Social Media Release

I ran this post over at PR2.0, but it is also appropriate to have a home here at Socialmediarelease.org. 

The content has been modified a bit since so much has happened over the last few days.  Most notably, Chris Heuer created this site dedicated to Social Media Releases (SMRs), presented the format for the SMR at the recent Society for New Communications Research event in Boston, and also ran a powerpful post entitled, “The Impact of Social Media and How it Changes Everything.”

Seems almost like history in the making here, considering that we’re celebrating the 100^th birthday of the original press release this week.

With the rapid evolution of SMRs, we can’t forget just how many people have yet to even learn about the fundamentals of social media.  What are tags? What is RSS? What is social bookmarking all about? Why use photo sharing sites when we can put the images on our corporate site?  Blogs don’t reach the mainstream, do they?  You get the picture.

For all us us helping to define the new PR landscape,we need to remember that we have an opportunity to increase the value of our profession tremendously over the coming years.  But more importantly, it is up to us to ensure that we don’t leave anyone behind.

Social Media is not only for the elite PR pro or early adopter; it’s for everyone that cares about engaging with target markets.

With that, we need to continually take a couple of steps back in order to help everyone understand the benefits of Social Media and most importantly, learn how to implement Social Media Optimized (SMO) campaigns to more effectively converse with customers and encourage them to share information amongst each other.

Technologies such as RSS, tags, SMO, social bookmarking, etc., are ineffective if you don’t have a grasp on what they are, how they work and how you can benefit from them.  So, at the end of this post, there is a link to a doc that explains how to write an SMR, what the technology means behind it and how it helps you, and how to distribute it.

It’s important to understand that just because SMPRs provide a new format for delivering news, and, wire services provide a new push channel for companies to broadcast to bloggers, it doesn’t mean that bloggers/reporters will automatically pull your information.

As one reporter put it when learning about SMPRs, “You mean I can get the same poorly written press release in a whole new format, with fake, useless executive and customer quotes, so that I can deconstruct the content in order to figure out what the news really is?”

New technology and poor writing, still equal a bad press release.

I’ve heard many discussions lately surrounding PR 101 in regards to writing press releases. Everyone says, write well, write clearly, get to the point, reduce hyperbole, etc. But as with every educational institution, there are always different “schools” of thought on how to write well. So PR 101 doesn’t mean much if you didn’t learn the right things along the way. This really shouldn’t be open to various interpretations. Take the following advice at its core and don’t deviate from it.

Bloggers, like traditional reporters, are busy people. They will never ever get from a release what your product marketing and marketing department try to shove into it.

Another way to create a “better” press release is to think about it as taking the news release you would have written and then condensing it into a solid pitch letter. Get to the hook and the relevance ASAP. The process forces you to distill what really is important, why, and to whom it impacts. The end result should be a compelling, SMPR which bloggers — and honestly, traditional reporters, too — will appreciate.

We’re often asked, will SMPRs replace traditional PRs? The answer is no. In fact, many new media PR practitioners write and distribute both, or a fusion of the two in order to serve the many different audiences.

I reached out to friend, and fellow SMR Working Group associate, Todd Defren - since he introduced the first template for mass consumption, “It’s important to understand that the Social Media News Release is not intended as a replacement for the traditional news release. It’s an evolution. The SMNR’s core function is simply to allow creators of news to leverage the Web familiarity that is now ingrained in consumer audiences. With 50+ percent of consumers now creating and sharing content online (Pew Research), it just makes sense to democratize access to corporate news and multimedia assets to anyone (reporters, bloggers, laypeople) who might be interested, and, to create a forum for community and context that – to date – has been unavailable via old-world press releases.”

Amen Todd.

Social Media Press Releases do not replace traditional releases, they complement them - much in the same way that Social Media activities and campaigns work best in concert with traditional PR initiatives. Together, Social Media + PR delivers a more effective communications program that actually “thinks about” and strives to “satisfy” the needs of your customers.  Most importantly, it also given them a powerful forum to “participate” in the news.

“The tools used to generate Social Media Releases will end up being free plugins for common blogging platforms and merely features of the enterprise blogging software suites.” – Chris Heuer

Click here for the Social Media Press Release “How To” guide. And please, feel free to use it, share it and evolve it freely. Available in Word or PDF.

Click here for the first draft of the official elements of an SMR proposed by The Working Group. 

Tags:  socialmediaclub socialmedia chris+heuer chrisheuer briansolis brian+solis todddefren todd+defren social+media+release smr hrelease pr public+relations publicrelations pr2.0 pr20

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