"Downstream Blues" Lead To Latest Social Media Suggestions
As noted in earlier posts, I’ve been meeting with representatives of the Big Wires to discuss the Social Media News Release’s progress at 1 year. Rather than post it all in one big write-up, I’m breaking up some of what I’ve learned into smaller chunks. (Also, I still have a couple of meetings left to do.)
I heard good stuff. I heard from PRNewswire, for example, that they’ve had “literally hundreds of conversations with agencies & corporations about the Social Media Release.” I met a guy yesterday whose sole job is to talk to agencies and corporations about Social Media in general, and SMNRs in particular!
I heard interesting stuff. I heard about how each of the Big Wire services has removed barriers to their content, in the past year or so. No more need to sign-in to their sites as a credentialed journalist in order to access news release content. Just pay ‘em a visit and hit up the Search box for what you are looking for, whether you are with the Wall Street Journal or Wally’s Wonderblog. “Democratizing Access” is one of the core principles of the SMNR.
I also heard troubling stuff.
For as much progress as the Big Wires have made in terms of embracing Social Media (in word and in deed), there are some facts that PR pros and SMNR evangelists need to realize:
- The Social Media “tags” associated with the SMNRs distributed by the wire services only exist at the wires’ own websites. In other words, the links for del.icio.us, digg, et al. that you see appended to the bottom of a release like this one, only appear at this wire site (in this case, at the Marketwire.com domain).
- The same goes for ALL the wire services. None of the wire services can automatically ensure inclusion of Social Media-related links.
- The news content – the words – are being distributed to thousands of “downstream” services like Comtex, the AP Wire, etc., but generally without these social tags.
- Why? Cuz these downstream news outlets don’t want yer stinkin’ social media tags. They’ll add ‘em themselves, maybe, but that’s their call. (Some of ‘em want straight ASCII text.)
- Meanwhile, the pictures and multimedia are being sent to places like the AP Photo Wire and to video distribution outlets like YouTube. “Cool,” you think, “The wires are pushing my video content to YouTube!?”
- Yep, but, the YouTube “user” publishing the content is not the newsmaker but the wire services, as seen here (MultiVu is PRNewswire’s multimedia service).
- Of course, that doesn’t preclude the newsmaker from posting their videos to YouTube on their own, as well.
So … whether your SMNR appears on any other site with the Social Media tags is dependent on whether those “downstream” distribution outlets (MarketWatch, Yahoo Finance, et al.) decide to add features like Digg, del.icio.us, email-a-friend, etc., to their own sites. The wires have no control over this situation.
Why is this important? Because according to all of the wire execs I met, fewer than 10% of the online population look at press releases at the wire service’s sites. Most people – most bloggers – see press releases in a re-purposed format, at any one of thousands of different places across the web.
Which leads me to these interim suggestions for SMNRs:
- Go ahead, create and post a Social Media News Release on a major newswire’s site. It will ensure a high-quality version of the SMNR exists on a credentialed site that is well-regarded by the Search Engines.
- Doing so also ensures that the core content (the news, if not all the fun stuff) will be distributed to thousands of downstream outlets.
- Re-purpose the release, in all its Social Media glory, in the newsmaker’s own corporate newsroom (you should enable moderated comments, trackbacks, and other “social” features like del.icio.us, Digg, et al.). More so than anything else, the SMNR is about enabling conversations between companies and their stakeholders: these conversations should ideally spawn at their own website, not at “_____wire.com.”
- If you do issue an SMNR via the Big Wires, you should use the resulting GoogleJuice to your advantage: be sure to include a link in the wire version of the release to the corporate newsroom version of the release. This requires asking a favor of your webmaster (“tell me the permalink in advance”), if PR doesn’t already manage the newsroom content online.
More to come in the weeks ahead…
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Comments
Todd,
It was great sitting down and discussing the landscape at length. We truly appreciate your efforts and evangelism.
One major benefit of using our MNR service is the ability to track the conversations that message has spawned. Having one uber-release allows all the consumers of the news (and thus metrics) to funnel into one place, ensuring better ROI than ever.
Stay tuned for more developments and big ideas!
David Weiner, PR Newswire
Posted by: David Weiner, PR Newswire | June 13, 2007 07:50 PM
Great post, Todd. I love to read and learn more about ideas for putting SMNRs to use and how the big wire services can/might play a part. Good stuff.
Posted by: Mike Keliher | June 14, 2007 08:34 AM
Todd:
I am looking forward to catching up with you in person in the near future. Paul, Melanie and others from our team, and friends and fellow Social Media peers like Kevin Dill and Sally Falkow speak very highly of you and your work. We will most assuredly have an opportunity to work directly together in the near future, and I am excited at the prospect.
I have followed some of the discourse in your blog most recently about the woes of Social Media adoption downstream for the major newswires with great interest and wanted to share some thoughts and perhaps even provide some clarity on a few items that are easily confused, and can be equally confusing.
