Social Media News Releases Gain Momentum
Next time a skeptical PR traditionalist asks ya, “What’s all the hullabaloo about these Social Media News Releases? Has anyone ever done one?” please direct ‘em to this post.
Below I’ve recapped the handful that I’ve happened to save; I know there are more out there. UPDATE: I’ve added several since posting this blog entry this morning, including one from Gatorade!)
(Send me yours and I’ll add a link!)
- Coca-Cola
- Nortel
- Belkin
- Cisco
- Ford Motor Co.
- Gatorade
- Verizon
- Las Vegas Township Justice Court
- BEA
- SAP AG
- Novell
- Hubspot
- Eurekster
- ITV (Britain’s biggest digital cable channel)
- Symantec
- WebEx
- Nutrisystem
- Plant-It 2020 (Second Life Reforestation Project)
- The first & second GeoCommons SMNRs
- SinglePipe Communications
- A list of PRX Releases
- Pretty much every release in General Motors-Europe’s Social Media Newsroom (which is a model for any brand looking to embrace this approach).
- A list of some U.K. SMNRs distributed by webitpr can be found here.
I get enthused about the momentum indicated by the Big Names above. I also offer kudos to each of these early adopters for merely trying out the approach.
But I also readily admit that some of these SMNRs are better than others.
Where most of these SMNR efforts fall down is in regard to “SOCIABILITY.” There are typically many ways to save/share the links to these releases (e.g., “save to del.icio.us”), but, due to the limits of a) most wire services and b) most online corporate newsrooms, there’s a dearth of examples where the NEWS is treated as a BLOG POST, i.e., with moderated Comments & Trackbacks.
This is a key aspect: the SMNR is not just about adding multimedia & links, it’s not just about enabling readers to save & share the content – the SMNR is also about conversation. It’s about two-way participation between the newsmaker and their audiences.
My prediction for 2008 with regard to the SMNR is that our successes with regard to saveable, shareable, embeddable content will also extend to sociability. We’ll get there. Ya heard it here first.
Posted on: October 15, 2007 at 2:56 pm By Todd Defren
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As Digital PR we issued the 3nd Italian SMNR for promoting a Mediaset initiative (Mediaset is the Italian private TV Network, owned by Mr. Berlusconi) called MoltoMedia.
MoltoMedia is a Lab for financing innovative cross/multimedia projects.
Here it is: http://www.digital-pr.net/moltomedia/news.htm
Here my post: http://www.vincos.it/2007/12/05/moltomedia-laboratorio-per-progetti-crossmediali/
Dear Todd:
Great post. I publish about 100 press releae per year for a software company — and am working on moving us (dragging/screaming) toward the SMNR format when appropriate.
I worked with the PRXbuilder to test it out the format with one for my personal blog
http://writingriffs.blogspot.com/2007/11/christmas-mountain-story-of-cowboy.html
Of course the story behind it was a little funnier — I titled it the World’s First SMNR by an Octogenarian – http://writingriffs.blogspot.com/2007/11/worlds-first-multimedia-press-release.html
There are two troublesome core issues with the SMNR. One is writing. One is cost.
Writing
Too many words. Way too long. And some of the KEY FACT bullet points examples in the SMNR’s above are just the same old corporate gobbledygook sentences broken out by bullet points. They aren’t bullet-pointed facts at all
COSTS: The average news wire costs around $400-500 for the first 400 words. Then $100 for the next 100 words. Then you have additional fees for video and images. Some of these SMNR’s can cost thousands of dollars. I saw one that cost $15,000! For ONE release. It quickly becomes financially irresponsible to go this route. Unless there is at least some semblance of return. Or at least some kind of metric that might justify it. But it has to be more cost-effective for the average SMB. I’m sure Coke and Cisco can pull this off with their budgets — but I’m think even they will back away unless it becomes more cost-effective.
Anyway – thanks for these resources.
Best
Steve Kayser
As “Digital PR” (an Italian agency part of the H&K group) we create 2 SMNR:
- in february for Electrolux (a bit too raw) http://www.digital-pr.net/kitchenstage/blog.asp
- in november for Fox TV
http://www.digital-pr.net/natgeo/news.htm
My post here http://www.vincos.it/2007/11/06/comunicato-per-i-media-sociali-o-social-media-news-release/
Hi Todd
I am not sure if I would use the word “appropriate” in considering this issue. I think it is about both the organisation and the participant having a choice. Our platform CAN be integrated – see the Streakr example above – so that the conversation can take place via comments on the organisation’s domain if participants want it to.
