More Social Media Release Stuff

As part of the iterative process of perhaps improving on current social media release models, here are some more links to the work of people who got started on this before me.

First of all, the Social Media Club's SMR site. Lots of good stuff there.

Secondly, Brian Solis's PR 2.0 blog. Lots more good stuff there.

Shift Communications has posted a template that seems to sum up the current thinking on SMRs.

And so on. Just Google Social Media Release and you'll find plenty of ideas.

Still, I don't think we're there yet. To add to the bullet points below about SMRs, here are some further thoughts:

• An SMR needs to use web technology to tell the story. It shouldn't just dump a bunch of links and tags on users. Those are fine for people in the know, but 95% 0f people aren't in the know yet.


• The whole idea of including canned quotes strikes me as absurd. Does anyone have evidence that these quotes are being used? (Seriously, show me some examples and I'll eat my electronic words)


• Further to that point: shouldn't an SMR be designed specifically for use by online media and social media outlets? Has anyone really asked these media or studied their use of corporate information to figure out what would be most useful to them? (Again, this is not meant to be a challenge, but more of an open question)


• The current traditional press release model is most definitely broken and in need of a 21st century fix. So this is an incredibly worthy effort and I look forward to watching and participating in the evolution. But I would hasten to add that clients/companies are going to be reluctant to change their release model until we PR folks can demonstrate to them in a slam-dunk, no brainer way why this is better for them.


• To this last point: Visit PR Newswire and take a look at an random handful of releases. You won't find many SMRs among them. And don't pooh-pooh this and say, well that's traditional business, blah blah blah. These are the people spending real money on issuing releases. You'll know the evolution is happening when you see it happening there.