I’m knocking out this week’s Wrap from a hotel room in Cary, North Carolina. Feel free to check out Links from Shel, the link blog where I save all the various posts and articles from which I choose the items to appear in the Wrap (as well as those I’ll talk about on For Immediate Release.

The Social Media News Release lives; we just don’t call it that any more

A controversy swirled around the idea of the Social Media News Release (SMNR), which was derided as little more than lipstick on a pig. Some argued that the whole idea of the press release had run its course in the era of social media. A few years later, nobody talks about the SMNR any more, but press releases in general have incorporated its various ideas, and for good reason. PR Newswire‘s analysis of the press releases it has distributed for its clients and found that adding multimedia—a key component of an SMNR—will boost its visibility. Adding a photo ups the number of views by 1.8 times, a video multiples the views by 4.3 times and a combination of both earns 7.4 more views than just a traditional plain-text release. The biggest gains, though, with a combination of image, video and downloadable content, such as a PDF, an ebook or the like. That multiple media approach gets up to 9.7 times the views of a traditional plain-text release. Remember, the idea of an SMNR was not to be social in and of itself, but to provide the resources to allow somebody else to create social content.

Just because it’s a press release doesn’t make it true

Back in the days when news releases were called press releases—because only the press saw them—you could pretty much count on their authenticity. Today, when anybody can distribute a news release that anyone can see? Not so much. Fake news releases are nothing new, but one that hit the web this week duped a lot of people, suggesting that vigilence is a new requirement when consuming content distributed under the guise of a release. The readiness to accept the release was partly the result of its source: PRWeb, one of the major players in the news release distribution business. The release announced that Google had paid $400 million for WiFi provider ICOA. Who ran the release? Associated Press, for one. TechCrunch for another. C|Net reports that PRWeb, in disavowing the release, said it was hornswoggled by someone claiming to represent ICOA. The CEO of Vocus—which owns PRWeb—has promised to improve the company’s processes.

Washington, D.C. digs into social data just like businesses do

It’s becoming more and more common for businesses to analyze massive volumes of social data in order to detect issues and identify opportunities for improvements. But a city? To be sure, Washington D.C.—not part of any state—is unique among American cities. Now it may be the first to apply the analysis we usually hear about from companies like Dell and Cisco Systems to municipal issues. A Wall Street Journal article notes that “The local government in the nation’s capital is paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to a startup to gather comments on Twitter, Facebook and other online message boards as well as the government’s own website. The data help form a letter grade for the bureaucracies that handle drivers licenses, building permits and the like.” One department that got a C-minus in its first grade responded to the data by reassigning people to jobs where they won’t interact with the public and making improvements to its website. Reflecting a commitment to transparency, the grades are posted to Grade.DC.Gov, which is open to the public. The effort is costing significant sums of money, but substantive improvements to public services should blunt most criticism of the expense.

Accounting for mobile adds hundreds of thousands to the number of people online

The rankings that calculate the number of people visiting websites mostly haven’t accounted for mobile access, according to PaidContent. ComScore has released numbers based on new metrics designed to remedy the situation, and the results “shake up the existing rankings in some dramatic ways.” Pandora, for instance, ranked 61st in ComScore’s listing of the most visited websites, but once you add mobile to the mix, the music site leaps to the 23rd spot. ESPN moved up four places. Others that gained impressive numbers by factoring in the growing mobile audience include Wal-Mart, Amazon and eBay; “the three companies all had an incremental mobile audience of more than 20 percent.”

Most gamified apps will fail to do what they’re designed to do

When a marketing or communication technique gets big, there’s one guaranteed outcome: Most of what gets developed will suck. I don’t care whether you’re talking about websites, Facebook pages or QR codes. Or, for that matter, gamification. As the discipline of gamification grows, with the resulting college classes, books and boutiques, you can expect the majority of gamification efforts to be slapdash examples of not getting it. And now, Gartner has projected the percentage of gamified apps that won’t manage to do what they were designed to: 80%. TechCrunch cites Gartner research VP Brian Burke, who says it mostly will be a matter of bad design. “companies/developers get fixated on bells and whistles like points and badges, while not creating meaningful enough motivations and objectives. Without the latter, the former become meaningless,” Ingrid Lunden writes, channeling Burke, who remains positive about gamification in general. “People are just doing it badly,” Burke said.

Thanksgiving sets record for Instagram photo sharing

Social visual communication is heating up and Thanksgiving Day in the U.S. offers more proof. During the holiday, 10 million photos were shared at a clip of 226 per second, according to The Next Web.

Feeling information overload? Maybe you’re doing it wrong

A new study finds that some people who experience information overload can blame the platform on which they’re consuming their content rather than the glut of content itself. The University of Texas study, “News and the Overloaded Consumer: Factors Influencing Information Overload Among News Consumers,” asked about the ways consumers use 15 technology platforms. “Three showed a positive correlation as predictors of overload: computers, e-readers, and Facebook,” according to a Nieman Journalism Lab report. “Two showed a negative correlation: television and the iPhone. The rest — which included print newspapers, Twitter, iPads, netbooks, and news magazines, among others — showed no statistically significant correlations.” What does it mean? “Even if you read The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, The New York Times, and ESPN in a day, you may not feel as inundated with news if you read on your phone instead of on your desktop (with 40 tabs open, no doubt). The more contained, or even constrained, a platform feels, the more it can contribute to people feeling less overwhelmed,” according to study co-author Avery Holton.

Convene a Congressional panel! The government is spending money on PR and advertising!

It took an investigation by the Washington Guardian and the Medill News Service to reveal that the U.S. government has spent $16 billion of taxpayer money in the last 10 years on PR and advertising. (How dare those government agencies communicate with their constituents so those citizens will know what services are available to them?) To be fair, the study—as reported by The Washington Times, is critical of government processes, not the potential value of PR and advertising. For example, “The Veterans Affairs Department has spent $25 million on advertising since 2011 to encourage more retired troops to take advantage of its mental health services, luring new customers into a system that is suffering historic backlogs for the people it already tries to serve.” But the Times report seems confounded that the money spent on external services is in addition to in-house communication staff. Have they never noticed that staff communicators in the private sector includes agency management among their responsibilities? Of course, there’s the expected posturing, like that from a U.S. senator who lamented the spending given the federal debt. But seriously, government entities are like any other organization. The services they offer won’t do any good if the people they’re intended to serve don’t know about them. Right?