A Radical Suggestion for the Social Media Release
A radical suggestion for the Social Media Release: don’t put any Social Media Releases out over the wires.
While I sincerely applaud how far the wire services have progressed in all-things-social, I am unconvinced that “distribution” is the Big Issue for Social Media Release adoption. It’s not about distribution, it’s about empowerment and conversation.
I recommend you put out a well-written “traditional” release over the wires, with a built-in link to the “social media version” at the company’s online newsroom. Thus you can bypass the wire services’ outsized SMR fees without giving up on their distribution platform.
To do this, however, you first need to create a Social Media Newsroom, using a blogging engine.
The social media version of the release, posted to a social media newsroom, can allow for everything from rippable multimedia (video, audio, graphics, etc.) to sphere-this to del.icio.us links to moderated comments. Additionally, with each news item posted as a blog entry, you can aggregate all conversational elements about that news in one spot, via trackbacks and other social media tracking tools.
This approach offers the added benefits of being a lot less expensive; maintaining full control of brand identity; and turns your newsroom’s “version” of the release into the truly official version.
With so much potential activity happening around each release, it’s more likely that anyone who writes about your news online will link directly to the newsroom, versus linking to the heretofore “official” release that comes from the professional news wires. This boosts SEO. (In fact, you might also consider an AdWords campaign to drive additional web traffic directly to your most important news releases.)
Jeremiah Owyang’s recent post about how the Social Media aggregation and engagement prowess of FriendFeed is what the SMR should be, really hit home for me. He’s spot-on in terms of what the SMR should do for companies, and he really drives many of the points I’ve been making for two years – though I’ve often been misunderstood.
However I respectfully disagree with Jeremiah that FriendFeed will enjoy widespread corporate adoption. Given the relative “newness” of FriendFeed, one could suggest that the SMR (done right) offers a stepping stone to FF’s additional functionality, or (as Brian Solis suggests in the comments section of Jeremiah’s post), perhaps FF could complement an SMR. We’ll see.
I can point to some amazing examples of Social Media Release experimentation. Widespread adoption is a longer-term story. But as I’ve said a million times, we’re talking about the “webificiation” and “socializiation” of the humble, 100–year old, text-based press release: if you believe in the Web; if you believe in Social Media, you can’t help but agree that the SMR is on the right side of history.
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I really want to work with the wire services on this one, as they would be great partners (and indeed, many forward thinking professionals who work for them are GREAT people who have worked hard towards this) but I seem to be in agreement with you on this Todd. Send the regular release over the wires with a link back to a few of the places where conversation may be happening around the announcement/news. An SMR page, your blog and maybe a friendfeed room or delicious page.
Was speaking with a very large company about friend feed yesterday, and convinced them to start there with a laissez faire approach. To just jump in and get the account names and room names lined up so they can admin them. Hopefully they will be doing that today before everyone reads this…
See you soon. BTW, you have some really effin smart people who work for SHIFT – congrats!
I just went through this myself, preparing to use the wire to distribute a “SMNR”, but it was going to cost me $1K….um, we’re a start-up…no thanks. Instead I can cut that in half (even with an embedded video) and push folks to our blog, where our true social media news resides. I’ve been experimenting with several approaches over the last few months and will blog about results myself sometime soon.
As for FriendFeed; I’m on record as simply not seeing the use in this aggregation. I certainly do not see it as robust enough for any sort of B2B approach, and overall it is not a part of my own social media usage. But that’s just me
Great post Todd!
/kff
Reading the comments above, if price is a factor, then Friendfeed will have lower barriers to entry.
It’s too early to tell on adoption, but I’m making a call on where things are headed.
Todd: excellent thinking and you’re absolutely right, of course.
There’s nothing particularly social about the act of distribution – no matter how one chooses to tweak it. Making a news release more social doesn’t mean spamming it out to more people via wire, via email distribution, or via ads in RSS feeds.
It means opening up the format to encourage more interactivity, engagement, creative repurposing (aka “coverage”) and, yes, conversation.
Hence, hosting SMRs on the firm’s own social media newsroom is precisely the right thing to do.
If a well-crafted SMR can be considered an “opening statement” or conversation catalyst, you want to set yourselves up as a magnetic centre for that conversation, and encourage the juice to flow around your conversation starter as people add to, comment on, applaud, detract, or otherwise embellish and extend your statements.
At the same time, much of this is still terra nova for professional communicators and their clients and companies alike – we see a lot of cautious exploration and experimentation, lots of hedging of bets. Issuing a traditional release that links off to a more social artifact makes awfully good sense right now. But for the moment, I think the wire-based SMR can still play a role for many clients, as a good middle ground.
One of the challenges faced by many of the clients I’ve been dealing with is the extant gap between their Web operations and their communications function. The corporate and agency PR folk, quite often, just don’t have any sway over what happens to their Web, newsroom or much of the rest of their online activities for that matter.
