Silicon Valley Watcher, Tom Foremski puts it nicely:

Press releases are nearly useless. They typically start with a tremendous amount of top-spin, they contain pat-on-the-back phrases and meaningless quotes…

Press releases are created by committees, edited by lawyers, and then sent out at great expense through Businesswire or PRnewswire to reach the digital and physical trash bins of tens of thousands of journalists.

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I’d have to say that we at Ecopreneurist agree. While most businesses focus on attracting mainstream media visibility, as we said here, often the best way for eco-entrepreneurs to grow their businesses is to build grassroots support. In the world of Web 2.0, that means going online.

At my first college entrepreneurial venture in the ’80s, we slowly built our business by knocking on doors. Now, we’d probably make “friends” through Facebook. A start-up I worked for in the ’90s built their business by selling at swap meets. Now entrepreneurs build an e-Bay store.

Growing by word of mouth is a time honored tactic of entrepreneurs. In an earlier time, that meant going door to door or spreading the word through family and friends. Now it means engaging in social media.

“There’s a lot of noise and a lot of great clean technologies are going to be created,” Brown says. “The reason I wanted to go towards the Web is because, in the end, it’s the individual consumer who will be driving those concepts and ideas.”