Photo credit: Sony Pictures

Actor Abe Vigoda knows what it’s like to be dead even while still very much alive and kicking.

Known best for his roles as Sgt. Fish on the 1970s TV sitcom Barney Miller and Sal Tessio in The Godfather, Vigoda has been prematurely killed off by People magazine and dozens of other media outlets.

It’s the same “dead before my time” syndrome suffered by the lowly press release.

In 2006, the technology and media blogger Tom Foremsky declared the press release dead on his Silicon Valley Watcher blog.  His post started a useful discussion about social media, and the introduction of disruptive products from both legacy and new service providers.  PR professionals who understood the new paradigm also began to accept the fact that the era of command-and-control communications would be replaced by a more open dialog, in which consumers shared the stage with powerful brands.

So what’s the condition of the press release five years later?

In short: very healthy, but less profitable for the legacy market leaders. In the five years since Foremsky’s death declaration, millions of releases have been posted to web sites to be indexed by Google and other search engines, pushed via email and RSS feeds to media and other audiences, and transmitted by both free and paid distribution services.

Not only has this mainstay tool of professional communicators not succumb, it has bulked up beyond text to include photos, video and social sharing features.

The two largest commercial newswire services, Business Wire and PR Newswire, have seen a stabilization in press release volumes – which were as high as 200,000 releases a year each at their peak — after a decline driven by regulatory changes, the recession and increased competition from Marketwire, NASDAQ, Thomson Reuters and Vocus.

A revenue-sapping trend affecting each of these commercial newswire services is a phenomenon some have dubbed Web FD — a relaxation of disclosure regulations from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that allows publicly traded companies to post their material news on their web site, as long as they have told their key audiences how they intend to circulate news.

The list of companies that once paid hefty fees to Business Wire, NASDAQ’s Globe NewsWire, Marketwire and PR Newswire but that now self-disclose includes Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT),  General Motors (NYSE: GM), Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX), Marathon Oil (NYSE: MRO), Expedia Inc. (NASDAQ: EXPE), Tellabs Inc. (NASDAQ: TLAB),  BGC Partners (NASDAQ: BGCP), SVB Financial Group (NASDAQ: SIVB), Investors Real Estate Trust (NASDAQ: IRET), and Steinway Musical Instruments, Inc. (NYSE: LVB).

Also cutting into the highly profitable regulatory segment of the press release business is a relatively new offering from Thomson Reuters, which hosts the investor relations websites and streams the quarterly earnings conference calls for thousands of public companies.  After the acquisition of the little-known Norwegian financial news distribution company Hugin Online, Thomson Reuters began offering its clients a low-cost disclosure service – pitching it as a way to cut Business Wire, GlobeNewswire, Marketwire and PR Newswire out of IR budgets.

While this bloody battle rages for hundreds of millions of dollars in press release distribution revenue associated with disclosure of market-moving news from public companies, the highest growth in release volume is coming from marketers and small business owners.

One only need listen to the quarterly investor conference call of PR software maker Vocus for proof that sales and volume growth are exceptionally strong.  Vocus bought PR Web in 2006 and has registered steady gains by posting non-regulatory content from marketers and small business owners.

Unlike Business Wire, GlobeNewswire, Marketwire and PR Newswire, PR Web relies principally on SEO rather than the expense of maintaining a global network of feeds into newsrooms and paying distribution infrastructure companies like Acquire Media and The Associated Press.  Because the issuers of press releases via PR Web don’t care that their release doesn’t arrive at the Bloomberg newsdesk at precisely the same second as it gets to The Wall Street Journal, pricing is substantially lower.

Another selling point that appears to resonate with customers of PR Web are access report demonstrating page views, click-throughs, sharing, pickup and other data.  While Business Wire, Globe Newswire, Marketwire and PR Newswire each offer some level of post-release reporting to issuers, the data is incomplete because the newswires cannot track interactions with the content on third party sites (like Yahoo Finance).

