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.

OpenTable ended the unpleasant ritual of waiting on hold for a snooty hostess to  book your dinner reservation for a popular restaurant.

GPS devices from Garmin, TomTom and Magellin have made the concept of getting a TripTik from AAA seem almost quaint.

Calling a radio station DJ for help in identifying a song is no longer necessary, thanks to the Shazam iPhone app, which matches the digital fingerprint of a song and instantly displays the artist and title.

With all these technology advances, why is it so damn challenging for today’s time-constrained public relations professionals to shortcut the process of identifying and engaging with influential audiences, and  track the outcome?

My years with PR Newswire and subsequent board roles at Techrigy and dna13, taught me plenty about the never-ending software development process and the need to balance immediate code fixes with longer-term customer requests for new data and functionality.  Now that I’m enjoying a stint as an unbiased industry observer, I figured it was appropriate to ask the community using Cision, Dow Jones Media Relations Manager, VMS Insight and Vocus — and those who wish their budget could support such a luxury — to chime in with their wish list for the next generation of PR automation and software tools.

Ironically, it’s free software from Google, Moderator, that allows me to query the public relations industry and to tally votes on what questions should be asked of PR services providers.  With many of us gathering in October at the Public Relations Society of America international conference in Washington, DC, we should have a timely, specific and crowd-supported list of features to hand over to the development community.

Please take part in this exercise.  Sales professionals have Salesforce.com.  Finance people have their Oracle systems.  It’s only fair that PR officers push software suppliers to stay current and provide tools that will enable you to do your job as it evolves in 2011 and beyond.

A link to the Google Moderator survey on PR services is here:  http://goo.gl/mod/Cry4

Even with sea gulls circling, waves crashing and the smell of suntan lotion providing delicious distractions, it still takes a few days for vacationing PR and IR executives to force their brains into vacation mode.

Visiting the Narragansett, RI, Dollar Tree location was meant to be a simple stock-up for provisions missing from our beach cottage.  Instead, it turned into a bizarre “what if?” exercise about the brands we knew and loved when corporate communications was a simpler business.

Walking through the discount retailer’s aisles was like visiting a brand graveyard and exhuming familiar products that conjure up powerful memories.

Mallo Cup and Charleston Chew feature prominently in the candy selection.  In the breakfast aisle, Kellogg’s hasn’t paid a premium to occupy prime real estate, so shoppers get to experience Toast ‘Em breakfast pastries rather than Pop Tarts.

Remember when Lavoris stood proudly among Listerine and Scope as a leading mouthwash? Or when Bugles corn chips commanded the same respect as Fritos.

If Dollar Tree was a B2B supermarket offering steeply discounted services that still worked fine, but lacked advertising support or the latest technology update, what brands would we find?

Thick, phonebook-sized directories figured prominently in our industry a decade or two ago. IR officers religiously thumbed through the Nelson’s directory of analysts while the PR function carefully guarded their Bacon’s book of media contacts.  They’d definitely appear in the PR/IR dollar store.

Some of the earliest digital tools would be on the shelves, too.  The Reuters-owned Inc.Link product was the first generation of what we know today as the IR web site.  PR Newswire morphed Inc.Link into Virtual IQ, which Thomson then turned into its competitor to CCBN.

Streetfusion was another oldie but goodie, publishing a calendar of corporate earnings calls and webcasting them for investors.

Unlike consumer food and beauty products, most of the deceased PR/IR brands truthfully could not survive in a heavily discounted B2B environment equivalent to the Dollar Tree.  There are big data-gathering, fact-checking and technology costs to produce a product of high enough quality for corporate customers.

So even though Wyler’s lemonade is the powdered drink mix of choice at the Dollar Tree, it’s unlikely corporate buyers will be willing to drink the Kool-Aid offered by familiar suppliers of years gone by. Even for a buck.

Mirage? M&A drought appears to be ending in PR, marketing space.

After a long drought, M&A is picking up among the service providers relied on by many corporate communications departments and their agencies .

