The new world of Social Media Release

We’ve been working in a group as a part of a module’s assessment (PR & New Media) on a presentation about Social Media News Releases and I thought I’d use that as an opportunity to share a few things we came across. But lets start from the beginning…what is SMNR and what’s its future?

That is a definition we found and I believe it’s best to use it as it is: ‘A new kind of press release aimed at both journalists and bloggers. It does not include the ’spin’ of the traditional press release, but provides multimedia content in an accessible format that can easily be repurposed and shared on blogs, websites and social networks’.

SMNRs were first launched by Todd Deffren, who also sent one to PR Newswire in order to launch it. That met great success as within a week more than 2500 templates have been downloaded.

The following video shows how Webitpr people see SMNRs, what they make of it, their expectations, and so on. Of course i need to mention to this point, like we did in the presentation, that this is not necessarily the global way to utilize SMNRs, but one single company’s opinion.

But why do we need SMNRs? Why is it advised for companies to adopt it? First of all, they work absolutely great in accordance to traditional press releases, without being binned by journalists. They are sent via email and even if you don’t use it, you can always get back to it anytime you want. Plus you have the choice to read or not to read the whole of it, to open more links that appear in the release if you are very interested in the story covered, and so on. It’s really useful as important news are spread around the world very fast, and also shared with people, whether journalists, bloggers or customers. Since it works as a catalyst for the socialization of news, conversations should be continuous and have updates to keep the people engaged. 

We also came up with some negatives, for instance how SMNRs can be ignored by search engines, such as Google, if they are not published through a social platform (e.g. WordPress, Blogger, etc.), or the fact that since it’s still a new tool, greater effort should be made in order to write interesting and newsworthy stories, so that their importance will be recognised and will finally be adopted by more companies. We shouldn’t forget that SMNRs are only 2 years old and lots of companies aren’t savvy enough to use them. It is estimated that in its 5th birthday it will be more widely used. 

An issue of great controversy appears to be the fact that sometimes news reach the journalists before becoming official. That’s considered as a positive feature of SMNR as who wouldn’t love to have the release beforehand? Still, we should consider the case in which the news never becomes official, something that could possibly cause problems and builds bad reputation because of the unreliability of the source.

An example of a successful social media news release follows in the link below in order to illustrate what it looks like and what it contains.