PR Squared: Practical Matters

Brian Solis (pictured) at the PR 2.0 blog had a great post this week about the practical applications --- and challenges --- of Social Media News Releases.

As noted here, one of the core principles of the Social Media News Release is to "Be Findable." In an online world it is incumbent on the PR pro to do their utmost to ensure that their news is displayed and retrievable in as many relevant spots as possible. You'd think it would be easy to do so, with Technorati tags, trackbacks and such.

But Brian did the hard work of testing the process and results. He put out the same release over multiple wire services, to test their ease-of-use, results, and most importantly their efficacy with Social Media technologies.

"[C]ontrary to current marketing, not all 'social' elements of social media press release distribution services are truly integrated or functional …While they offer embedded links to services such as del.icio.us … digg … trackbacks, [etc.] they're still not necessarily providing much in the form of automated 'social media' value ... [Most wire services] simply direct you to a place where you can manually complete the social process…"

This will be of one the many challenges to Social Media's adoption in PR: it's easy for the wire services to pay lip-service to these technology enhancements, but we all know that there is a big difference between http://del.icio.us/post and http://del.icio.us/post?url=http://www.prnewswire.com/mnr/multivu/25419/.

Try this experiment:

Make sure that you are NOT logged in to del.icio.us.
Visit this release.
Click on the "Add to del.icio.us" button at the bottom of the page.

Clicking the link should take you to the generic del.icio.us homepage.

Now, try that "Add to del.icio.us" button again, after logging in to del.icio.us.

Not much better, right? In this case you're asked to manually paste the URL into the "post" field; and there's nothing to suggest that del.icio.us has a clue what bookmark you're trying to save.

Now, while you are still logged into del.icio.us, click this link: http://del.icio.us/post?url=http://www.prnewswire.com/mnr/multivu/25419/

BIG difference! Easy-peasy. The URL is automatically pasted into the correct field, along with a host of suggested tags. All the user needs to do now is title and annotate the new bookmark. Wouldn't it have made more sense to add a hyperlink to this URL to the original release? Granted, a del.icio.us user who's not logged-in would still be directed to do so, but, the current set-up simply refuses to consider that the user just might be logged-in.

Now, I am a PRNewswire/MultiVu fan, so this is not meant as a slam against any particular service. According to Brian Solis's research, all the vendors have similar issues. I know many fantastic, well-meaning people at PRN, BusinessWire, PRWeb, etc., and I know that they are all working hard to improve their offerings in this area (despite the fact that doing so requires catering to a tiny minority of bleeding-edge zealots)! This post, riffing off Brian's, is intended to merely point out some simple stuff that the wire vendors could score points on.

The message we need to send to all of the wire services is: make it easy, do it right, or don't bother. Half-measures are no help.

Tags: brian+solis, pr+2.0, social+media+news+release, social+media, prnewswire, businesswire, prweb, marketwire, hrelease, public+relations, social+media+club