The Social Media Release is back in the spotlight once again and its sparking conversations, inspiring experiments, and raising confusion along the way.

This time, intent and distribution take center stage.

Good friends Todd Defren and Christopher Lynn took the time to research how wire services are positioning their products for Social Media. Todd posted the results here. Great work guys!

Basically, when you call your local representative, you’re presented with the following capabilities.

http://img.skitch.com/20080211-pac1bw1j4iyttbsrby58hx92ak.jpg

Now, whether these stats are accurate, that’s up to what you discover through direct research. Ultimately, you have to hear directly from your rep and try these for yourself in order to draw exact conclusions. But, as Defren points out, his research is representative of what the wire services "know and sell" right now.

So, this brings up a couple of important points:

How do you distribute these things?

And, is this what reporters and bloggers really want and do we really need them?

OK, NEWS FLASH….

For Immediate Release:

Press Releases Are Only One Way To Tell Your Story; Social Media Releases Can Complement Traditional Releases

DATELINE: The Blogosphere -- NOW -- Brian Solis, a “leader” in what should be nothing more than the obvious, today announced that Social Media Releases can complement your outbound communications strategy based on what the people you’re trying to reach want to see and how. They do not replace Traditional Releases.

“I am so pleased and excited that the PR industry is interested in something new to help reach journalists, bloggers and their customers,” said Brian Solis, author of the PR 2.0 blog. “But, I’m sorry to say, that just because a new tool is available to you, you still have to make your story interesting, relevant, and newsworthy. The Social Media Release is not going to miraculously fix a hyperbole-ridden, over-stated, incomprehensible document riddled with BS. The people that matter to you are simply seeking context, relevance, what’s new, what you do, why it matters, how it’s different, and to whom. You still have to do your homework and write something compelling and clear.”

# # #

Why Do We Need the Social Media Release?

OK folks, it’s time to separate the hype from the hope.

I think we’re learning “how” to create Social Media Releases, aesthetically at least. But, I don’t see many discussions that effectively and clearly say “why” we need them.

There's plenty of talk. And, there’s definitely no shortage of critics out there. And to some extent, I too am skeptical of any one tool that carries the hopes of an industry to magically change the popular perception of PR and press releases in general.

But, IMHO, the SMR is an important icebreaker for the bigger discussions of how and why we should write better press releases in general.

I use them in conjunction with traditional releases and they work extremely well. Personally, I prefer using a blog platform to create and distribute them.

Are they as effective when distributed through a a wire service?
For example, let’s use MarketWire’s recent launch of its new Social Media Release service, “Social Media 2.0” as a case study to see if we can answer why Social Media Releases are worth our time and if they really work. Disclosure, Thom, Kevin, I’m a big fan of MarketWire, so what follows is just an open discussion of a public launch related to a relevant topic.

Facts:

MarketWire recently acquired Kevin Dill’s PRNN service, which was an effective solution for distributing releases online.

Now part of MarketWire, Kevin helped the company build a new Social Media solution dubbed, “Social Media 2.0, the Industry's Most Authentic Social Media Product.”

They announced it via a Social Media Release format, a service which I also helped them manually code over the course of several announcements starting in 2006.

First, let’s examine the headline, “Marketwire Unveils Social Media 2.0: Industry's Most Authentic Social Media Product.”

The only reason I’m calling this out, outside of the Social Media ingredients that define the release, is because any product related to Social Media Releases is important and especially relevant to the discussion. Whether Traditional or Social, this headline unfortunately contributes to PR’s usual tendency to hype, hype, and hype some more. It steals from the significance of Social Media and the SMR, demonstrating why PR has a hard time getting taken seriously. Thom, Kevin, consult with us first. It’s free and it’s only going to help the bigger cause that we’re all collaboratively working towards.

Wanna know what the industry’s most authentic Social Media product is?

Blogs.

Instead of being the most authentic social media product, it instead comes across as a disingenuous and an opportunistic attempt at capitalizing on something momentous and “open.”

The intro paragraph, aside from the hype, serves well for ensuring that the release gets indexed in traditional search engines. Their intro paragraph is packed with key words, which will help it show up in search.

Here are a few examples how well it did for searching “social media” and “Marketwire”

Reuters

Google News

Yahoo News

Could it have been a bit more effective across other key words?

Yes, absolutely.

That’s the art of a SEO-optimized press release, which are complementary to SMRs and traditional press releases.

Did it too reasonably well?

Sure it did.

Here’s where most Social Media Releases fall down…

The link to Digg isn’t generating community voting the way that it does in say, a blog post.

Is this fixable?

Yes.

Unfortunately, the link to search context and discussions within Technorati isn’t yielding all of the discussions we know are present in the blogosphere.

