PR agency Text 100 is out with a global survey of bloggers and damned if the results don’t reveal that social media releases—which inspire passion among those who object to them—work.

The survey first determined that bloggers have grown in importance to corporations, measured by the increased outreach by businesses and their PR people. And the vast majority of these bloggers want companies and their PR people to reach out to them. While awareness of social media releases avaries from market to market, among those who know what they are, they’re perceived favorably.

What’s more, bloggers have noticed an increase in the number of social media releases they’ve received. But the real value derives from the elements of the release actually being used by bloggers. In the past year, 26% of Asia-Pacific bloggers have used the various pieces of a social media release, while 15% of European bloggers have taped into these assets. None in the U.S. had, but Text 100 attributes this to a small survey sample of U.S.-based bloggers. The experience must have been good, though, because more than 60% of bloggers in Asia-Pacific and Europe plan to take greater advantage of social media releases in the upcoming year, along with nearly 45% of US bloggers.

To me, this makes tremendous sense, given the disdain bloggers expressed for traditional press releases and their preference for incorporating images, video and audio into their posts. Social media releases (among many other things) make it easy to cherry-pick and embed multimedia assets into posts which, in turn, makes it easy for a blogger to customize the post to his audience rather than regurgitate the same text-based release that everybody else is copying and pasting.

The survey covers a lot of other information, such as the degree to which bloggers are inclined to abide by embargo requests and the sources they use in order to find content about which to blog. Michael Netzley recorded a brief interview with Jeremy Woolf, Text 100’s global social media practice lead, for Monday’s FIR, and a longer FIR interview with Jeremy should be up in a day or two.

But the growing acceptance of and willingness to use social media releases should be heartening to the members of the social media release working group. Our next tasks include further promotion of the social media release; fleshing out the website that contains social media release news, information and resources; and getting to some kind of agreement among companies that distribute releases (both wire services and do-it-yourself sites) to adopt the tagging standard developed by the technical subcommittee and embraced by the group.

With evidence beginning to emerge that using social media releases pays off, I’m guessing interest in adopting them will also rise.

If you’ve distributed a social media release, I’d love to know what kind of results it produced.