1.Too funny...like trying to show Houdini a new card trick. What's scary is that some people may actually fall for this.

2.Ouch! I was wincing as I read this.

Outing stuff like this plays a valuable role in educating (and scaring off) people who might get pushed to do the same stupid work.

3.Heh... have you clicked on that T'rati link (http://tinyurl.com/2g3u5e) yet? Right now, the only blog post it lists is, ah, this one.

On the upside, if they didn't read your blog before sending you that pitch, they sure as hell will now. (At least this once.)

4.Shel -

Thanks for your posting.

We are familiar with and very much appreciate Shift's efforts to develop the ?social media press release? template. It is a great step in the right direction for the Public Relations industry.

Our model differs slightly from Shift?s in one key regard.

When a release is posted on a web site it really ceases to be a press release. When a release is online the audience is not only the traditional media but also bloggers and, most importantly, the general public. Therefore, we would make the case that listing news facts and quotes in a bullet point form is not the most effective method of communicating news.

The best approach for a news release is still the narrative format ? it the easiest to read by reporters, bloggers and interested citizens alike. The approach we have taken is modeled more after the online versions of some more forward thinking major dailies who have taken a traditional narrative article and published it online in a more conversational format. In particular, the Washington Post?s online version of articles allow for readers to become engaged with the material and make news more of a dialogue with its readers.

On this point we might have to agree to disagree.

Let?s keep the dialogue going. (And apologies for the misspelling. I know that can be frustrating.)

Best regards,

Jeff Mascott
Adfero Group

5.Jeff, thanks for posting!

Several of us involved in the new media release initiative have advised that both a traditional and new media release are appropriate in most cases, to be distributed concurrently with cross-links to one another. That way, journalists get the benefit of the parsed content while those who find value in narrative can continue to use it.

I think it's important to remember where this initiative came from -- an appeal by a journalist. It was his (and other journalists') complaints about the traditional press release that led to the idea of parsing news facts into bullets, which allows the journalist (rather than the PR agency) to "spin" the resulting article. It also makes it much harder to issue a release designed to get ink but that has no real news. Finally, when tagging standards are developed (part of the working group's efforts), each bullet can be appropriately tagged for search enhancement.

The press release distribution companies (notably PR Newswire and Business Wire) are involved on the working group specifically to find a reasonable way to issue these releases for distribution, rather than simply house them on the web. (PR Newswire's MultiVue accommodates that now, but is prohibitively expensive for a lot of companies.)

6.Shel -

Points well taken. You know as well as we do that in the not too distant future all organizations will need to create and publish news in a conversational format and join the ongoing dialogue or they risk become irrelevant.

Again, let's keep the conversation going. More to come on this topic from our shop?

Thanks, Shel.

Jeff

Jeff Mascott
Adfero Group

7.I agree with 95% of what you say, and think Adfero have misfired on most of this.

However, I have to agree with Jeff about the narrative as opposed to bullet points. The bullet point approach just doesn't work for me, or for nearly all the journalists I've spoken. Almost all prefer proper narrative news releases, with the 'bonus' feature of social media news releases - multimedia, comments, links, choice of quotes etc.

And crucially I very strongly believe that bullets are NOT "one of the elements that make a social media release useful".

Bullets just make the release far harder to read and use. If bullets were really easier to read, then you'd be writing all your blog posts in bullets - and I'd stop reading ;)

8.Hi, Stuart; good to hear from you!

Your point is the reason I advocate two versions of the release -- one traditional and one social media. But I go back to Tom Foremski's original argument:

"Deconstruct the press release into special sections and tag the information so that as a publisher, I can pre-assemble some of the news story and make the information useful."

That post is here, by the way: http://tinyurl.com/evakp

Perhaps Todd Defren and Phil Gomes could weigh in.

9.That's why when I first tried social media news releases I did both. However, when I started talking to people I decided in most cases it wasn't worth the extra effort to create both - the narrative was far more popular. For a client with a big budget I'd still do both, but for most I'd only do the narrative as it's simply not cost-effective to do something that only appeals to a small number of people.

Incidentally, the trackback to my post on Tom's original post still generates a lot of traffic to my blog - an indication of the interest in this subject.

10.Shel,

As an employee at Adfero, I'd like to offer a couple of views to what has become an intriguing conversation here on your blog.

First, getting your name wrong is inexcusable. There?s nothing else that can be said about that.

Regarding the bulleted quotes versus narrative style, I admit that I was the one who pushed hardest for that concept in our company. As a former journalist, I don?t find the list of quotes, largely without context, to be compelling. Most reporters, particularly at large newspapers, aren?t going to take a canned quote of any kind ? in a narrative or listed in bullet point. At some overworked newspapers, however, the reporters may be more willing to use the quote than try to reach the source on the phone just to get an exclusive comment. In this case, the narrative format is even more critical so that the reporter can use the comment appropriately.

While I respect your idea of sending two news releases ? one with the narrative and one without ? our goal was to create a release that accomplishes our goals in one document. Our goals might be slightly different than yours and Shift?s (and we are very familiar with Shift?s work and applaud them for breaking new ground).

For one thing, we are not writing solely for journalists. One of the things that makes the new media environment so much more productive is that organizations can issue their news releases directly to the public. The goal is go convince the mainstream media and the blogosphere to pick up the release and run a story about it, but it is not the only goal. Equally important is to deliver that information directly into the hands of target audiences in the public. And for this, they very much need the context and background that the narrative format provides.

We believe that what makes the evolving design of the news release exciting isn?t so much how the information is laid out on the page. It is how it invited ongoing dialogue with the target audience through the capability for comments, links to Delicious, Digg, Newsvine, etc., and its multimedia ability to provide potentially extensive background information via additional resources (white papers, links to other related articles or commentary), video interviews or exhibits, and other graphical support.

We very much appreciate what Shift has done, as well as yourself, and by no means claim to have originated the concept of the dynamic news release or social news release. We do, though, think we have some small part to offer in this ongoing debate and enjoy the opportunity to participate.

Regards,
Chris Battle
Adfero Group