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Thursday, June 12, 2008
The Social Media Release: What’s in a name?
During yesterday’s FIR call-in episode dealing with PR spam, the issue of the press release arose—not surprisingly, since so much PR spam arrives in the form of traditional narrative press releases. Stowe Boyd—whose contribution to the panel discussion was invaluable—reiterated a point he’s been making for a while: He’d rather just read a blog post about an announcement.
This an other ongoing resistance to the idea of the Social Media Release have led me to wonder if all this negative views might have been avoided altogether if we had just opted to call it a Social Media Press Kit.
After all, one of the principle benefits of the Social Media Release is one-stop shopping for all of the information and assets you might want to use in your online reporting. This includes news facts; quotes (real, not made up, since by separating them from the rest of the release, fabricated quotes are much easier to spot); images, audio and video (embeddable into your own blog or news story); and links. It also includes tools to aid in your research, such as Technorati tags and links to other coverage of the news. It also includes social media tools you can use yourself to share the information with others, such as links to Digg, del.icio.us, and the like.
(As far as I know, nobody has talked about putting widgets into a Social Media Release, but why not?)
Who would want to read all that in a blog post? Ideally, the CEO, the product manager, and anybody else in the company who wanted to blog about an announcement (as well they should) would use the Social Media Release as a resource, just like anybody else who wanted to write about it.
In some regards, the Social Media Release is more like a press kit than a press release. God knows how many press kits I have put together in my career, stuffing folder pockets with backgrounders, different versions of press releases, fact sheets, photos, specification sheets, diagrams and other resources.
So is it really a matter of semantics? Because people view press releases as something pushed at them, the Social Media Release has earned its share of detractors, but if we’d labeled it a press kit all along, would the concept have met with the same degree of negativity?
