My friend Dan Janal (whom I haven’t seen in way too long) sent me an email after he read my post on the effectiveness of Social Media Releases (SMRs) asking just what a social media release is.

I wouldn’t have thought I’d be writing a Social Media Release 101 post, given the volume of content already out there dedicated to the topic. But given Dan’s question (which leads me to believe there must be a lot of other people with the same question), coupled with developments with the Social Media Release Working Group, it’s worth revisiting the basics.

The notion of the SMR has sparked a lot of opposition, mainly from people who think the press release is dead and that the SMR is a lame attempt to bring them into the social media era when they should just be scrapped and replaced with more SEO-friendly alternatives or social conversations (depending on whom you listen to). In fact, there has been a significant amount of debate over the merits of the SMR, all of which seems odd to me, given what the SMR really is and what it was designed to achieve.

An SMR is not going to take stains out of your carpet, make crops grow in Ethiopia or take a bullet for you. What it will do, when executed well, is increase the coverage your story gets online.

A brief history

Back in late February 2006, Silicon Valley Watcher blogger Tom Foremski posted an item titled, Die! Press Release! Die! Die! Die!. Tom complained that traditional press releases were narrative exercises in spin that took time to deconstruct and reassemble into a story of interest to his readers.

Tom made several recommendations, which SHIFT Communications principal Todd Defren took to heart, so much so that, in late May 2006, he released a template of what he dubbed the Social Media Press Release. That was followed by an update to the template—version 1.5—in mid-April 2008. Todd also introduced a template fore a social media newsroom, but that’s another story.

There was more to Todd’s effort than the parsing of information Tom sought. Recognizing that bloggers and journalists writing for websites have far fewer restrictions than print publishers—they can incorporate links into their articles and embed multimedia elements—Todd created a template that incorporated a variety of elements easily lifted from the release and added to a post or article.

Among those inspired by Todd’s template was Chris Heuer, a founder of the Social Media Club and currently the driving force behind AdHocnium (with which I am involved). Chris created a mailing list to discuss the SMR, set up a site to house information about it and began working to make it a standard. Chris, Tom Foremski, Brian Solis and I even recorded an occasional podcast to update those who were interested on the status of the effort.

Ultimately, managing the SMR process became too much of chore to continue as a purely volunteer activity. In March 2008, the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) announced (with a social media release, of course) that it was assuming sponsorship of the effort.

Under IABC’s sposorship, a working group was formed that includes representation from the major wire services, interested technologists, PR agencies and others. Tom Foremski and Todd Defren, along with Chris Heuer and I, are members of the working group.

In the interim, most of the recognized press release distribution services have added SMRs to their catalog of services while third-party services have emerged that let you create an SMR on your own. Several agencies—Edelman and the Social Media Group among them—also offer SMR products to their clients.

The goals of the SMR

The overarching goal of the SMR is to get the organization’s story in front of as many of the right people as possible. If that sounds like the goal of the traditional press release, it should. The difference is in who produces the content. Traditional releases were produced for print, for newspapers and other mainstream media that were pushed to audiences; at one time, the filter of the media was the only way an organization could tell its story short of buying advertising.

SMRs are designed for all those bloggers and site owners producing content that targets the interests of their readers. For bloggers already inclined to cover your company’s news, the SMR can be a compelling resource, resulting in your video, customer quote or PowerPoint presentation appearing in their posts, which are already highly credible to their communities.. (It’s also worth noting that the SMR can be an equally valuable resource to company executives and employees who are blogging their own perspectives about the announcement.)

In order to appeal to those bloggers and reporters who are communicating with people you want to reach, the SMR needs to achieve several objectives:

1. Parse information into easily identifiable sections, including news facts (without spin), genuine quotes (not fabricated), boilerplate information and product specifications, to name a few. This lets reporters and bloggers cherry-pick the pieces they want to use and even copy-and-paste some elements into their stories.
2. Provide easily-embedded assets, including images (from photos to package art), audio and video. Ideally, no downloading should be required. Just copy the embed code and add it to your article or post.
3. Make it easy to research the story by including links to related materials. These can include tags that bloggers have added to posts they’ve written on the subject and archives of links to related coverage.
4. Through a uniform infrastructure, make it easy for reporters, bloggers and readers to reuse pieces of the SMR in various unique ways.

The hRelease standard

The most misunderstood dimension of the SMR is the tagging structure, even though the concept goes back to Tom Foremski’s original post in which he asked producers of press releases to “tag everything so that I can pre-assemble my stories.”