Among management at the major newswires, there is a strong desire to expand from PR and IR to the marketing communications departments at larger enterprises, and into small- and medium-sized businesses, as a hedge against declines in regulatory release revenue:

• PR Newswire is a gold sponsor at this week’s Content Marketing World conference in Cleveland.

• GlobeNewswire has started distributing releases for customers of Cision, who can now build and distribute to a custom media list and also send their content over CisionWire.

• Business Wire sells an SEO service called EON – Enhanced Online News as a standalone while including the feature in other wire distribution circuits.

Watch for both scrappy entrepreneurs and larger players to bring new services to the distribution market in the months ahead.

On the scrappy end of the spectrum, tiny Wyoming-based PitchEngine (where I have acted as an adviser for some time) continues to enhance its social media release platform and forge partnerships so the technology is available to a broader set of customers.

A larger player, the fast-growing Meltwater Group, based in San Francisco, already sells its Buzz, News, Press and Reach products to the PR sector. I’d be surprised if a distribution product was not on the way.

There are undoubtedly others making inroads into a crowded market that shows no signs of taking Tom Foremsky’s advice.  Let me know what you are seeing out there.

Just as the web-and-mail video rental business model of Netflix spelled doom for Blockbuster’s bricks-and-mortar outlets, it was only a matter of time before Sean Morgan’s introduction of the real-time TV monitoring business Critical Mention forced the once-dominant VMS into extinction.

It took eight years.

The death of Video Monitoring Services of America LP, a firm that once employed more than 1,000 people and generated sales of more than $50 million, was etched on the www.vmsinfo.com web site Friday like a gravestone inscription:

The VMS Board with the input of qualified professionals have elected to close VMS.

Unfortunately almost all VMS personnel have been terminated effective today.

The decision has been made after exhaustively evaluating many different options and with sadness for our loyal staff and customers.

At some point in the very near future a Trustee will be appointed to liquidate VMS. We anticipate the trustee will make future communications with customers.

VMS thanks all customers for their loyal support.

For those of us in the PR services sector, it was apparent VMS would be toast when Critical Mention launched a platform delivering real-time email alerts that not only informed clients when their key words were heard on television, but also allowed subscribers to view the video clips instantly.

While VMS management scrambled to save their burning house, Morgan, the Critical Mention CEO, went on an R&D offensive and offered update after update to his software and an expanded trove of content that today includes every major U.S. over-the-air market, cable and satellite TV programming, as well as many foreign sources, and even web video from online news sites.

There is no shortage of entrepreneurs, like Morgan, who are licking their chops over the prospect of disrupting other legacy players in the billion-dollar PR services sector.

But why haven’t they declared victory?

In upcoming posts, we’ll take a look at the disruptors in four segments of the services market: Distribution, Targeting, Monitoring and SaaS (software as a service).

Next week: Distribution

Services like Marketwire, PRWeb, PitchEngine, GlobeNewswire and Hugin Online have had an impact on the legacy market leaders PR Newswire and Business Wire.  We’ll dig in to see who is growing and why.

(Disclaimer:  The vast majority of my career has been spent in PR services.  My only current role in the distribution arena is as adviser to PitchEngine. The views expressed here are my own.)

Every industry has its own vocabulary.

“ANFO” was lingo I learned in my first PR agency job, writing a monthly column called “Shot Rock” for Pit & Quarry magazine.  My account was a commercial explosives business that had been spun off from DuPont, and ammonium nitrate was a mainstay for blasters.

At UPI, articles we promised to write for newspapers were called “skedders,” because they were scheduled ahead of time.

PR Newswire loved to refer to its clients’  heifers.  It was newsroom lingo for “HFR — Hold for Call.”  Nothing to do with cows.

So when I took on my first operating role since leaving PRN, I expected that I’d have to learn a new vernacular.  Context Optional, where I’m vice president, strategic accounts, has developed many of the most popular branded applications on Facebook. Clients include Clinique, Target, OpenTable, Microsoft and the U.S. Census Bureau.

