April Dunford is Director of Business Development at Nortel. She heads up marketing for Nortel’s Incubation Program, responsible for bringing new products to market.  She’s a savvy marketer and blogger.

And despite her former skepticism, April is now also a huge fan of Social Media Releases.  (Yea, I am back on that kick.)

April recently detailed some amazing results for her first Social Media Releases… 

The first one – which she admitted was a not very newsworthy release about Nortel’s corporate green policy – led to “more press interviews than I’ve done in the past two years.  I was on national television.  I did a video for Forbes.com.  The Chicago Tribune, L.A. Times (etc.) all did stories with us in addition to the dozens of bloggers and online news sources who picked up the story and linked to our video – Spectacular!”

It’s not uncommon for corporations “try out” an SMR with a minor news announcement, just to see how things go.  April’s first SMR got uncommonly good results because she and her colleagues did an uncommonly good job of adding relevant tags, storyline angles and multimedia content.

Buoyed by the first SMR’s success, April’s second social media release was more ambitious: it was used to announce a new product.  “We put together a new blog and included the link and feed to the blog in the release.  We shot a video interview with the product architect and had some video of the prototype of the product.  We created a Flickr site and posted screen shots of the product.”

“Again, the results (of the SMR) were spectacular.  In the community of bloggers and online news sources focused in our product space, there were dozens of articles and a lot of discussion about the product.  I was on TV twice, and the architect of the product also did national television.  BusinessWeek did a podcast with our CTO on the subject, I did interviews with 4 newspapers including the Wall Street Journal, we got several inquiries from analysts, our blog was getting 100 uniques a day in the first week and we got invited to speak at a couple of conferences.” 

I was also in correspondence today with Beth Harte, a marketing blogger who has also been experimenting with Social Media Releases.  She recently sent a BIG announcement over BusinessWire in traditional format, and a MINOR announcement out, SMR-style, via PRWeb.  According to Beth’s subsequent Google Analytics performance review, the minor news SMR generated 1,330 hits/inbound links, while the big traditional news release netted just 243.

“Moving forward I will only use SMRs,” says Beth.

Convinced, yet?  Maybe just a little bit?

I’ve always said that the adoption of the Social Media Release would be a long slog.  But I’ve also often said that its Web-friendly, social nature will put the SMR on “the right side of history.”  Experiences like Beth and April’s are further evidence that change is a’foot.

P.S. – April did not provide links to her SMRs in her original post.  I’ve asked her for the links and will update the post when/if she gets back to me.

P.P.S. – Please note my “radical suggestions” for SMRs before you run off and spend a million dollars on a slew of new SMRs!

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