There’s a Tom and Jerry vignette where Tom has a blueprint for building a better mousetrap. It’s a one of those Rube Goldberg contraptions that’s supposed to end up altering the contours of Jerry’s head. It works, but not in the way Tom planned it. Jerry, shrewdly modifies the blueprint, as you can expect.

I thought of that when debating the social media press release by PR Squared. Todd Defren of Shift Communications has released a whole new company, PRX Builder, to back the idea he launched several months ago. The PRX Release, (see example here) is simple, but functional. You can test it out for free here -with a GMail account login. Or check a PDF template.

The navigation is not so intuitive, but it covers the basics -keywords, quotes, multimedia, boilerplate etc. A good text editor is built in to it.

For now, this is still the beta stage as fas as social media is concerned. I can see how, a few years from now, someone’s going to build on it in such a way that may alter the blueprint.  That’s the nature of the malleable social media. Once you release it, you lose control in a good way; it morphs into something you didn’t quite expect. Not in the Tom and Jerry confrontational way, but as in Wikipedia, the spirit of co-opetition, the open-source initiative, and open source art, literature, music, and something as complex as Moodle – a community of hundreds of thousands of users in 160 countries.

So to get back to the press release, those like Lego, announcing the release of Open Source software, may eventually want to migrate to the social media format. Ad and PR agencies had better take notes, if they want to remain relevant, and not be like the buggy whip manufacturers when the first automobiles rolled into town.