I’m no newbie to Facebook. But it isn’t until you look beyond your “wall,” “news feed” and “live feed” that you realize how damn confusing the platform can be for anyone — let alone a brand — trying to harness the power of the medium as a way to attract and engage fans.

Facebook does have a sales team to work with deep-pocketed consumer brands.  Often, though, CMOs want to do more than advertise to create a tighter bond with online consumers.

That thirst for engaging content has created a nice business for the select few who understand the always-changing technical underpinnings of Facebook and the rules concerning user privacy and best practices.

The fact that Context Optional has earned the coveted “Facebook preferred developer” label is just a starting point.  It’s my job to bring my new colleagues’ API-driven creativity to those marketing and PR pros charged with attracting and retaining fans and followers, and to do it in a manner that achieves business goals and is culturally acceptable on Facebook.

So I’m learning about the differences between canvas applications and apps that live on tabs.  I’m diving into Facebook “boxes” and trying to understand why they are about to be discontinued.  And just when I was starting to forget about the investor relations profession’s nightmare transition to the financial reporting language XBRL, I am told that Facebook code is written in FBML.

Luckily, the fans of Einstein Bros Bagels don’t have to worry about any of that to get a coupon for a free bagel and schmear.  All they have to do is click on the “free bagel” tab.  My new employer has handled the back end integration with Facebook to make this special offer work.  My guess is that the fan base will soon be well north of today’s 22,000.

The 548,000 fans of Chanel were awarded this week with the option to download screensavers that display the time with two vividly recreated J12 timepieces.  Budget-wary teens were given a fun set of viral “Stop Me From Spending” tools.  Still other soon-to-launch apps are aimed at Valentine’s Day, the Vancouver Winter Olympics and even a mobile phone texting competition.

Needless to say, I am having a ball working with brands to creatively earn the right to have a relationship with consumers on the Facebook platform and beyond.  Just forgive me if I don’t yet know the difference between a poke and a nudge.

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(Note:  I remain an active board member at dna13.)

There’s something special about a guy who isn’t a rock star yet has three times the Twitter followers of Bob Dylan.  He’s not a deep-pocketed electronics retailer, yet his social media presence dwarfs Best Buy.

Jeremiah Owyang is an influencer in Web strategy, a futurist, a gadfly and — most important of all — someone who listens, studies, engages and shares.  A partner in the newly formed consulting firm Altimeter Group, Owyang earned his nearly 60,000 followers the hard way.

Since I dived into the social web after leaving PR Newswire, I found that Owyang’s Forrester research reports provided a well-grounded reality check that validated fundamental shifts in consumer behavior, marketing methodologies and the demand for new PR and marcom tools.  He’s routinely quoted by CMOs during conferences and, unlike many celebrities, @jowyang almost always tweets back immediately.

During my recent visit to Altimeter Group’s new headquarters in San Mateo, California, Owyang showed no signs of being jet-lagged, despite returning less than a day earlier from one of his frequent overseas speeches.  He also demonstrated keen knowledge of an increasingly confusing vendor community supplying social media monitoring, analysis and curation tools.

To illustrate why the public relations industry should familiarize itself with social customer relationship management systems, Owyang shared an anecdote about how appliance maker Whirlpool  failed to appease a disgruntled customer, and the damage it caused due to that customer’s ability to influence millions through social media.

“Customers do not care what department you’re in,” said Owyang, predicting that some forward-thinking companies will take on the challenge of building smart systems that inform Support, PR, Marketing, Product Development and offer a single view of the customer no matter where they touch the company.

I am aware of one large food manufacturer whose PR department is heading into the new year with amped up monitoring capabilities and a plan to pipe real-time data into their customer service call centers.  If the readers of PounceNow are aware of organizations where PR is embracing the challenge, please comment on this post.

Don’t let the mustard-colored sports coat fool you.  Tom Kunz is one hip CEO.

