Jonathan Schwartz may be the first Fortune 500 CEO to blog, but he did one better. Sun Microsystems yesterday announced it had held its first virtual press conference in Second Life.
As Sun's Chief Researcher puts it, working in SL syncs with what Sun has been after in networking: communication, sharing and community-building.
This is indded a company to watch. In other news, as has been reported in the Hobson and Holtz Report, Schwarz has asked the SEC to approve of the use of blogs to satify Regulation FD requirements. Meaning, he's seen blogs as doing the work of a press release. Aparently, Reg FD doesn't recognize the Internet, let alone blogs. Sound familiar?
I suggested to a marketing and PR director that press releases belonged to the push era, and should be at least supplemented (if not replaced) by blogs, but she had never heard of such a preposterous idea, and filed it under "Hmmm, that's interesting." I didn't bother to even mention Second Life.
As Schwartz puts it, he was far less worried about what he was saying in his blog, than where he was saying it. Read his very thoughtful piece about the "anachronistic press release" and it gives us a glimpse of where communications whether it is for legal or news dissemination purposes is headed.
I believe, that the future of communications is going to be driven by a few people who may not even have Marketing and PR in their title. They live in this bubble, doing what they've always done, while their audiences, and even the media have moved on. Gotta give it to Jonathan Schwartz for pricking that bubble. Just for the record, even the once the staid old Beeb, rented an island for a show in Second Life, and at least one PR agency, Text100, has opened an office there as well. Not surprisingly, Text100 also has a blog.
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