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A quick double-whammy for you guys today…

First, a great example of a Social Media News Release (SMNR) from one of our clients, Eurekster. 

Eurekster is a social search pioneer: their “search wikis” (a.k.a. swicki) are based on topics of interest to a website publisher and their audience; the search results improve as the publisher’s community gets involved.  (Ex: a travel blogger’s swicki may create a tagcloud of “top destinations,” and the search engine gets smarter as the blog’s readers click on the search terms.)

Today’s announcement proclaims “the availability of custom social video search and a video buzzcloud widget featuring … content from blinkx.”  So if you extend the “travel blog” example I just used, you get a video swicki like this one (it’s cool; you should click on it). 

I know there are a lot of videophiles out there for whom this video swicki would be a cool addition to their blogs.  If you make one, let me know?

What I like about this SMNR? 

• Crisp, interesting pictures of the announcement’s principal players. Not typical headshots.
• The ability to email the release to a friend. (shareability!)
• A Wikipedia link about “social search.” (context!)
• All the Social Media tags you could want. (T’rati tags, digg, del.icio.us, etc.)
• Embedded video within the release, which is itself embeddable by bloggers (as seen above).  How nice to see an online release treated as a fully-functional online resource.
• Also, this release is about a “partnership” – any PR pro will tell you that “partnership releases” are generally a yawn.  But with this video – which features the CEOs of the two companies having a nice chat about today’s news – we can visibly demonstrate the camaraderie and goodwill (not to mention hear about the relevance of the news, direct from the sources).

Forget for a moment that you could easily accuse me of flogging a client’s news.  (For the record, they didn’t ask me to write anything; this post will be a surprise to them.)  If you can get past that, think about this:

For this post, I used the links and embedded video and some quotable language from the original SMNR.  I’ve re-purposed the content of the SMNR to suit my own ends, and in the process added to the buzz about this announcement.

In part, it is the ability to easily re-purpose and broadly share this news content that makes the SMNR such a powerful concept.