Embargo Breakers: A Nobody’s Perspective

There has been quite a bit of talk about people breaking the sacred embargo. An embargo is press-speak for the time at which a story should be held until, so that the company can prepare the troops to deal with all the things that comes with a big story: traffic surge, brand management, and perhaps, finishing the features that were promised in the press release. Some PR firms will make you sign informal NDA agreements, and others will never send you a story early, if you are proven untrustworthy. If the story is embargoed for Tuesday at 10:30am EST, you technically shouldn’t release it a minute early. Of course, in this competitive environment, it doesn’t happen all the time, and when embargoes are broken, everyone cries foul.

As a former contributor (with an alias) with one of the major Web 2.0 blogs, I know how important it was to receive an embargo. It enabled me to fact check, compare the new release to other competitors in the space, and I could pace myself on when to work on the news release. I loved it, because I wasn’t forced to write on a real time basis, and hopefully I could add more value, rather than writing off the top of my head, probably taking too much information from the press release itself, rather than thinking about it. On the flip side, if I was assigned to write about a story that had been broken earlier, for some reason or another, I was forced to take a different angle on the news to make it newsworthy, and for some mundane releases, it was virtually impossible. How often does a post show up in your feed, and you click on it and it’s taken down only to see it pop up several hours later? How often are the second tier blogs getting information the day of the story releasing, rather than have them break the news, potentially killing the chances that the big boys write about you?

Here’s why the broken system is broken:

1) Very little accountability for the major publications. As a current entrepreneur without the resources and weight of a PR firm, can I really try and get angry at one of the major blogs for covering me? If they break my story early, should I even say anything? Should I notify any of the other blogs that I sent the news to, possibly starting a flamewar on Friendfeed, Twitter, etc? When you’re the biggest blog out there, you’re going to get news first, and it’s always going to piss off the second tier blogs.

2) The system was initially designed for magazines and newspapers, that needed significant lead time to get to publication. With the blogging landscape breaking the news these days, is this even necessary?

3) Blogs are rewarded for getting the news out fast, and as a result, mistakes happen (and sometimes on purpose). The lifeblood of a blog is pageviews, and posting a couple minutes earlier than anyone else could cost the blog hundreds and hundreds of pageviews. In all fairness, with all the time zones, feverish posting, incomplete and erroneous press releases, there are quite a bit of mistakes that happen. We see this all of the time. With the big blogs turning into franchises with five to ten voices contributing on a regular basis, there are bound to be significant mixups in communicating embargo times. I’ve witnessed these first-hand. The result of this that makes it bad is that there is no accountability. Everyone is afraid to call out the embargo breaker by name, and instead you get the tweet “Xth embargo broken this week”.

4) Communication, Communication, Communication. This is partially related to 1-3, but when an embargo is broken, why isn’t the PR firm more transparent about who broke it, and what the end result was, whether it be intentional, mistake, or in many cases, the PR firm tells certain bloggers to publish early. There’s been way too many cases of PR firms saying that a no-name blog has broken embargo, so it’s ok to publish early. I know of an example of that this week, in fact. And sure enough, tweets come in with everyone crying foul of that blog breaking embargo. Did the PR firm let the other bloggers know that? I highly doubt it, because it’s from the A-list remember (being sarcastic)?
Until folks are called out by name, and are forced to explain what happened, things are going to stay the same. But in defense of bloggers, I think that more times than not, it’s mostly a by-product of misunderstandings. You have three parties playing this game: the entrepreneur, the PR firm in most cases, and the blogger (and their team of writers).

But hey, don’t bloggers not want to get the standard e-mail release anymore and have creative ways of information discovery? Aren’t bloggers supposed to be tired of going through their inboxes to find a story? Don’t they want to hear about new companies from non-traditional avenues? As Steve Rubel asked, Does the Chase Make PR Obsolete? LOL

Should Netvibes/Pageflakes have been Friendfeed before Friendfeed?

I am a huge fan of start-up pages, web pages that show your customized news and information pulling in tons and tons of RSS feeds, in an easy to read, organized format. The most popular of these are iGoogle, MyYahoo, and Netvibes.

 In fact, I use Pageflakes all day, every day. I pull in the RSS feeds from my favorite news sites, and instead of going to the various news sites and blogs to see new and updated information, I go to one place to view it all. In fact, whenever I show the power of this to my less-techie friends, they are astounded by the power of this sort of tool. The reason why people don’t know about this tool is because:

• RSS has yet to go mainstream
• Many people still have yet to think of blogs as important learning tools, the trade journals of their space
• It’s not easy for non-early adopters to determine the credibility of a blog and other forms of user generated content

Despite this, for early adopters, a feedreader or a start-up page is essential to traversing the internet. Unfortunately, Pageflakes was unable to develop a sustainable business model and was sold to LiveUniverse for pennies on the dollar, and Netvibes has had it’s fair share of turbulence and still have yet to find a business model, despite a solid user base.

Both Netvibes and Pageflakes were trying to solve the same problem in my mind, aggregating information resources in one central repository. They attempted to make their sites more social, but there was never really a social component to these sites in my opinon. What they didn’t see in my mind was the Friendfeeds, Profilactics, and Lifestream.FMs of the world that are using RSS in creative ways, that are much more social with comments, distribution, and forming groups. Did Netvibes/Pageflakes miss out on this opportunity? Or would this just be another feature that would have been just as hard to monetize? I don’t have the answers, but it seems that Netvibes and Pageflakes were in the drivers seat to make RSS and syndication more mainstream and may have missed out on an opportunity to grow volume in the marketplace.

Back to blogging!

As many of you know, it’s been an insane past 2 months transitioning from a corporate smurf to a full-time entrepreneur. My first day of being a full-time entrepreneur began on August 1, 2008, a day I’ll never forget for the rest of my life. In one of my last discussion with my previous manager before taking the plunge, she asked me a couple of questions:

1) What are you good at?

2) What are you passionate about?

It was an easy decision, a decision that’s about as irrational as it gets. In fact, at my graduation party (from b-school), when the topic of conversation revolved around The Next Step, everyone assumed that climbing the corporate ladder was my future. But in fact, it was so far from my ambitions and after informing the guests of my chosen path, everyone was shocked. How could a son of a physician and a social worker do the unthinkable, pursue a path where failure is the norm, and there was no such thing as salary and benefits?

I chose this, I’ll embrace this, and I’m looking forward to the journey. Let’s play ball. This is going to be fun.