I attended a Webinar last night from Vocus called The Evolving Social Media Press Release. I found this was a very interesting insight into the minds and opinions of some of the foremost thinkers in the field of social media. Through my work I come in contact with a lot people at different levels of understanding with social media – and, of course, even us people who are employed in this area are still just getting our hands around all the tools, and learning by doing.
One of the best insights from the night was the idea that the social media press release is inherently different from a ‘traditional’ press release. The traditional press release is still a very powerful tool for creating exposure for your clients; it is one way a PR person can create content for a journalist. They write something and ‘hook’ the journalist in, so that a journalist will be interested in writing there own version of the story. The social media press release, on the other hand, is a content manager, it gets outputted to areas where interested parties will pick it up – this might be direct contact with the end user, it might be an online newswire, it might be a social network. The social media press release acts as a content manager because,
- For one it is optimized for search engines, hence searchable
- It is active, links and quotes can take you to other parts of the web and other places of interest
- It is scalable, the user of the press release can view the summary and highlights, or they can go in-depth into the release
- It is multimedia, the release can contain video clips and audio clips – currently people are creating podcast summaries of the release of easy of reading
- It is interactive, Monika xx, spoke last night of the interaction built directly into the release, the user can comment and speak about the release, they can blog around the release and portalize it through commonly used forms of social media i.e. social networks and community based news websites.
The second interesting thing from last night (it was 7pm here in the UK) was that no one on the panel thought it was the end of the ‘traditional’ press release – the social media press release will not be suitable for everyone – if a baker is wanting exposure for a new range of bread it is unlikely that his audience would be online, frequenting social networks and blogs, therefore their would be little point in creating a bells and whistles social media press release – a traditional one would be appropriate.
As always everything PR people do should be rooted in research, and this is no different with the social media press release. The people who are developing this new offering have a responsibility to show everyone else that this isn’t the silver-bullet and it doesn’t work in every situation, but if it is well researched and understood and if it can add value to the offering of the client then a social media press release might well be something to look into.
One last thought from last night:
To sell a product you need to be believable, to be believable you need to be creditable, to be creditable you need something investing to say – and that all starts with content.
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