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We can add BEA (NASDAQ: BEAS) to the list of big companies (Coca-Cola, H-P, Novell, Belkin, etc.) that are taking the Social Media News Release for a spin.

Here’s a look at BEA’s release.  The primary PR contact, Marissa Lee, worked for us many years ago, and she was kind enough to let me know that they based this news release on our humble template.

I was particularly impressed by this announcement because it is seemingly an important one to the Company.  It sounds like a major launch: “BEA Systems Delivers Industry’s First Enterprise Social Computing Suite.”  One of the subsequent news bullets notes: “(This) heralds the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise and signals the increased importance of collaboration and social software to improve knowledge worker productivity and user-driven innovation.”

Sounds important!  No disrespect intended to other large companies’ dabblings in SMNRs, but to me, many have smacked of “experimentation,” e.g., “This SMNR stuff sounds kinda cool, but let’s try it out with some low-level news.”

(Belkin would be the exception; they’ve embraced the SMNR big time.  Pretty much all of their releases now look like this one.)

The challenge with BEA’s release (and most all others to-date) is the inability to converse about the news release, anywhere.  You can’t do so on PRNewswire’s site (would you want to?).  And, you’ll note that the version of this news published at BEA.com is not Social Media-savvy.

I’ve noted before that a “true” Social Media News Release needs to empower conversation via moderated comments and trackbacks.  Each news release would ideally become very “blog-like.”  Press release = blog post, with links, multimedia, comments, trackbacks, etc.

This is still all too rare. 

BEA’s release, like most other SMNRs to-date, has many of the trappings of Social Media, but without hewing to the spirit of community, conversation, and engagement. 

It’s not about the Social Media “badges” (“add to del.icio.us,” et al.), it’s about being social.

Still, experimentation for its own sake is encouraging!  We’ll get there, True Believers.