Traditional Media Release or Social Media Release?
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You may have heard about the Social Media Release and are wondering whether you should be using that instead of a traditional press release?
No, you shouldn’t replace your press release with a Social Media Release; you should be doing BOTH!
First, some background on what a Social Media Release is.
It takes the essence of an old-fashioned press release (providing and distributing information about your company to garner publicity) and reorganizes it in a way that makes it compatible with Social Media.
Essentially, it takes a plain-text press release and turns it into a blog post, with all of the capabilities that a bog has, including the ability to comment, and aggregate inbound links.
The Social Media Release (or SMR) was developed by Todd Defren at Shift Commuications in 2006. A template of the SMR can be found at http://www.pr-squared.com/. Todd gives lots of great tips on how to use it and lets you use it free of cost.
More advice that he give is to not use the SMR when you submit the release to the news wire services. Instead, put together a traditional press release and add a link to the corresponding SMR in it. This way, you get all the benefits of the SMR without having to pay the fees to the wire services for using one while still getting all the benefits of their wide distribution.
So what can the SMR do that a traditional press release can’t?
Well, when posted to a social media newsroom (check out Todd’s link above for more information about that) a SMR can allow you to use all sorts of multimedia options, like video, audio, and graphics.
So why should you bother to do both?
Well, we all know that press releases are great for improving SEO and your Google ranking (beyond the obvious benefit of getting your message out there, of course); a SMR is like a press release on crack.
With a traditional press release, you are submitting to the news wire services in the format that they are used to, and not paying any hefty fees, but with a SMR, you have interactive capabilities up the wazoo that will drive the SEO benefits through the roof.
Now, in order to maximize the SEO benefit that you get, you need to make sure that you’re writing with your site’s SEO considerations and keywords in mind. But make sure that you’re not trying to stuff in keywords that aren’t organic to the release – it will sound fake and undermine the publicity efforts of the release. You can also include rich media content (like images or videos or podcasts) that will raise the pick up for Google Images and Google video; again, just make sure everything is tagged with the right keywords.
Here are a couple great additional resources for learning more about Social Media Releases…
Definitely agreed with you, john.
Social media release is a great tool to ‘advertise’ our website. But normally it is suitable for “service website”. Is it applicable to blog like us ?
Your right in saying the SMNR should coincide with the traditional release. The SMNR is a place to stimulate online conversation. Another similar alternative to Pitch Engine is Pressitt which is a free service to create and publish Social Media News Release.
Well, its kind of two different things. A press release, maybe 500 words to tell about the product and then your blog to have maybe hundreds of articles.