As head of Cenury 21 Real Estate LLC, Kunz is in an industry that’s being disintermediated by the Internet      and ravaged by the recession.  Yet I have never met a more positive, open-minded and technology-friendly executive.

What does he do right:

• He’s not afraid to experiment. Century 21 pulled its TV advertising budget and spent the cash to bolster its presence online. Kunz says brand recognition for the franchise was already in the high 90s, so there was no reason to spend millions on 30- and 60-second image spots.  The company is contemplating a switch back to TV, but it would be a web-based format where Century 21 branding was visible at all times on the screen.

• He understands the time-sensitive nature of news. When Congress extended incentives aimed at first-time homebuyers, Kunz dropped what he was doing to record a 2 minute presentation on a tiny, inexpensive Flip video camera. His comments were up on Century 21’s YouTube channel within minutes.  As of today, the video had been watched nearly 1,700 times.
• He takes counsel from Matt Gentile, Century’s 21’s director of corporate and brand communications. In an interview with PR Week’s Eric Iacono, during the Next conference, Kunz talked about making media outreach in local markets a priority.  By incorporating interviews with local print and broadcast media into trips, and inviting local Century 21 franchisees to participate, the organization lands extended coverage rather than the short soundbites afforded by national media.
• He doesn’t hoard good information. While many CEOs would stay silent about marketing strategies, Kunz is a walking dictionary definition for transparency, even sharing his age (61) with the crowd.  As for naysayers, he advises them to watch the AT&T  “Lost Dog” YouTube spot to explain power of social media.

I also liked Tom’s ability to be self-effacing in a manner that seemed genuine:  “I’m a gadget freak,” he told those attending the Next event at the Waldorf Astoria. “It doesn’t mean I know how to use them all, but I buy them all.”

Tom was kind enough to do a short interview with me following his appearance at Next. Please excuse my camera work, as his head is halfway out of the frame for portions of the video.  Yet another reason I never worked in TV.

Let’s take the social media temperature of the airline industry.

United breaks guitars. Bad situation, though I loved spokeswoman Robin Urbanski’s quip:  “This strikes a chord with us.”  She was classy while under fire.

Southwest allows its flight attendents to rap the pre-flight safety demonstration.  When SWA’s Paula Berg speaks to PR pros about emerging media, she always plays that wonderful video.

jetBlue has 1.4 million Twitter followers.  When the airline tweeted about a unique $599 pass that allowed unlimited flights during a traditionally slow month from mid-August to mid-September, they quickly sold out.

Malaysian carrier AirAsia trended on Twitter and was a top story on many news sites because a baby born onboard one of its jets was awarded free flights for life.

Delta issued a statement saying that laptop computers are prohibited on the flightdeck of  its flights and those of its Northwest Airlines unit.  Media reports, including this blog entry on LaptopMag.com, say the pilots overshot Minnesota’s Twin Cities airport because they were distracted by their laptops.

“I know whenever I get to playing Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook hours and hours can go by without my noticing. And I’ve missed my stop on the train more than once while heavily engaged with Chess Titans,” wrote K.T. Bradford.

Delta is a global company that serves plenty of developing nations.  These are some of the same regions where Nicholas Negroponte sought to distribute inexpensive, rugged, wifi-equipped laptops to help educate the world’s poorest children.  It seems to me that Delta could earn high marks from its customers by introducing a welcome distraction into the lives of kids who could benefit from a laptop: a large contribution to One Laptop Per Child.

I would value comments from readers on whether or not Delta should take additional public action, beyond its October 26 statement.

Walking to work, I decided to look into the front door of a white tablecloth Italian restaurant called Nanni’s to see if there was a menu on display.

I hope what I saw was not on the menu.  A black and white cat was sitting proudly on top of a nicely set table, while an employee chatted on the eatery’s pay phone.

With a blog called PounceNow, cat-related items are kosher, right?

I don’t expect diversity in the New York supermarket business.  Rightly or wrongly, I have long associated chains like D’Agostino and Gristede’s as places managed by brawny Italian-American men.

