Is the Social Media News Release a Waste of Time?

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The Social Media News Release (SMNR) has significant benefits over the standard press release format. For companies there’s the SEO factor, the ease of distribution, the ability to embed high resolution images and video, and the potential for sharing across the social web. And for journalists there’s the potential to gain additional information quickly and easily through embedded links, and the ability to download supporting multimedia files without having to request them. So I was somewhat amazed to discover recently that as many as seven in ten journalists and bloggers prefer to receive news releases simply via text in an email.

I carried out some research via Twitter that asked how writers prefer to receive written information from agencies and organisations. And the results were conclusive: a press release as text in an email is preferred by 73% of respondents. Only 16% preferred the SMNR format, with the remaining 11% preferring a word document (a figure I find equally as astounding). The figures are even more surprising when you consider that 80% of the 89 respondents qualified themselves as “primarily a blogger or an online journalist” rather than a print journalist, which is a group I would have expected to have been more ‘enlightened’.

So where does that leave those of us working in PR? Having evangelised the benefits of the SMNR both within the agency and to clients over the last year or so, am I left with egg on my face?

I still totally believe in SMNRs. The benefits of correctly formatted, properly keyword-targeted and ALT tag optimised online news are significant to search engine optimisation. And it allows easy sharing and bookmarking across the social web. It’s something that adds a further, valuable layer to a conventional news release. But the research can’t be ignored: if writers want information in email format, then that’s what we have to give them. So, for now at least, we’re combining the two approaches at BOTTLE. We’re formatting news releases as SMNRs and uploading them to the web, but we’re copying the main body text into an email and sending that with a link to the full SMNR. It seems a little backward to me, but so be it...

[UPDATE: Read a response to this post by Adam Parker from RealWire]

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