PR Squared: Tagging: "Crowdsourcing" vs. "Purpose-Built"

During the recent NewMediaRelease podcast (#7), conducted by Shel Holtz, Chris Heuer, Brian Solis and Tom Foremski, an interesting debate came up regarding the use of del.icio.us.

As fans of the Social Media News Release (SMNR) know, our template (pdf) included a field for a "purpose-built del.icio.us page," the intent of which --- to provide journalists with both time-sensitive and on-going context for their research and stories --- is well-covered in more detail here.

However, when Shel put out his own SMNR for his client, SpiralFrog, he envisioned a del.icio.us tagging strategy based on "crowdsourcing." In other words, if I understand it rightly, his hope was that people who read the release and/or saw related content would tag their own del.icio.us entries with the "spiralfrog" tag, as seen here.

Fascinating. According to Shel, many of those "spiralfrog" del.icio.us tags were motivated by Shel's release and follow-on coverage in the Financial Times. Congrats to Shel, Neville, et al.! This bears watching: in the future it could become a metric for the success of a PR campaign.

In his SpiralFrog release, Shel also included a purpose-built page, at http://del.icio.us/spiralfrog. Now, I am a devout Holtz-worshipper, but I kinda think Shel & Neville may have missed an opportunity here.

At the http://del.icio.us/spiralfrog site, they could have saved a host of links related to online-music (both historical and contemporary articles re: piracy issues, blog posts & news articles about iTunes' Fair Use policies, Digital Rights Management, online advertising growth, etc.), with a few sentences attached to each bookmark that explained WHY each link might be of-value to the curious journalist or blogger.

It's not too late to do that, for future story pitches, but by keeping the current http://del.icio.us/spiralfrog site so sparse at launch, the initial burst of interest created by the SpiralFrog SMNR was probably not fully exploited. (Having said that, though, it seems like this was a monster PR project in its own right, and heaven knows it takes a lot of work to research, tag, and annotate even a single page worth of bookmarks in del.icio.us!)

That said, I think the SpiralFrog release was spot-on, and from what I heard during the NMRCast, it was not only easy to create but was very well received by the media. Hallelujah!

More good news: additional entries to the SNMR universe by Lee Jeans and Chevrolet!

Tags: shel+holtz, neville+hobson, spiralfrog, social+media+news+release, public+relations, pr, social+media

Comments

Good commentary, Todd, re: the SMNR and how it works for SpiralFrog.

We could do a lot more, undoubtedly. Heh! You said the key phrase in your post:

"[...] it seems like this was a monster PR project in its own right."

When I was fielding calls from reporters when we issued the first press release on August 29, I had specific comments that the SMNR version was very useful.

No better endorsement, IMHO.

Posted by: Neville Hobson | September 11, 2006 02:41 PM

Agreed! Congrats!

Neville, just out of curiosity, did you & Shel benchmark how may "spiralfrog" bookmarks existed in del.icio.us (and other bookmarking services) prior-to your announcement?

As noted in my post, I'd be curious to see how it spiked over time, post-launch.

I think if you guys could show a big increase in the # of bookmarks, it might impress your client contacts. Just a hunch...

Posted by: Todd Defren | September 11, 2006 02:45 PM

Can't really discuss much more at this time, Todd.

You can be sure, though, that this will eventually be good material for discussions regarding the effectiveness of social media in PR.

Posted by: Neville Hobson | September 11, 2006 03:41 PM

My review of del.icio.us before setting up the tag revealed NO references at all, Todd.

Posted by: Shel Holtz | September 13, 2006 01:36 PM