As an innovator in the newswire industry, Marketwire has never been shy to venture out and try new things. Sometimes we fail at those ventures. Other times we succeed. When it comes to Social Media, there is little dispute, even among our peers in the industry, that we have led this charge. Further testament to that is that over the course of the past 12 months we will have delivered nearly 5,000 SMNRs downstream on behalf of hundreds of clients – an average of roughly 17 – 20 per day. The great thing about our willingness to try new things is that our objectives are always focused on helping communication professionals do their jobs more easily and efficiently, and to ensure that every possible step is being taken, or has been considered when helping them optimize their news with traditional as well as Social Media.
In your recent post you reference that "The Social Media tags associated with the SMNRs distributed by the wire services only exist at the wires' own websites." That is the case with a number of our competitors, but not with us. Marketwire Social Media tags remain intact with any/all downstream partners who accept them. This is one of the reasons communication professionals who use SMNRs find us so compelling among our peers. Our Social Media links do travel downstream. Ours are the only ones that do because we are the only HTML based wire service, where our peers are using either plain text or ASCII to deliver Social Media content. Most major news aggregators and online sites are also HTML based, and there is where our clients who use SMNRs really benefit.
Now, you do make a good point…the tiny graphic of either a Digg or del.icio.us icon do not always travel downstream. This is largely due to the fact that the space those icons occupy directly competes with ad space on those downstream partner sites. Obviously not something they’re interested in giving up. But, the Social Media hyperlink travels and is reposted downstream, in every case.
For example, look at this release on AOL News: http://money.aol.com/news/articles/_a/mgm-grand-detroit-now-accepting/n20070613081009990034. At the bottom it says "Add to Digg" or "Bookmark with Delicious" or "Add to Newsvine". Aside from Yahoo! Finance who is developing this technology themselves, virtually all the other HTML-enabled news aggregators do carry these links from Marketwire.
There are literally dozens of sites on this list, including:
AOL News (http://money.aol.com/news/articles/_a/mgm-grand-detroit-now-accepting/n20070613081009990034)
CNN Money (http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/marketwire/0265636.htm)
MSN Money (http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/ticker/article.aspx?Feed=MW&Date=20070613&ID=7028174&Symbol=MGM)
Excite (http://nd.marketwire.com/news/showcache.do?itemid=9852433)
iWon (http://money.iwon.com/jsp/nw/nwdt_ge.jsp?section=news&news_id=iwr-0265636&feed=iwr&date=20070613&cat=PRRELEASE)
Myway (http://finance.myway.com/jsp/nw/nwdt_ge.jsp?section=news&news_id=iwr-0265636&feed=iwr&date=20070613&cat=PRRELEASE)
cNet News (http://investor.news.com/Engine?Account=cnet&PageName=NEWSREAD&ID=4103574)
News Blaze (http://newsblaze.com/story/2007061305005200021.mwir/newsblaze/MARKWIRE/Marketwire-Releases.html)
Netscape (http://money.netscape.cnn.com/news_story.jsp?idq=/ff/story/2171/20070613/0809000062.htm&TickerSymbols=MGM)
There are also dozens of local news sites that carry the links such as AL.com, Connecticut Post, Modesto Bee, Las Vegas Sun, SF Online, Syracuse.com, and the list goes on and on. You can see more examples of this in your own clients News Dashboard Reports in the SHIFT account in our system.
Along these same lines, Marketwire is the only wire that gives companies what you refer to as "Google Juice". Why? Because as you identified, our competitors are distributing plain text, ASCII-formatted news. All the sites listed above, along with dozens of others, carry hyperlinks from Marketwire releases because we alone send them news in HTML. This means that only Marketwire releases are creating and carrying downstream the backward links that everyone so badly wants, giving the added benefit of page rankings! To add to the "Google Juice" factor, we are also the only wire service which allows our clients to choose their own keywords to metatag for search engines. Our competitors choose keywords for you. Personally, I would rather put key word ‘control’ in the hands of my clients.
Your advocacy of Social Media is critical. The conversations you spark in this blog and in the industry events you speak at further reinforces that wire services like us, as well as others who are looking to help communication professionals ‘get’ this Social Media “thing”, have to stay sharp, on our toes and with an ear firmly turned to not only our clients who want to reach Social Media, but to the partners who make that transport possible. The more we are able to support our downstream partners with technology that makes this easier, the more our clients benefit. This dialogue must continue in order for us to all get better at doing more of the right things.
Posted by: Thom Brodeur, Marketwire | June 14, 2007 11:55 PM
Nice to hear you are creating new jobs for people ;-) As you mention in your post, the things we create are only as good as the downstream outlets willingness and ability to take them. Should be interesting to see how it all shapes up over time.
Posted by: Kami Huyse | June 19, 2007 11:31 AM