Should You Start Issuing Social Media Releases?

The Social Media Release is a new press release template that attempts to provide bloggers and other Internet media with news release information in a completely new format.

There’s a lot of talk about this subject in PR 2.0 circles, and you can get in on some of it through this free webinar (sponsored by Vocus) next Tuesday 3/4/08 called the Evolving Social Media Release.

Here’s a template from SHIFT Communications that was one of the early ideas in this area:



(Here’s a link to a PDF of the full size version of the original social media release template.)

As you can see, the idea is to break up your content into bite-sized chunks that anyone on the net can redeploy, rather than writing the traditional pseudo-news-story style press release that has been the dominant format for decades.

I think this is a good idea — a good idea whose time has not come yet. The overwhelming majority of press releases are still written in that old, ineffective style — and tons of them still get picked up. So it’s not like that style is killing media coverage of press releases. And there’s still the matter of telling a story: chunky templates may have smaller bites of information, but if they don’t tell the reader a story, they are going to be ultimately confusing.

Fortunately, many people are working on updated versions. For instance, Marketwire recently announced a new version of its social media release template. Here’s a bunch of content copied straight from their release about the template [this is how it’s supposed to work — being able to copy and paste directly from the release]:

Exclusive features include:
- Comment box and online newsroom
- In-release performance statistics on search engine cataloging
- Distribution to YouTube, iTunes, Second Life, Pheedo™,
Photobucket and Twitter
- Facebook® tags
- Custom RSS feeds
- Trackbacks for easy monitoring of online performance
- Search engine, Technorati™ and Digg™ results
- Embedded 500-character audio summary headline
- Distribution to more than 1,200 in-network geographically
targeted websites

– Additional Social Media 2.0 features include:
- Newsroom integration
- 50 social tagging options
- Multiple social video and photo hosting options
- Permalinks
- Keyword cloud navigation
- Downstream distribution to more than 1,000 websites and online
news destinations

As you can see, still a little clunky.

If you are interested in this topic, I suggest you follow it online through blogs like socialmediarelease.org.