Yes, we all know that’s broken and wrong, but it is still very often the case. The frustrating reality is that they may not have the budget or ability to quickly change their existing newsroom into something more social. One of my favourite clients, as an example, is still fighting with their corporate Web marketing department to stop them posting news releases as PDFs (ack).
Setting up a standalone, blog-based social media newsroom that links back to the corporate site is an option, for sure, but it’s far from ideal. To accrue the maximum benefit from any conversational karma and Googlejuice created, that newsroom ought to be a core part of the main site.
This is can be a frustrating discussion to have. With any reasonably large corporation, there’s a good chance that the newsroom will be one of the most frequently-updated, content rich, and search engine-friendly parts of the site. Any right-thinking Webmaster would surely want to look at the newsroom as a great engine for driving link traffic and organic search results. Sadly, the discussion doesn’t always go that way.
So for firms who don’t have social media newsrooms or who lack the budget or ability to change their existing newsroom in the short term – the wire-hosted SMR still makes good interim sense, as long as there are a lot of links to drive clickjuice back to the main corporate site.
The comparison with FriendFeed is a good one, and I agree with your point that its “the Social Media aggregation and engagement prowess” is something any SMR provider should hope to emulate. I think we also agree that Jeremiah’s prediction (“…the Social Media Press Release, will reincarnate as Friendfeed”) is a bit of a stretch. The two things may aim to achieve similar goals, but they start from entirely different points of origin.
One last, quick, fairly obvious observation – when we’re talking about “wire distribution” here, we are, of course, really talking about online “distribution” (i.e. posting) on the newswire service’s Web site. There ain’t an actual wire in the world that can handle much more than standard ANPA-formatted ASCII text right now, although things are certainly evolving apace in that world too.
This seems like a pedantic distinction, perhaps, but I often find myself having to point out the difference between what an actual wire service does and what email/downstream Web distribution models are all about.
Hi Todd,
Just wondering if you could share some examples of social media newsrooms that work. You mentioned in your post that it’s best to create a Social Media Newsroom using a blogging engine, which ones have you found to be the best for this purpose?
Thanks!
@ChrisHeuer – First, thanks for the kind words about the “effin smart” people of SHIFT. It comes from running a TALENT AGENCY first, a PR FIRM second. I also appreciate your SMR comments, of course: you of all people are well aware of the struggles, and I am glad we see eye to eye on this one.
@Jeremiah – For the record, I’ve got nothing against FriendFeed: it’s just that if getting Corporations to “webify” their releases has been this big of a struggle, educating them on the existence & benefits of FF seems to be a longer-term project! Also, the branding issue (i.e., making a FF “room” look official/branded) could be a dealbreaker for some old-skool marketeers.
@MichaelO’ConnorClarke – Wow, thanks for the spot-on analysis. I am flattered that you took the time to be so thorough.
@Marifer – GM Europe and Electrolux and NeatReceipts have social media newsrooms of various quality. There are more but I can’t think of ‘em off the top of my head. I honestly feel that I put the cart before the horse: in my mind, the SM Newsroom is more critical than the SMR itself! As for engines, WordPress works for me.
SMR distribution doesn’t have to be expensive. Wire services can distribute low-cost, HTML versions to selected distribution points (including the service’s own website).
One of the mistakes that has been made is that services are still trying to host all of the content for these releases, including the high-res images and video (which *is* expensive), but it doesn’t have to work that way anymore.
If customers stop trying to distribute SMRs over the wire, the wire services will eventually have to drop their prices, but by that time there will be so many alternatives that it won’t matter. Today, wire services need to help themselves by working to lower prices and make inexpensive HTML distributions happen. Otherwise, other technology will fill that gap.
You’re kind to call it “thorough”, Todd. Most people I work with know by now that “long-winded” is a more accurate description
The GM Europe social media newsroom example is a good one to cite – I think what they’re doing is pretty much the state of the art in this space right now.
You’re kind to call it “thorough”, Todd. Most people I work with know by now that “long-winded” is a more accurate description
The GM Europe social media newsroom example is a good one to cite – I think what they’re doing is pretty much the state of the art in this space right now.
Todd
At the risk of being in advertising mode this is something we have tried to solve from day one with our SMNR service because as Michael so rightly points out a lot of organisations lack the budget, but also potentially the expertise to do this themselves. That’s why our platform can be mapped to an organisation’s own domain so they get the Google Juice and it is the organisation who hosts the conversation.
ITV, Europe’s largest commercial broadcaster, is using this facility from us see:
http://socialnews.itv.com/?ReleaseID=7244.
In addition, on suggestion from Constantin Basturea last year, users also have the facility to nominate and introduce a comments respondent/moderator so that anyone who chooses to comment knows that someone from the organisation is listening – its not a faceless web page, see: http://blogit.webitpr.com/?ReleaseID=8873
We do send out a text version with a link back when we distribute but we also indicate to the recipient what additional content is available if they visit the page. The challenge of “the downstream blues” as you once described it is one that Shannon is right, needs to be solved. However the identity, SEO and conversational ones can be if the wire service is prepared, as we are, to take a back seat.
Thanks
Adam