Examples of Social Media Press Releases: [link to post]

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Social media news releases gain momentum: Examples of companies using social media networks to spread the word a.. [link to post]

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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/

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

My post here http://www.vincos.it/2007/11/06/comunicato-per-i-media-sociali-o-social-media-news-release/

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

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?

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