Nice Social Media Release, shame about the content

I can see the point of the Social Media Release, really I can.

Traditional press releases are a bit rubbish, and having a segmented release with pictures and quotes and video is really smart. I can also see that submitting your release to Digg and Twitter and YouTube means that other folks apart from journalists might turn up your highly optimised content using Google (other search engines are available).

But what, what, what is the big deal? I’ve been reading up on this for a few weeks now and I have a sneaky suspicion that an awful lot of PR types are holed up in their shiny new specialist practices, pursing their lips thoughtfully, while musing whether the best SMR template is the SHIFT format or the almost indistinguishable template on Digital Snippets or Social Media 2.0 or whatever.

Who cares? As my old editor used to say: “Don’t get it right, get it written.” Why aren’t more PRs using social media releases, given that we all seem so convinced of the value of PR 2.0 and social bookmarking and the like?

Of more concern to me, as a journalist, is that the social media releases I see online are brilliantly formatted and present most of what I need to get a story started. But they’re just not terribly well written. They’re certainly not compelling. And they won’t stand out when the likes of Marketwire and PR Newswire start pumping out a few thousand of them every day. 

Take this release from Ford, created using the new Digital Snippets format. It looks suspiciously like someone spent a few months crafting the template and then ten minutes copy pasting content from the corporate brochure. It looks pretty, but it’s impossible to read and it doesn’t exactly sizzle.

On another note, this post from Strumpette is worth a read for anyone considering using wires to distribute SMRs. Strumpette says that Marketwire’s Social Media 2.0 service is just a "Communications Career Suicide Template" that enables “media spam distribution and victim database services” (press release wires to you and me) to spam more recipients, more quickly than ever before. Entertaining, even if you don't agree with everything she says.

Comments

[J Collins]

Interesting post Sally.

I suspect a large part of the problem you identify here is that many PR agencies actually don't have specialist agencies, or even anyone who fully understands social media.

So you end up with digital agencies that understand the technology of the SMR, and then PR agencies that understand the release/story aspect of the SMR, but it's still a challenge to put the two together.

I agree, though, that given the amount of money being invested in the PR industry's social media research and high-profile hires, it's kinda surprising we don't have more actual social media releases, isn't it?

[Carole Scott]

The most effective and worthwhile online and offline media coverage I have secured in recent times has been generated by making individual approaches to journalists, specifically targeted to their interests and audiences. It's true that PR agencies need to use the most up to date communications tools (such as social media releases) and that there are benefits to using this format for news. I think it's good to remember, though, that a release is a tool and it is how it is used that counts; what distinguishes PR from marketing or advertising is the tailored approach that PROs can offer. This targeted approach cannot be achieved by a release being issued in a scattergun fashion, no matter how gorgeous (or should that be delicious?) its format.

[Sally]

Carole

You make a brilliant point - only today I had lunch with two journalist colleagues and one of them pointed out they hadn't written a story off the back of a news release in the last 12 months. The second journalist had written one such story.

That said, I do often use press releases as background and a research tool and a format that is more user-friendly can only make that process easier for me.

[Paul Wooding]

The press release is dead. It should be confined to the office bin along with the tie.

I've just come back from Mobile World Congress and had something of an epiphany... it's all about 1-2-1 interaction, with the trick being to get the right information, in the right format to the right person at the right time, and the press release is probably just about the worse way to do that.

Of course, clients wont stop asking for them anytime soon, but us PROs can start changing the way we write and distribute them so that they become information sheets rather than para after para of meaningless guff.

I used to beam with pride when I wrote a quote for a CEO in a release that got approved with few if any changes. Now I cringe.

Ideas + delivery are the core 2.0 PR skills. Within that comes relationship building and strong writing, but the "broadcast to many mentality" is on its way out.