Is this fixable?

Yes.

In the Bookmarking category, the MarketWire SMR has everything needed to ensure that people can save and share this link publicly within social networks.

The trackbacks function only provides a trackback URL, when it could also display a list of all places that responded to the news.

Instead of providing a hub to all external and orbiting conversations, it provides a count to discussions through traditional search engines.



The embedded video and stills ensure that the conversations take place outside and around the news. For example, at the time of this article, the YouTube video featuring Thom’s intro to the new release service was viewed 333 times and counting. However, it’s missing the link back to the release should someone stumble upon it directly within YouTube. But, it’s still bringing the conversation to people and also allowing them to discover it within their networks.

Overall, aside from the “over the top” positioning, MarketWire demonstrated how a Social Media Release can spark conversations across the Social Web. As their coding improves, they’ll be able to track and promote the dialog more effectively, thus extending the conversation.

Unfortunately, though, the release isn’t gaining visibility within Social Media channels, which is an important step in tying everything together, and also promoting the information within the very networks that people go to discover and share information.

Everything else, including RSS feeds, work really well and I’m sure the SMR service will only get better. The products from PRNewswire, PRWeb, and BusinessWire, share similar capabilities, and most likely, results within the Social Media Sphere.

How could all of them improve?

Service providers and businesses looking to amply SMRs should extend the platform beyond an HTML Web page. Building something on a social platform such as WordPress, with full customization capabilities, delivers an inherent social ecosystem which supports the social tools of today and tomorrow and also ensures visibility and search ability using Social Search engines. Offering combo pricing for an SMR plus traditional distribution would raise the bar and create an entirely new playing field for sharing news across Social and Traditional networks.



What Makes a Social Media Releases Social?

Obviously a Social Media Release needs to feature Social Media ingredients, which includes links to bookmarking networks, contextual tags, the ability to track and host conversations, and also discover them within social networks. The inclusion of new features to simply make a fancy, shiny, new whiz bang press release doesn’t necessarily cut it.

So, what socializes a release?

A Social Media Release should contain everything necessary to share and discover a story in a way that is complementary to your original intent; but, the difference is, how they find it and the tools they use to share and broadcast.

Social Media is one big extension to the Web, except it promotes voices, along with content, in a way that focuses on people and their social networks.

Giving everyone what they need and how they need it, requires a different approach. Almost 100% of press releases issued today are done so without video or audio, which are underlying component of SMRs. But it's not about multimedia content, it's about connecting content across social networks and the people looking for it.

Social Media lowers the barriers to entry for companies to record, share and embed video and audio, and most importantly, allow people to also easily share with their audiences. The same can be said for all multimedia content.

Everything within Social Media now is widgetized, meaning that if you upload various content across social networks, you can embed it all in one place and repackage it under one brand umbrella. Without getting all geeky, these networks give you the “embed code” that you need to plop it somewhere. It's just cut and paste. What if the whole SMR was embeddable as well? That could be very cool!

So if we’re promoting conversations, shouldn’t we instill the ability to host or feature comments?

Absolutely.

Social Media is a two-way street and dialog sets the foundation for Social Media Releases.

The next step is discovery.

By placing content across social networks, properly tagging them (inserting relevant key words) within each, and linking back to your SMR (or blog post), you can effectively leverage visibility within each community, and also steer influence back to your intended impressions.

Obviously conversations should be ongoing, so part of socializing the release has a lot do with helping people staying connected and also find it again should they wish to see updates.

Make sure to check out co-comment, Tangler, and SezWho.

RSS for company news is one way to keep people tapped in to what you're doing. Offering links to simply that process could only help. For example, include linked icons for Bloglines, Netvibes, PageFlakes, and Google Reader. In addition, companies should also think about creating individual RSS feeds for product lines and specific services, to keep people connected to specific channels.

And if you’re feeling particularly inspired, creating an aggregated dashboard of relevant content, using Alltop or POPURLs as an example, bloggers, journalists, and customers can stay up to date and connected. Try experimenting with Netvibes to create something like this as a way of experimenting by tracking your favorite voices and stories on the Web. All it takes is an RSS feed.

So again, we ask, what makes a Social Media Release Social?

Well, at the end of the day, if you’ve ever written a blog post, much of what I’m describing already exists. There’s nothing to say that you couldn’t do this right now simply by creating a customized blog that is an extension of your company’s online newsroom.

However, if resources are limited, there are companies, including my own, which help you get there. Or, you can simply use existing services to recreate this process for every news release you wish to publish.

So, at the end of all of this, a Social Media Release should look something like this:


http://www.briansolis.com/2008/02/definitive-guide-to-social-media.html