1.I believe this would be the case, but I'm wondering how the study defines a "social media news release". Are they only including those with some kind of press release distribution service, or are they including companies who have added a blog and/or social media news room onto their existing websites. It seems to me that digital is definitely the way to go, but I would like to see some examples of the type of releases they're talking about and the resulting coverage. I think a lot of bloggers would simply have a knee-jerk reaction to say that they prefer social media press releases (as opposed to traditional releases). However, I have seen a lot of the reports that come back from online only distribution of press releases and what they consider "pick up" is mostly other mainstream publication sites scraping PRN for content to boost their own ranking. Am I missing something?

2.@shel thanks very much for covering the analysis and glad you found it of value. We intend to rerun the exercise in another 6 months or so to see how the results compare.

@shannon the answers to your questions are as follows:

1. Only releases (both "traditional" and SMNRs) hosted/distributed by RealWire were included in the analysis to ensure consistency and also because we only had the data relevant to coverage for our own releases from the Proveit press release evaluation element of our service(see below). Clients opt for this addition to our distribution service in around 75-80% of our releases which gives us an excellent data set to work with when it comes to analysing release performance (for either format).

2. Examples of SMNRs are listed at the beginning of my post http://bit.ly/VTge7

3. The analysis was based on actual coverage not responses to a survey of any kind.

4. The total coverage figure quoted includes the republication coverage you refer to. Editorial and blog coverage only refers to coverage where there has been some degree of reporting, editing or opinion within the coverage rather than straight "scraping" as you put it and where the coverage made a relevant reference to the release material.

Some of the examples actually show you this sort of coverage as we offer clients the option to publicly show any relevant editorial or blog coverage that we track so visitors to the release can then see the whole conversation (or as much as possible). So for example the HSBC Insurance release http://blogit.realwire.com/?ReleaseID=12680 the first piece of editorial coverage shown is the following http://bit.ly/fKcvZ and the two blog reactions from Technorati are me linking to it (this wasn't included in the analysis obviously as didn't exist when I wrote the post!) and this post http://bit.ly/kRmk3.

We have very strict quality control procedures over our tracking/evaluation service with each piece of coverage being checked for type and relevancy. In addition our clients themselves obviously review our tracking data, so the data should be very accurate. However given we are talking about around 7,000 pieces of editorial/blog coverage across the whole population then the odd piece is bound to have been incorrectly identified or classfied as no one's perfect, but I have no reason to believe that this would have biased the exercise in any material way.

I hope that covers all your queries but please let me know if you have any other questions. I can be contacted at @AdParker on Twitter.

Thanks again.

3.Thanks for the post Shel. It's nice to see some support for Social Media Releases. While I recognize that there are other services with "social media releases," I think Shannon has a point. Putting a "share" button on a traditional press release doesn't make it social. The content has to be conversational - and I'm not just talking about adding multimedia. The success of a SMR isn't going to be measured by traditional metrics.

It's not about the volume of journalists you send it out to, it's about how much influence your SMR receives and how that impacts your brand, client or organization. You cannot squash a press release into Twitter or Facebook and expect it to engage. When the content is good, influencers on the social web take care of the distribution - as many as 10,000 views are generated on some SMRs and none of that traffic comes from traditional sources. We just posted a case study from pfs marketwyse that supports.

I applaud you for your support of SMR adoption. And by the way, the investment can be zero dollars as PitchEngine makes it free to build and share SMRs.

4.We had a great deal of success with our first multimedia news release http://digg.com/u16Qz9 which featured singer Ashanti in Vanderbilt Hall helping our CENTURY 21 President and CEO, Tom Kunz, giving away $221,000 Grand Prize to our Path to Your Dreams Sweepstakes winner in Grand Central Terminal. Our impressions and AVE were through the roof for the month of June. I'm a bit cautious on the metrics, as a lot of the AVE is calculated based on the number of words that were picked up online as opposed to print and it does not calculate broadcast. I'd love to hear your thoughts on calculating ROI via impressions / AVE formula.

Best Regards,

Matt Gentile, Director of PR
Century 21 Real Estate LLC

5.@Jason. Couldn't agree with you more on all counts. Putting a "share" button on a traditional release doesn't make it social which is why our SMNR platform has been based on the SHIFT template from the very first one we created in June 2007 http://news.prblogger.com/?page=6042.

Influence is definitely not about distribution lists, which is why our evaluation also includes an assessment of the POTENTIAL influence of every piece of coverage tracked. However obviously ACTUAL influence of such coverage can only be measured by reviewing its impact against an organisation's objectives which isn't really practical for a distribution company to do.

Direct to reader engagement and/or subsequent finding, sharing and commenting through search, social bookmarking, social networking and microblogging is clearly a very important element (as we sort to demonstrate with our online media video http://www.vimeo.com/2759273) and we also have plenty of experience of this leading to thousands of views as you say. We only limited our analysis to coverage as one of the key challenges that has been made to the SMNR by the unconverted has been whether it was appropriate for the whole media world, not just social media.

Finally there are obviously a number of good SMNR service solutions out there all with their own strengths. Ours and yours are two and as Shel mentioned the other day Shannon Whitley and his PRXBuilder tool has also been in the vanguard of this space for a long time http://www.voiceoftech.com/swhitley/?p=139

Hopefully with such great work being done on both sides of the Atlantic we will see even more strides being made in providing high quality, well presented and relevant content to all interested readers.

Shel thanks again for covering the analysis.

6.@Adam. Thanks for clarifying how the numbers were derived. I appreciate the analysis and the examples.

Side note: I love this sub-head from your original post: Less stories. More creatively told. To the right people. No matter how we serve them up, this seems to sum up beautifully how we should be approaching PR.

FYI, I am a huge proponent of the SMNR, but I don't appreciate wimpy analysis or people who try to sell the idea on novelty alone, so I thank you for this (you, too @Shel for posting) and for the thoughtful reply to my questions.

The only other piece I think about is the amount of follow up that took place to gain that sort of coverage, but there are so many other such factors that would be next to impossible to quantify in a meaningful way.

Thanks again!