Social media ‘friendly’ releases

Posted Tuesday, October 9, 2007 at 2:55pm in Blogging, Off topic, PR General, Technology  | 

It’s all about the Kaizen. That’s why we’ve been working on a few tweaks here and there on our ‘traditional’ ‘bread and butter’ press release distribution. Can you call online press release distribution ‘traditional’? Anyway, traditional or not, what is becoming apparent is that the old style of press release (You know? With a narrative and stuff?) is certainly becoming more social media friendly. And so they should be.

Why? Well, for one thing, we don’t have the blinkers on when it comes to the Social Media News Release. We don’t believe every news announcement is going to be delivered exclusively via SMNR-stylee for the foreseeable future, that’s for sure. When you work on the front lines (joke), you come up against a host of obstacles. Mainly agency and corporate clients saying: “Yeah this is great but it’s not quite for us just yet.” And that’s fine. We’re a distribution company not a Web2.0 company.

However, that’s not to say you can’t add a few social media bells and whistles to a normal online press release. Already there’s the ability to include hyperlinks, video, social bookmarking, Technorati tags and a company RSS feed. Here’s a few more I’ve been involved in implementing over last week:

Social networking video

The ability to add video has always been available on webitpr’s sendit service. However, until now, it was only downloadable video in the form of a wmv, mpeg, avi, mov etc etc. Now, as well as the downloadable video, there’s the ability to add YouTube, Blinkx, Google Video, Vimeo etc video too.

Facebook bookmarking

Probably because I’m living on Facebook I get a kick out of this one the most. Although quite a simple one really. In short, a user lands on a release distributed by us, see’s the Facebook icon, clicks it and boom! It lands directly into that person’s Facebook Mini Feed.

Two more additons to making a ‘traditional’ online press release more social media friendly. Some might argue that our normal press release is indeed a SMNR. I don’t think it is. Sure, it’s got the feeds, hyperlinks, social bookmarks, social network videos etc but it hasn’t got the ability to post a comment (or a comment moderator for that matter), inbound blog links, links to relevant coverage and the branded experience.

But, case in point. This ‘traditonal’ release here has 21 inbound blog reactions and 12 saves in delicious.

It’s all about being social media friendly. As Antony Mayfield once said: “Make your content better, more attractive, findable and shareable.”

Right on.

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