Entrepreneurs seeking funding for their new initiatives are also breathing a sigh of relief that venture capital is again flowing, with the disruptive ad buying network TRAFFIQ getting $10 million in new funding from two firms yesterday.

In the PR space, the perennially loss-making Medialink video news release business was put out of its misery by Shoba Purushothaman’s VC-backed digital video warehousing startup, TheNewsMarket. Medialink needed a new digital business model and TheNewsMarket had to find a way to help its subscribers generate more content, so we’ll see if a merger can be the catalyst for growth.

The place I called home for 20 years, PR Newswire, pulled the trigger on a deal Friday to buy The Fuel Team, the longtime partner behind the PRN “Media Room” and “IR Room products.”  As with the Medialink/NewsMarket, PRN obviously sees the logic in being a repository for its clients’ myriad digital assets  — not simply text press releases.

Another transaction that closed in the past couple of weeks is Techrigy, the social media monitoring company acquired by the fast-growing UK-based marketing automation roll-up Alterian.  Unlike VC-backed competitor Radian6, Techrigy was privately owned and built its business as an OEM solution more than a retail supplier of monitoring.

Who will buy Radian6 and lesser known SM monitors like Crimson Hexagon?  What about legacy VNR producers — like KEF Media Associates and On the Scene Productions – suffering from shrinking demand for glossy, made-for-TV productions?

Another potential acquisition target is Peter Shankman’s advertising-supported ProfNet clone, Help a Reporter, and Feedroom, which suffers from a TheNewsMarket-vs-Brightcove identity complex.

In their quarterly communications with shareholders, the publicly traded PR services firms Cision and Vocus revealed their M&A agenda. Vocus, which hasn’t had a blockbuster acquisition since buying PR Web in 2006, said it would prefer not to use its extra cash for a share buyback.  Rather, CEO Rick Rudman, said he’d target companies that provide one or more of the same services as Vocus, to expand the customer base; or firms that could be added into the Vocus platform to create a new capability; or an organization in an attractive geographic region not currently served  by Vocus.  Cision, on the other hand, is plagued by debt and actively divesting its European media monitoring businesses to concentrate on its software product, CisionPoint.

Other entrenched PR/IR/marcom services players with money to spend include Berkshire Hathaway’s Business Wire; Thomson Reuters; Nasdaq OMX, which owns Globe Newswire and the IR web-hosting service Shareholder.com; and Jorn Lyseggen’s unconventional sales powerhouse Meltwater Group, which recently began selling a social “buzz” product on top of its inaugural media monitoring service.

While Batboy still lives in the form of an off-Broadway musical, I miss seeing his face on the cover of the tabloid Weekly World News, alongside the supermarket checkout counter.

Now an online publication, Weekly World News never confused its readers by trying to be anything other than off-the-charts zany.  PhD Ape and the friendly underwater Nessy-like monster known as Kraken were fictitious and fun.  It’s the same model that works well for the Onion, which still thrives as an ink-and-paper parody periodical.

Where things start to get as hairy as another Weekly World News cast member, Bigfoot, is when an organization respected for publishing the truth strays from the mission — even  in the name of comedy.  April Fool’s Day is the day the shananagans usually happen.

As a former editor of the Utica College Tangerine, I know how much fun it is to create an entire issue of phony articles, photos and ads.  But when we re-branded the weekly the Gangerine each year on April 1, we inoculated ourselves against anyone claiming they were confused over what was true and what was concocted.

Not so when a fake item — like a press release — is presented as fact.

Because the feeds of commercial wire services like PR Newswire and Business Wire are pumped directly to the hundreds of thousands of equities terminals of Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters and Dow Jones and to media web sites, there is a great deal of anxiety about fake press releases.  Bogus content can tarnish the editorial reputation of those  media brands as well as those who issued April Fool’s releases during a lapse of judgment.

That’s the reason why hoax releases are routinely rejected, even when they are well written and presented by organizations with deep pockets and good intentions.  It’s not personal.  History has shown that a gullible public and inexperienced journalists can lead to embarrassment.