We did this precisely because we aren’t in the business of “owning” conversations, but facilitating them. Some might say we are missing a trick in SEO terms on our part, but we think that it’s not our juice in the first place.
However in some cases organisations may not want to host the conversation and also integration into sites is potentially something that only more frequent users might want to invest the (relatively small amount of) time and effort in doing.
We also were/are hoping that organisations might choose to nominate “interesting” moderators whose potential direct response people might be interested in receiving in order to encourage comments. To date though there has been a degree of reluctance to do this. Not sure if this is a lack of understanding or trepidation – probably a bit of both.
At the same time by tracking the conversation wherever it does end up happening we aren’t trying to dictate to participants that it must happen on our or the organisation’s “turf”. Social Media is about community and unsurprisingly people might be (and so far apparently are) inclined to want to blog/comment/write about an issue within their own community rather than either on our site or the organisation’s concerned.
Hope that answers your question
Adam
Dan – You raise a good point (multimedia “versus” social media) which I will address specifically in a post that’s brewing for later this week.
Adam – The innovations are inspiring to hear about, good stuff. Don’t worry, yet, about the lack of comments. We are at the beginning of this road.
However, here’s a thought/question: is it appropriate for the conversations about the news releases to happen “on” the release @ webitpr, or at the company’s own website? Can you readily integrate the two?
Many I’ve seen just use a multimedia component, without actually implementing social media. Doesn’t that take the point out of it or do we consider multimedia social media now?
Hi Todd
Thanks for the links. Agree completely that to be a true SMNR the platform needs to allow the release to be truly social. We think our service has embraced this.
All of our releases have the ability for visitors to post comments and in fact we have recently added the facility for users to state who will moderate and respond to the comments and even include a biog and photo http://pages.citebite.com/c2t2g3p6m2khv. Hat tip to Constantin Basturea for this idea.
Despite this, to date no one has commented on any of the 13 releases we have distributed, even the 4 which had moderators.
However the way our distribution model works (for both traditional releases and SMNRs), we proactively monitor the coverage anyway, rather than relying on trackbacks that often aren’t used. Also the SMNR carries a little piece of Technorati API which shows the inbound blog links which combine to mean our SMNR can track the conversation wherever it happens.
As well as social bookmarking to make our releases sharable the RSS feeds for our releases maintain the links, multimedia etc so that readers can share the release effectively via RSS readers.
To monitor readership we have built in Feedburner and Google Analytics support and finally users can also virtually “host” the platform on their own site, as this Streakr example shows http://news.streakr.com/?ReleaseID=6195, to allow the company itself to benefit from the SEO juice they generate.
We are increasingly finding more and more interest being shown in the concept. For example our video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD_mYKc20OY about the SMNR has had over 1,200 views on YouTube and is ranked top for relevance for a search for social media. And we have a number of users who are indicating they expect to start sending SMNRs in the near future.
Finally any suggestions for improvements always welcome.
Adam
Thanks for aggregating the companies using this emerging media. I think it helps validate social media newsrooms as a communications tool.
I totally missed that post. Great stuff!
Hi Bryan -
Two things going on here…
1) The comments, when/if they happen, ought to happen at the corporate site. BUT, not many corp newsrooms enable comments/trackbacks. Until/unless they do, this impt feature won’t ever catch on. Again, I expect to see more of the GM-Europe-style newsroom in the future.
2) No, users are NOT used to commenting on news releases. This is bleeding edge stuff, amigo.
Best case, the wire services find a way to enable comments/trackbacks that are echoed directly to corp newsrooms. But this requires integration. All of this is hard.
Dave – Is 2X normal web traffic not good enough? See last week’s post: http://www.pr-squared.com/2007/10/prsquareds_social_media_tactic_3.html
Hi Todd,
Thanks for pulling together this great resource.
I was particularly happy to see the Hubspot release coming out on a mainstream wire service the other week.
Have you come across any good beginning-to-end case studies with metrics yet?
Dave
Todd,
The only SMRs I could find with the commenting functionality you’re calling for are the ones from the GM (are there any others from your list that I missed?). And of the four or five of those that I clicked on, none actually have any comments to them.
Do you think that’s just a question of people getting used to the notion of commenting to news releases? Are people just not reading GM’s news releases?
What do you think is going on there?