SEC To Recognize Corporate Blogs as Public Disclosure. Can We Now Kill the Press Release?

Disclosure Versus IR/PR

Disclosure relates to the market - the people who may trade or act based on the information you publish. Reg FD protects the voice of the investor and guides companies on how to publish information so that it reaches a fair share of the market so that no one person has access to information before the other.

We can't deny or ignore the value and benefits associated with strategic support for connecting corporate news to market influencers. Now, to the defense of wire services, and as I've written before, wire services can bypass those very influencers to reach people directly.

Not only does wire distribution meet disclosure, the art of search engine optimized press releases (SEO releases) have the unique ability to appear in search engines tied to the key words your market uses to search for related and relevant information. PR Newswire, MarketWire, Business Wire, and PRWeb offer businesses the ability to distribute news with added SEO functionality. When paired with a well-written, SEO optimized press release, wire distribution can more than satisfy disclosure, it can carry your story directly to the people looking for it.

In addition, wire services have invested over the years in the development of a secondary distribution channel that has, in my opinion, remained relevant even as the Web continues to rapidly change and evolve.

When a press release crosses a wire, many search engines and their financial properties (finance.yahoo.com or finance.google.com) and all market-powered hubs, portals and dashboards, receive wire feeds which automatically populate respective "Recent News" sections. Similar to how we receive RSS feeds to seamlessly receive the news and information we prefer, investors, analysts, press, and decision makers can see, in one place, the trading status, coverage, related news, and crowd-powered discussions around the activity. This has been the case since the days of Web 1.0 and was our first taste of the Social Web that is now becoming pervasive.

Without wire services, penetrating these valuable dashboards, that are still today, a primary source of finance information and activity, is incredibly difficult, if not impossible.

This new guidance, however, presents an opportunity to connect corporate information from sites and blogs to these powerful financial online hubs so that important corporate news can still reach people, the way they're used to receiving it.

Forcing them to change their habits isn't a realistic expectation in the short-term.

This is a Chance to Reach More People, Their Way

Not only do SMRs socialize content and link conversations across the Social Web, they also help bloggers and online journalists more effectively write a rich media post using one resource that provides them with everything they need.

Now that we don't need to adhere to a fixed form or design and presentation aesthetics, technically there's nothing holding us back from carrying the torch forward. It can only help present and share information in an alternative method that complements traditional releases, outbound contact, and market-related conference calls.