PR Per Post.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

In going over topics before this week’s podcast, something got floated that’s less an idea and more a solution to a problem you didn’t know you had until I pointed it out. The topic was Pay Per Tweet and how the legitimacy of content is affected because you pay for it. (A separate issue from product placement branded entertainment.)

This lead to talking about how ad blogs seem to all get the same PR releases, where it was then suggested half-jokingly, half-not, that if people are going to be paid for Tweets, then PR should pay bloggers to run those releases.

Objectivity aside—it seemed plausible enough to consider in the following context:

1) Ad blogs are not fax machines. Yet that’s exactly how PR uses them. The first goal for PR is to get their clients mentioned. So why should they be paid to do just that while ad blogs are exploited for free?

2) Ad blogs need PR releases, not the other way around. Charge, and they’ll just send releases to someone else. Maybe. Unless most of the blogs in question were on the same page with this. As for needing PR to send stuff in, others might, but I built the majority of the traffic here by finding my own material, and the posts with the most hits here never came from releases.

3) Be. Paid. I’m not saying I’d do it, but like Chris Rock said, “I understand.” One possible way to do it: Charge a flat rate to provide a link directly to the full release, and then charge a different one to write something about it.

Never happen in a million years... right?