The social media release is not a PR panacea

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In the first few weeks of my new job at readMedia, I’ve been learning tons about the role press releases play in our clients’ local media relations strategies. Although many PR and media bloggers have decried the death of the press release in favor of new tactics like the social media release, from what I’ve seen so far those claims are quite premature.

All the discussion about social media releases seems to come from the perspective of big brands launching new products and trying to get feature coverage. It was no different when I was reading Putting the Public Back in Public Relations. From Chapter 8:

Most news releases are driven by product development, which can cause an inward and narrowly focused view from life inside the company.

But thousands of PR and communications professionals just don’t work in this kind of environment. Many of them work for organizations whose activities form the basis of bread-and-butter local news stories: non-profits, schools, governments, small businesses. (A recent Pew Research Center study found that three-quarters of local news is triggered by government and schools.) The PR strategy at these organizations isn’t focused on trying to get consumers or B2B customers to buy their product and thus aren’t putting out the kind of releases that PPBPR (rightfully) lambastes:

Company X Launches World’s First, Industry-Leading, Innovative Thingamabob That Will Change Our Lives for the Better

The news these organizations are making is the kind of news that likely used to be covered by a local newspaper or TV beat reporter: the results of a state agency investigation or the growth of a local college. But as newsroom resources dwindle, local journalists are relying more on well-crafted press releases to alert them to and help them tell stories. And we all know that often press releases are given a quick copy edit (or not) and reprinted, sometimes in their entirety, as news.

Where the SMR falls short

What the social media release encourages is “atomizing” content into bite-sized pieces so that bloggers and journalists can reassemble it. This may work for a journalist at Fortune or a blogger at Engadget who wants to dig into a trend or review a product, but a city desk reporter at a local daily or the publisher of a suburban weekly often just wants solid, relevant content they can quickly post or publish. They don’t want to have to piece together a story from bullet points, quotes, images and video.

I’m not knocking the concept of a social media release, entirely. I hold great respect for Todd Defren and Shel Holtz and others in the PR profession who’ve developed and worked to refine the concept. I absolutely think many components of SMRs are vital for PR pros to adopt: making sure releases are posted online for purposes of public viewing, search indexing and social network sharing; enhancing stories with multimedia content when appropriate and available; and providing links to additional resources are all important ways to augment a story.

But I just don’t think an SMR is the best approach for every organization – especially locally-focused ones. A lot of the hype about the SMR seems to be built around using it as a tool for news like product or campaign launches (like the Crayon/Coca-Cola example cited in PPBPR). That’s a very narrow slice of PR.

While the SMR isn’t necessarily supposed to be a replacement for traditional releases, there’s still a lot of argument about which is better and which will “win out.” The SMR may eventually become the superior choice for communicating certain types of news, but I still think it has a long way to go before unseating the traditional press release (enhanced for the digital age, of course) as a source of local news content.

19 thoughts on “The social media release is not a PR panacea”

  1. Here’s a thought that I’ve had for a long time. In advertising/marketing, we have Business to Business and Business to Consumer. In our agency, we have practitioners of both. So I was thinking this: a traditional press release is a B2B communication. It’s designed to go to someone who is at work. A SMR is a B2C communications piece. It’s advantage is that it can be shared by consumers on social networks. And it can be optimized for search. The conundrum comes in the language. A Traditional Press Release has rules, but in order to be shared, a SMR needs to be written a little differently.

    Just a thought.

    • Interesting thought. But I’d argue that the lines between “work” and “social networking” are blurring heavily. And a traditional release doesn’t have to mean a paper or email release – traditional releases can be posted online so that they can still be easily shared and optimized for search. It’s traditional in the sense that it’s a complete, well-crafted story that news outlets can readily use, versus an SMR that needs to be reconstituted.

      It would be interesting to see statistics, and I’m not sure how a study would be conducted, on what type of release is shared more. I’d bet that consumers are more willing to share a complete story (be it from a news outlet or an online release) than a link to an SMR. Though an SMR would let people share only the pieces that interest them (an image, etc.), sharing the pieces seems like it would strip a lot of context, no?

      • The lines between work and social networking are blurring. No question. So I’ll say this: a press release, regardless of the manner it’s delivered, has the goal of catching a person’s attention so they’ll write about it. A SMR has the goal of catching someone’s attention so they’ll talk about it. Are the two different?

