Just when I thought I was out…. they pull me back in.
(Sigh) I thought I would sit out the latest round of debate surrounding the social media release.
Greg Jarboe was kind enough to quote from my previous tirade (Die, Social Media Release Controversy, Die) in his posting yesterday Does Social Media 2.0 deserve a second life? on SearchEngineWatch.com (thanks, Greg), and there have been lots of related developments since my last post, so I just thought I would chime in again. There have been some successes cited in the months since, and also confusion and disagreement.
It is clear that the SM Release remains a hot topic among PR people, or more specifically, PR bloggers. But does anyone else care? I have heard some good things and some mixed takes on the SMR from just a few non-PR bloggers and journalists.
Journalist Lena West posted her thoughts on the InfoWorld blog in Social Media News Releases: Do Them or Not? Her wrap on the subject:
Bottomline: Try it out, see if it works for your organization. Don’t use it at the exclusion of any existing forms of media communication, but rather as a supplement. And remember, no amount of ‘social media-ization’ can make a news release exciting. A crappy news release is still a crappy news release.
Noted journalist Tom Foremski, whose famous post Die Press Release, Die apparently inspired Defrens to invent the SMR (and served as inspiration for the title of my last post on the topic) is now saying that Facebook is the new press release. See PR People: Do As I Say, and, As I Do, on the Marcom Professional blog.
And, some A listers – none other than Scoble and various members of the Web 2.0 Working Group – questioned the need for an SMR awhile back. This may sound heretical, but their thinking does not necessarily represent the mainstream.
One of the hurdles to widespread adoption of SMRs, I think, is the diversity of formats – there is the original SMR as conceived by Defrens and Shift Communications, there is the hRelease, from the New Media Releasse Group, which proposes a markup language for SMRs, and there is the much recently-discussed Snippets format (see Buzz Bin’s post A New Take on the Social Media Release).
And, just this week, Marketwire chimed in with their new Social Media Release 2.0 service and format Marketwire Unveils Social Media 2.0: Industry’s Most Authentic Social Media Product (isn’t social media 2.0 redundant? Ah, well, at least they made the announcement via their SMR).
So what is the intrepid PR manager supposed to recommend to their clients? The SMR still feels too much like a home-brewed science project.
The traditional press release has had its long reign is because people understand it, it is an accepted format and an institution. You have news. You issue it, in all its banal but by now familiar glory, or lack therof – replete with the happy talk and spin. Then people have at it, mocking it, talking about it or simply ignoring it.
Consider how new the SMR concept is and how fast the worlds of social media and related tech are evolving.
Yesterday, Greg Jarboe reiterated his position that testing and measurement should be the key determinants of success for SMRs and found some things he liked in Marketwire’s new offering.
How will we discover if Social Media 2.0 provides us with increased Internet visibility and greater search engine performance for our news? As I wrote back in May 2003, the only way to find out is to “Measure, measure, measure and measure some more.”
[Regarding Social Media 2.0 from Marketwire] there’s a nice mix of new distribution options and PR measurement
tools. This will enable me to tell if “Social Media 2.0 offers
increased social network visibility to a prospective audience of more
than 200 million Internet users.” If it does, that would be very cool.
I agree that we need to continue working on the formats, putting them to the test, and trying to figure out what works best.
And while it is good to have choices and good to evolve, at some point it helps to get to your destination and have consensus and standards – a lingua franca for SMRs that extends beyond the leading edge PR folks and is embraced by marketers, journalists and bloggers alike.