Fast food companies seem to be particularly fond of generating press through hoaxes.  In 1996, Taco Bell announced via full-page ads and a press release that it had purchased the Liberty Bell and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. Citizens and politicians went ballistic, saying that a national symbol of U.S. freedom should not be sold.  The restaurant chain issued a follow-up release a few hours later saying the whole story had been a practical joke.

Other fast-food and beverage chains have tried to match Taco Bell’s creativity.  Burger King routinely uses April Fool’s Day to create buzz, through full-page newspaper ads and other tactics.  One heralded the introduction of the left-handed Whopper sandwich, and another followed the Mad Cow Disease tainted beef scare and claimed the chain’s name was changing to Chicken King.

As someone who has had to reject releases submitted by PR agency execs and their eager clients, I emphasized that the individuals digesting press releases were not always able to discern fact from fiction.  Unless an issuer was willing to make it clear that the entire press release was a parody, there was a chance it would be taken seriously by an unwary consumer, investor or reporter.  The brand reputation of a newswire service was more important that the potential loss of revenue by refusing to distribute a hoax press release.

I wish I could say that every hoax story was caught before it went out.  But that would be stretching the truth.

The press secretary for the acting governor of Pennsylvania, Mark Schweiker announced on April 1, 2002, that he had changed his mind and decided to run for a full term.  The tongue-in-cheek release included clues that it was a hoax, including a campaign manager named April Phuels and a quote from Schweiker’s wife saying she did not want to leave the governor’s mansion because the bed sheets were delightfully soft.   The Schweiker release was “killed,” a newswire service term for alerting media not to use a story, within a few minutes of transmission.

Business Wire sued the individuals behind a phony 1999 press release that claimed a company called Webnode had been granted a government contract to regulate ownership of portions of the Internet.

Some pranks have proceeded without setbacks, primarily because broadcast or print outlets were willing parties to the April Fool’s jokes.  These three are courtesy of the Museum of Hoaxes:

• In 2004, National Public Radio’s All Things Considered announced that the post office had begun a new ‘portable zip codes’ program. This program, inspired by an FCC ruling that allowed phone users to take their phone number with them when they moved, would allow people to also take their zip code with them when they moved, no matter where they moved to. It was hoped that with this new program zip codes would come to ymbolize “a citizen’s place in the demographic, rather than geographic, landscape.” Assistant Postmaster General Lester Crandall was quoted as saying, “Every year millions of Americans are on the go: People who must relocate for work or other reasons. Those people may have been quite attached to their original homes or an adopted town or city of residence. For them this innovative measure will serve as an umbilical cord to the place they love best.”

• In 2000, Miller Beer announced that it had struck an agreement with the town of Marfa, Texas to become the exclusive sponsor of the phenomenon known as the Marfa Mystery Lights. These are spherical lights which appear south of the town each evening, seeming to bounce around in the sky. They’re variously rumored to be caused by ghosts, swamp gas, or uranium (though they’re probably caused by the headlights from the nearby highway). Miller announced that under the terms of the agreement the Marfa Lights would be renamed the Miller Lites. The local paper, which was in on the joke, printed the news on its front page.

• In 1999 the Savings Bank of Rockville placed an ad in the Connecticut Journal-Inquirer announcing that it would soon begin charging a $5 fee to customers who visited a live teller. The ad, which appeared on March 31, claimed that the fee was necessary in order to provide, “professional, caring and superior customer service.” Although the ad was a joke, many customers failed to recognize it as such. One woman reportedly closed her account because of it. The bank then ran a second ad revealing that the initial ad was a joke. The bank manager commented that the first ad ironically “commits us to not charging such fees.”

• In 1996, Virgin Cola announced that in the interest of consumer safety it had integrated a new technology into its cans. When the cola passed its sell-by date, the liquid would react with the metal in the can, turning the can itself bright blue. Virgin warned that consumers should therefore avoid purchasing all blue cans. The joke was that Pepsi had recently unveiled its newly designed cans. They were bright blue.