This is not to suggest that Todd and his team are a bit nuts...far from it...merely that they are on a noble quest. Today they launched a template for a more social online newsroom, or in our parlance, MediaRoom. I applaud them for their efforts to keep this evolutionary thinking moving forward. Change takes time, particularly in industries that are highly regulated. In the last six years, my company has launched over 400 online newsrooms of some shape or size, many of those through our strategic partner, PR Newswire. Certainly back then and to a large degree still, education was the key to adoption. PR Communications professionals had to KNOW ABOUT the tools before they could use them.

New technology has to do a couple of things very clearly in order to see mass adoption. Tony Perkins, founder of the now defunct Red Herring Magazine, and editor of the new Always On Network, has some interesting insight in his blog post about avoiding another tech bubble. One of the key components of any new technology is that it takes something that people are already doing and saves them time and money.

That has always been the key value proposition of online mediarooms to the busy PR professional. They MUST post news releases to their websites for compliance and other reasons. They MUST (if they're public) use the wire services to distribute said news. And historically that meant dealing with a busy webmaster or using a clunky html WYSIWYG tool to do it. Content management platforms have improved, PR pros have gotten more savvy, IT teams have become less gatekeepers and have allowed business units within their organization to use 3rd party vended solutions, price points have come down...and voila we have adoption of online mediarooms. Riding this wave and working personally with several hundred companies to implement these solutions has given me and my team a unique perspective...probably very similar to the experience base of the CCBN (now Thomson) team that has implemented thousands of IR websites since Reg FD became a reality.

Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz has been lobbying the SEC to make a blog post compliant as "disclosure." Well guess what? Today TypePad, which powers a very large percentage of PR and corporate blogs, was completely down for an hour. Oops. The "new way" would have been a disaster.

Are online newsrooms useful for smaller or privately-held companies or non-profits or policy groups? Sure. Different value prop...they're looking for publicity, promotion, sales, consensus-building, etc. But my experience base lies with the publicly traded corporation and in this environment, the concept of enabling every Tom Dick and Harry to mash up and spread your company's news simply scares the bejesus out of them. Not interested. I'm convinced that at some point that will change and we will want to "turn on" the social elements of our MediaRooms much like Shift has suggested in their template. The technology is there...it's the strategy that has not yet caught up with it.

As I mentioned before, new technology always begs those discussions until it reaches a tipping point. Usage and comfort always has to catch up with the tool. Remember how yucky it felt to drive your first car that had anti-lock brakes? I really missed the old controlled skid!

Education is the key. The news release is certainly not dead...nor is the traditional way of doing news distribution for thousands of companies and the bulk of communications professionals. Change is good and most certainly inevitable...like Agent Smith says in the first Matrix: "You hear that Mr. Anderson?... That is the sound of inevitability... It is the sound of your death... Goodbye, Mr. Anderson..." Keanu: "My name...is NEO!"