The emerging conversation about the importance of curating content can help settle some of the claims and misunderstandings of the social media news release (SMNR).

The most recent assault on the SMNR was levelled by Jeff Mascott of Adfero Group. Mascott wrote:

... eliminating narrative content altogether is a mistake.

Reducing content to bulleted lists fosters cynicism about the press. By trying to make life easier for journalists, the PR industry is basically sending the message that a reporter???s role involves little more that copying and pasting someone else???s text.

In addition, bulletpoints are usually just flat-out boring. Without context, a collection of standalone facts and quotes makes for a dry, choppy read. No one wants to spend their time reading unreadable content ??? not the general public nor journalists. Bullets can also create technical problems for syndicating content via email, making social media press releases largely unshareable.

The flaw in this argument is simple enough: Nobody ever suggested that a SMNR requires bullet points. Nor does listing a summary of news facts mean that a SMNR cannot use narrative to tell a story.

These mistaken beliefs about the SMNR have run rampant since Todd Defren released the first template back in 200x. Other objections run the gamut from “it doesn’t help with your SEO efforts” to “there’s nothing social about a social media press release.”

I’ve noted several times that the whole issue never would have erupted had we opted to call the damn thing a Social Media Press Kit instead of a release. But now, with content curation heating up as a core communication activity, it might be easier to explain what the SMNR is trying to accomplish.

The idea of curating content arises from the fact that there is so much content out there, from so many different sources, that people will readily avail themselves of a service that finds, collects, filters, selects, and republishes or links to valuable content on a particular topic.

If you’ve ever looked at a SmartBrief bulletin or Ragan’s PR Daily (or their other daily bulletins), you get a sense of what curating can do. These real-time curation efforts not only find high-quality content around a given theme, but add context to it by explaining why each item is interesting or important before linking to it.

The New York Times Topics pages are another form of curation. Rather than identify content produced by others, Topics collects only Times content, but includes multimedia and other material. Looking at the AIDS/HIV Topics page, for example, there’s a link to the Times’ AIDS Health Guide, video, audio, interactive resources, and links to external resources like the World Health Organization, in addition to an archive of AIDS-related articles that have appeared in the Times. The articles and multimedia are each introduced with a blurb explaining what it’s about.

The SMNR is also all about curation. It was never intended to replace a traditiona, narrative press release. In fact, the narrative press release should be one of the elements incorporated and linked to from within the SMNR, along with photos, videos, audio, graphics, and other company material, regardless of where it was published, that is pertinent to the theme of the release. For example, if the product manager wrote a blog post about the launch of a new product, that should be included in the SMNR. Far from eliminating narrative material from the press release, the ability to incorporate all of these elements actually increases it.

In addition, the SMNRs I’ve produced have included links to two Delicious accounts, one for additional external resources to aid in a reporter or blogger’s research, another listing the articles and posts that have been written based on the release.

Those elements of a SMNR that mirror parts of a traditional release—executive quotes, for example, and boilerplate information—also qualify as curated content, since they come from other sources.

The whole idea is to provide one-stop shopping for anybody planning to report on whatever it is the organization is announcing by pulling into one place all the material—and links to material—related to the topic and providing context around all those links, quotes, news facts, and so on.

And let’s not forget, even if the adoption of the SMNR has been slow and organic rather, they do work. A Text 100 report showed that social media release produces greater usage; they also allow businesses “the opportunity to in essence tier target bloggers with unique opportunities or angles.” The Text 100 study showed bloggers prefer social media releases to traditional releases.

And a study from RealWire, a UK-based wire service that offers a Social Media Release option, analyzed 997 releases his company distributed from December 2008 to May 2009, 71 of which were SMRs. The results suggest that the SMRs earned double the coverage of traditional releases.

What the studies don’t show is how a blogger or reporter got to the SMNR in the first place. They could easily have found the SMNR by following a link from the traditional release posted on the company’s media site or Google News or the press release distribution service’s site.

Ultimately, though, the reason SMNRs work is that they serve as the curated resource of all the company’s content on the topic, not just a rejiggering of the material contained in a traditional release. None of which is inconsistent with Mascott’s recommendations for a “better” social media release.