        Not sure. Just throwing it out there to the room.

  2. Amy,

    Great insight here. I think you’ve really hit the nail on the head with SMR not being the be all/end all, and I had no idea about the idea that 3/4 of the local news is generated by a few sources, that’s really interesting. One aspect that I think you left out about the SMR is that it can’t have the same impact on organic search for a company as a traditional release. Obviously this has become a big topic for many organizations as they look to build traction with certain links and keywords. Press releases are an easy way to get a lot of exposure to spiders, and thus traction up the rankings. So when a traditional press release has solid news and is accompanied with a solid link building strategy then it can still be a very, very powerful tool for any organization.

    Unfortunately I think that at the heart of the debate on press releases is the validity of the news they promote. You pointed out a great example with your generic headline about the innovative thingamabob (hilarious by the way). Sometimes it just isn’t “news” and I think that’s where the disconnect lies. So be it a traditional release or a SMR, if it’s not news, it’s not getting covered no matter how you package it. Hopefully we can all get back to the day when a press release actually meant something, and it only encompassed news that was meant to be covered.

    • Jay – you’re certainly right about news releases being a critical tool for SEO and organic search – and reputation management, as well. A traditional release can offer these benefits if it’s published online (all of our clients’ releases are sent directly to news outlets but also posted online and almost immediately indexed, for example). Pairing the news-ready format of a traditional release with an online strategy that gives it some legs and allows it to be shared and spidered is a good way for organizations to hit media and directly reach the public.

      And the validity and relevance of the news is absolutely key. Whether it’s an SMR or a traditional release, the content needs to be newsworthy. PR professionals still need to find the stories and story angles within their organization that are of interest and matter to audiences.

  3. Been thinking a LOT lateley about social media vs. traditional media, which I think is not all that different than how PR is being tackled by organizations.

    I think there are certainly times, if and when your audience is exclusive that you may well be able to hyper focus targeting into social channels, and specific ones at that. But overall I think we are going to see that much the same way that cable television fractured the broadcast television landscape, social media is going to fragment how business communications is handled, including PR.

    I think it is a bold assumption by anyone practicing in the space to assume it will be a natural evolution that is unavoidable. I’d also argue from a sociological perspective, we are very likely to see the generation that is currently pre-teen potentially reject the idea digital social interconnetivity.

    We are in a transitional moment. Transitions are not always absolute and everlasting.

  4. Great post and something all PR folk should be assimilating towards in respect to the PR profession. I agree with you on the role of the traditional press release/media advisory/pitch, but I also see the importance of SMR and how it relates to further layering your brand/news to the masses or intended small pocket audiences. In the end, it all comes down to content and the strength in which our messaging is presented. The message is wasted if it isn’t crafted carefully and with purpose.

  5. Amy — Thank you thank you thank you thank you!

    As someone who works primarily in the government/NGO/non-profit/association sectors AND on a very local/regional level, I’ve been struggling with how to best apply social media to everything I do with any real impact. I’ve listened to all the Sermons from the Mount by all the Social Media Rockstars pronouncing on the death of the traditional release. You know what? When you only have eight local media outlets that will be interested in your story, sending them each a news release directly and making a phone call is actually MORE efficient than developing a SMR.

    As you say — it’s shifting, and the best path is likely a blend of old and new. I think the basic premise of good news release writing is the only thing that will remainthe same: whatever medium you use to communicate with the media, just don’t try to blow smoke up anybody’s ass.

    • Thanks for the comment, Cam. I think sending a well-written release that reporters can use easily is important, but even in small locations it’s important to have the news online, too. I don’t want to confuse “SMR” with “online release” though. While an online release has similarities/components of an SMR (like SEO optimization, multimedia, etc.), to me the difference is more in the content and how it’s structured. A traditional release should be written in a ready-to-go format so that a reporter could run it. SMRs take a lot more work for the reporter to reassemble, since they usually aren’t in the format of a fully written news story.

      Again, the most important thing is making sure stories are newsworthy and compelling and that you’re targeting people that your news is relevant to!

  6. Amy,

    Call me old school, but I fail to see the SMR’s being affective. I think that SM has taken on a very personal flavor, and I am curious to see how SMM is actually going to manifest itself. I think that there is a huge hurdle there that is keeping companies for actually acting instead of just talking about progressing into Social Media more. I think traditional press releases are still viewed as far more official and carry a ton more weight. Thanks for the post!

