take ... businesses that learn to communicate effectively (without jargon) will be those that succeed in an increasingly blended world.

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