The hRelease specification includes a variety of tags that are assigned to information within the SMR, such as dates, places, news, multimedia and quotes. Consistent with the XML standard, these tags aren’t anything that you (or I) have to learn. Instead, they’re cooked into the interfaces used to generate an SMR. For instance, if you fill in a field for a news fact, the system you’re using will automatically generate the news tag in the the code it outputs.

With all SMRs incorporating an apples-to-apples set of tags, it becomes easy to find and use this content in a wide variety of interesting ways. A publisher could, for example, create a visual timeline of events based on date tags. Someone reading the release (or an article based on it) could schedule an activity listed in the release on their own calendar. Reporters could find common information from a number of different releases.

Debunking SMR myths

As I noted early on, the SMR concept has raised a lot of hackles in some quarters. Most of the objections to the SMR, though, are based on a misunderstanding of what it is. The common myths include these:

All SMRs must adopt the same template

An SMR can look any way you want it to look. In fact, the hRelease tagging structure makes it even easier than usual to reformat the information in a release to adopt the look and feel of any given template-driven distribution channel. What does need to be consistent is the use of the hRelease tags.

You must put your news facts in bullet lists

You can format your news facts any way you like.

There’s no need for an SMR when the company can just blog

Who in their right mind would want to read a blog post that enumerated all of the background information associated with an announcement? Indeed, the company—the CEO, the CMO, the brand manager, even rank-and-file employees—should be blogging their perspectives. But where do they get a photo or video to add to their posts? From where can they extract the product specifications or reach out to the right person to get more information? The SMR is not a blog post and is not meant to be a story. It is a resource for people writing one.

A product demo is all that’s required

This was the argument of uber-blogger Robert Scoble, who argued that pre-written material is only useful for those who are unable to write their own reports or opinions. The SMR, however, gets away from pre-written material and simply provides resources and information. And that demo? The video should be right there in the SMR.

Nobody reads news releases

A study conducted last year by the Society for New Communication Research into the value of putting traditional news releases online proved that people do read—and act on—news releases. But with the SMR, the goal isn’t to have everyone read the release. It’s to provide fodder for the reports and blog produced for website and blogs that people already read.

It’s expensive

That depends. Many of the SMR services—like PRXBuilder and PitchEngine—are free. The cost for other services varies. And the cost could be limited to your time if you do it yourself.

You should try to get people to your site, not someone else’s

I have to admit to being truly baffled when I read this argument in a post by SEO consultant Seomul Evans in which he wrote, “The whole point of marketing your business is to get people to come to your website and get them to buy your products. So why would you spend money to put your information on another website? We have already noted that SMNRs generally do not result in optimal links to your site, so there is really no sense in using them for that purpose.”

If an SMR were meant to be an SEO tool, I’d agree. Its goal is not to drive traffic, but rather to make sure people know and understand your story. SEO is one of the main reasons to continue issuing traditional releases (along with the fact that online and print editors continue to use them as filler).

The era of the destination website is winding down. Traffic to your company’s site has already suffered as eyeballs shift from destination sites to Facebook, YouTube and other social properties. You need to tell your story where your customers and other constituents spend their time, whichmeans making your content so compelling that bloggers and reporters want to use it. 

It replaces the traditional release, which still has legs

A traditional press release and an SMR are not mutually exclusive. In fact, most SMRs are produced on the web and are not distributed. Instead, a link to the SMR is included in the traditional release. As long as there are publications that need filler for the back part of the book, and as long as online versions of traditional press releases produce results, the traditional release won’t be going anywhere. (Unfortunately, that includes the bad ones, of which there is no shortage.)

You can’t own your own multimedia account

Some press release distribution services require you to provide them with the original video so they can upload it to their own YouTube (or other multimedia sharing) channels. But not all of them. If you don’t want your multimedia assets housed anywhere other than your own preferred location, switch to a service that accommodates your preference.

Where do things stand right now?

In June at its annual world conference, IABC released the hRelease specification, which had earned the working group’s approval. The current efforts of the working group are to…

• Promote the SMR in order to develop widespread understanding of what it is and isn’t, its benefits, and its adoption
• Get all SMR service providers to adopt the hRelease standard
• Move all SMR resources to the new (currently all-but-empty) SMR website to serve as a single resource

Want more?

I got links:

More explanations of the SMR

Dave Fleet’s Social Media Training wiki
How to write a social media press release from Copyblogger
The definitive guide to social media releases by Brian Solis

SMR Services

PitchEngine
PRXBuilder
RealWire
PressKit’n (late addition)

Samples of the SMR

Oracle
Centrum Vitamins
USA.gov
Vauxhall

And here’s a case study from Geoff Livingston.