  7. Amy, I’m going to disagree with your stance that SMRs aren’t effective for local media coverage of governmental or educational stories and also that they aren’t effective for SEO purposes. Much depends on how an SMR is put together and how it’s shared. I’ve had great results for local clients through SMRs. The key is to still work with individual journalists, but all I have to send is one link… That includes the “traditional” release, high-rez images, any relevant additional resources, sites, documents, all in one place. It’s less about thinking people will share it than about making it easy for the journalist to do what I’m asking (write a great story) by collecting everything in one place. Those who want to be pitched/notified by SM are easy to reach with an SMR and those who prefer email or phone, well, it’s a short link :)
    I’ve had more than one journalist email me back after receiving the link thanking me for the thorough, easy way we put together information. And then they wrote great stories.
    And… The releases stay live, long after the news story is no longer “featured” on the local news stations’ web sites. Some have had thousands of views. I use pitchengine.com, incidentally.

    • Hi Mandy, thanks for weighing in. I’m not sure I was clear on my distinction between a traditional release and an SMR. A traditional release can certainly live online, have links and multimedia and be optimized for SEO. And you’re absolutely right in that it’s great for journalists to have everything in one place. The difference is how it’s written/presented – a “traditional” release is written in news-style, so that it closely resembles what a finalized news article might look like. An SMR (at least as I understand it based on Todd Defren’s template and the way Brian Solis discussed it in PPBPR) presents the story in a more broken-up format: a list of bullet points with news facts, a list of key quotes, a paragraph or two with some background information, plus the multimedia assets. But my argument is that type of structure or presentation adds a lot of work for a reporter to “put it back together” again into a story. I wasn’t necessarily defining traditional releases as paper or email/phone pitches.

      I absolutely agree with you that organizations need to have an online presence with their news in addition to making sure it gets to reporters in a format that’s easy for them to turn into a news story. At readMedia, all of our clients’ releases are published online (like the two I linked to above) and have a lot of features that you would see in an SMR (and they do live online forever). But they’re ALSO sent directly to journalists in full-text form with a permalink to the online version. A lot of SMRs leave out this direct distribution step and only publish online.

      My main point is that while the “atomized” and deconstructed format of an SMR, in terms of how it’s written, might work for a certain type of PR outreach (like a product launch), for a lot of local organizations it can be more effective for them to produce releases that are as close as possible to a finished news story (and of course make sure that these releases are online and include additional assets a reporter would need). Make sense?

  8. I agree with that assessment… While the format I use includes bullet points and an automatic push to Twitter & some news outlets, the main “story” is still written as a story. I think often (like so many things) it comes down to effectively using the tools and knowing your audience (and how/where they get their info). I’m not a fan of the “atomized” format, either, but definitely a believer in the SMR as a content aggregator & efficient distribution method. Thanks for sparking a discussion that needs to happen… It’s time for digital PR to grow up.

    • Mandy and Amy — great discussion. I think we’re all arriving at similar conclusions from different vectors. What it ultimately comes down to is doing what someone once described to me as serving the story to the media on a “digital platter.” In other words, provide the story in as many formats as available, so the journo who doesn’t like pdf’s has another option, and the journo who doesn’t like following links has another option, and the journo who likes following links and downloading media-ready images, video, audio and anything else she can get her hands on has that option as well. Cheers!

  9. A press release is only as good as the eyeballs that see it, whether it’s a traditional release or a social media release (although, most SMNRs aren’t really social…they’re just bite-sized multimedia releases).

    There’s so much focus on the packaging of a social media news release that many PR pros forget about distribution. Whether that distribution is via an RSS feed, search, or via personalized email to a targeted list of bloggers and journalists, you still need to get your news to the right audience.

    Is the traditional release dead? No. It’s just evolving.

    • Too true! The danger zone of social media excitement is the overly exuberant claims with what are becoming cliche terms – killer, epic, dead – as a mean of describing the massive importance social media plays as a game changing agent. It certainly has been and will continue to be, but we are really just talking evolution. The revolution is over, everybody gets that it CAN be powerful, now it is about how it happens from a practical perspective and over what timeline, while always watching for the swing back.