The idea behind the development of the social media release, or SMR, is to leverage the resources of the Internet to generate wider distribution of your press release as well as to make the release more user-friendly for non-traditional journalists and others who might want to repurpose your news.
Here are some links on the subject:
- "Social Media Release Moving Forward Again": A post by Chris Heuer of the Social Media Club
- Chris Whitley's PRXBuilder: Online tool for creating SMRs
- Edelman's Storycrafter SMR tool (example only -- it doesn't appear that this is posted for use by non-clients)
- Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About SMRs: A comprehensive post by Brian Solis
- New Media Release group: A Google group for discussing SMRs
Of all of these links, I think Edelman's Storycrafter page gives you the best overview of what an SMR might look like.
My big concern about all these efforts is that they appear to place the highest priority on designing releases that look like web pages, rather than placing the emphasis on storytelling. This may help leverage the net to create higher visibility for your story, which is of course a worthy goal. But I'd like to see research on this point first before I take it as gospel.
What these versions of the SMR leave out, which is crucial, is using releases to tell stories. Today's jargon-laden, poorly written releases are hardly paragons of storytelling. But at least they try to tell a story based on age-old and proven journalistic style.
So if we are going to develop a successor to the traditional press release, let's at least start with the premise that we're going to tell a story. Then let's overlay it with SEO tools and other Internet-friendly content and coding.
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