Social Media Releases

StoryCrafter, Edelman’s version of a social media press release service, has attracted a fair amount of atten­tion. There’s no lack of good comments already out there, but the subject’s inter­esting to me, so I thought I’d pitch in too.

First a round-​​up:

Social media press releases are designed to give journ­al­ists and bloggers the elements of a release in a mix-​​and-​​match format. You get the key facts, a selec­tion of quotes and pictures and contact details. The release itself acts a little like a blog post, with its own feed, comments and trackbacks.

It’s gen­er­ally felt to be a good thing because (a) EVERYBODY hates tra­di­tional press releases; (b) email, post and fax are all broken and © their format is inap­pro­priate to the online, inter­active news envir­on­ment that has developed over the last couple of years.

Steve Rubel — announces StoryCrafter and the idea behind it. He says: “Most import­antly, every press release gets feeds, tags, del.icio.us/digg buttons, track­backs and comments”.

Edelman — pub­lishes its press release about the product using the StoryCrafter service itself as the vehicle.

PRSquared — notes that the product is for Edelman clients only, which he finds dis­ap­pointing. Also that StoryCrafter isn’t a million miles away from the (cur­rently free) PRX Builder or indeed the Shift Communications template. [Comments I’ve seen else­where have included the words ‘blatant rip-​​off’.]

The Bivings Report — hopes this won’t lead to floods of haphazard releases and wonders why com­panies don’t just stick their press releases on their own site.

Tony Hung — hopes com­panies don’t think this is some sort of magic bullet for getting atten­tion from the social web and is par­tic­u­larly con­cerned about the ‘digg’ button which rather encour­ages com­panies to spam digg.

From my own per­spective, there are pros and cons. First of all, when I get a tra­di­tional press release, it’s the same as reading any other news item. It needs to grab my atten­tion. I get about 20 a day. Most of them get marked ‘read’ and for­gotten, even though I didn’t read beyond the first para­graph. I’ll pay atten­tion if either (a) the item fits in with some­thing I’m already writing about or planning to write about, or (b) it tells a com­pel­ling story in itself which I want to pass on. The ones I like, I put a flag on and come back and try to find it when it’s time to put the news together. It’s not a great system from anyone’s per­spective: there are constant inter­rup­tions, messages go unread, get lost, cause me hassle.

So there are some great pos­it­ives here in this approach. For example, one dif­fi­culty with the tra­di­tional press release is that the facts are normally wrapped up in a bunch of hyper­bole about some ‘unique, world-​​leading and innov­ative product/​service’. I have to strip out all that guff to work with the story (I’ll also attempt to get some more inform­a­tion — I’m not that lazy). This format works the other way round. They give me the facts, and I put the meat on it.

I also like it that the template shows com­panies what ingredi­ents journ­al­ists are going to ask for — you need the key facts and links to more; you need a selec­tion of pictures, ideally at dif­ferent res­ol­u­tions; you want quo­ta­tions, and not just from the CEO saying how won­derful it all is.

Lastly, I’m really into the idea of sub­scribing to RSS feeds instead of having releases pushed at me. If I could reliably set up a Google Alert Feed (or similar) on the keywords ‘edu­ca­tion IT release UK’ I could consign most email releases to the spam bin. Plus, they’d be a lot less likely to be lost in my inbox some­where come press week.

However, the wrapping around the story is not always a bad thing. When it’s done right and the release’s writers have thought through why you and your readers would be inter­ested, it helps journ­al­ists to see the news angle. ‘X releases new widget’ is not news. Click — delete. ‘New Widget Could Reverse Global Warming’ might be. Click — flag. Since I get around thirty times as many releases as I can actually write about, it’s obvi­ously the ones that stand out as best fitting my news agenda that get through.

That shows a poten­tial problem with the StoryCrafter format. If you send me a bag of flour, butter, onions and beef chunks, and tell me that I can make whatever I like with it, then I might get stuck if I haven’t got a recipe, and end up chucking the whole lot in the bin. If I’m busy, I might have pre­ferred it if you sent me a steak pie ready for me to stick in the oven. Sure, there’s lots of times when I’ll make my own, but who knows, you might have a better recipe than me, or a great idea for a dif­ferent dish I could make with those things.

Two last thoughts.. sorry this is a bit random…

Journalists and pub­lic­a­tions are com­pet­itive. I don’t want the same ingredi­ents as my com­pet­itor. I want some special herbs and spices that will make my story better than theirs. In other words, just as the tra­di­tional press release doesn’t give journ­al­ists everything they need, nor does the social media version.

Very lastly. The submit to del.icio.us and digg buttons in the Edelman service don’t seem like a good idea. If you’re saying these new-​​style releases are some of the ingredi­ents of a news story, why are you also treating it as though it’s a finished piece? Press releases aren’t the same as news pieces, though they may share many elements. And as Tony says in his comments (linked above), it smells strongly of spam when such releases are put onto these systems. But it also points to another issue. There’s no obvious way to find the releases in the first place. The problem with it being a pro­pri­etary solution rather than a cent­ral­ised co-​​operative venture called prdel.icio.us or some­thing is that if you deal with a 100 dif­ferent agencies, each with their own service and a dif­ferent feed, finding these releases is going to be as random and inef­fi­cient as the bad old days.

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