In the public relations professions, the spotlight has been shining on the lack of adequate representation by non-male, non-white personnel for quite some time.  Similar criticism — and in some cases, litigation — has been lodged against the advertising and financial services industries.

But the world has changed since Don Draper types ruled on Madison Avenue, right?  Surely, the next generation of technology-driven marketing services would be led by people who more closely resemble those who live in our global communities where our clients sell their wares.

If the speakers and attendees at last week’s Inbound Marketing Summit in suburban Boston were an accurate sampling of who’s guiding us through the transformation from command-and-control “push” marketing to online and offline consumer “engagement” by brands, the answer is no.  The vast majority of those behind the books, speeches, opinions, videos and business models showcased at #IMS09 were  white males, mainly in their 30s and 40s.

One exception was Candace Fleming, CEO of the social media analytics platform Crimson Hexagon.  Another was Tina Hoang, whose Palo Alto, Calif., venture capital firm was trolling the event for companies to back.

While at PR Newswire,  where I worked from 1989 until recently, one of our overarching goals was building a healthy corporate culture and products that represented the needs of our communities.  Key to our success was attracting and retaining talent of all shapes, sizes, colors, orientations, religions and ethnicities.  The many postage stamp-sized images of my former PRN colleagues I see on Facebook each day confirms that we made plenty of progress.

Why is this important?

Census data from 2008 shows 54% of the U.S. population will be 54 percent minority groups — that is “everyone except non-Hispanic, single-race whites” — by the mid-21st century.  Professions that continue to rely on pale, male and stale people, practices and ideas are much more likely to be irrelevant.

One recent research paper on the topic, Elizabeth L. Toth’s  “Diversity and Public Relations Practice,” outlined the challenge for our profession.  Organizations like the Public Relations Society of America and the Institute for Public Relations have dedicated resources to address the issue.  But traditional PR agencies and corporate communications functions are morphing into new entities so quickly, it’s questionable how much impact the longtime industry standard bearers will have influencing the fledgling inbound marketing field.

There is  plenty of wildly successful marketing work being done in Africa, Asia, Europe and in the Americas using digital tools and creative  ideas from people who have never written a book or proclaimed themselves social media experts.  Events like the the trends-and-technologies Pop!Tech conference, in Camden, Maine, Oct. 21-24, have a broad roster of philanthropic doers who are glad to share their successes and failures with PR and marketing pros who want to learn new skills.

For people without thousands of dollars to spend on conferences like Pop!Tech and TED, last week’s Inbound Marketing Summit was well worth the time and investment.  I’d love to see next year’s event held in Indonesia, Argentina or Tunisia.  If not there, at least invite some of their digital marketing superstars to visit Boston.

Most corporate communicators would steer clear of a news event involving charged racial tensions and the police.

But President Obama’s use of a “beer summit” to calm the war of words between Harvard University scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley opened the door slightly for gutsy PR pros who might want to latch onto the wave of media coverage surrounding the issue.

The new owners of my hometown beer, Genesee, in Rochester, NY, timed their pitch to perfectly, landing a nice item in Jennifer Rossa’s Private Equity Beat Wall Street Journal blog and a bunch of other TV, radio, newspaper and social media coverage.  Genesee brewed up a controversy over Obama’s choice of Bud Light as the beer he will be drinking tonight.  Bud’s parent, Anheuser-Busch InBev NV, is based in Belgium.

“We think it’s great that the President is getting together over beers to have an important discussion. A lot of good solutions have surfaced when people can relax and talk over a couple cold ones,” said Rich Lozyniak, CEO of The Genesee Brewing Company. “We just hope the next time the President has a beer, he chooses an American beer, made by American workers, at an American-owned brewery like Genesee.”

The lesson here is that every big news story — in social media as well as mainstream print and broadcast — creates demand for sidebar material.  Cheers to the Genesee beer team for understanding the news cycle and pouncing.