Social Media Releases Turn PR Online
Think Web 2.0 for Effective Media Relations, Reputation Management
Jun 7, 2009
Social media releases grew from traditional media and video releases to allow ultimate flexibility for public relations professionals with rich content that includes:
- Text from a more traditional news release
- Social media tags for RSS feeds and aggregator sites
- Pulled quotes from the text of the news release for easy use by media
- An organizational profile paragraph, often called a boilerplate
- Podcasts with sound bites by organizational spokespeople
- Video clips and smaller, print-ready and high resolutions photos that illustrate the news release
- Links, white papers and other background information for more in-depth media coverage beyond the media release
- Enabled comments to have a conversation about the media release
- An updated Technorati list of blogs that link to the news release
- Sharing button to allows the release to be sent by users to a number of different social networks
The biggest reason that organizations should broaden from traditional media releases to social media releases is the technology's ability to engage in a dialogue to improve how news is communicated.
Online Public Relations With Social News Releases
This broader approach allows organizations to engage with the traditional media in a richer manner and extends messages to include bloggers and other vital social media. A social media news release resembles a homepage or dashboard, with all content relevant to the media release available on one screen.
Some large retail organizations, such as automobile companies, used social media releases for large product launches. Other examples come from government and large non-profit agencies.
An excellent example of the power of these more engaging news releases comes from the US Center for Disease Control. It used the format to communicate information about the H1N1 swine flu using embeddable widgets, video and high quality, small images.
Social Media Opportunities Broaden Media Relations
To begin creating a social media release, the content needs to be well developed with high quality editorial standards and a factual, not promotional, tone. Next, consider the content and format such as the multimedia additions that allow for easy use by reporters and other online audiences.
Think about how to promote the release using accurate and updated media lists. Finally, track the releases’ impact through media monitoring to assess who used each element of the content.
Start small with social media releases by using one of the free services available on the internet such as Pressitt.com and consider the fact that use of this new media release format will mature as key online audience needs become more refined and known. The results will be more effective public relations and highly targeted reputation management.
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