Tag Archives: Todd Defren

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.

Three stellar social media eBooks

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One reason it can be so intimidating for organizations to get started in social media is that there’s just so much information out there. Parsing through it all and trying to figure out what’s absolutely essential to understanding the basics can take a lot of time. Here are three eBooks that I’ve found extremely useful. They cut to the chase and give you the goods on social media:

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Brink: A Social Media Guide From The Edge

Todd Defren, SHIFT Communications
Key Topics: Blogger relations; multimedia content marketing; social media news releases
Share this with: Internal communications team or PR agency counsel
Why it’s stellar: It’s absolutely unbelieveable how much goodness Todd packs into 40 pages. What I love about this eBook is that it gives several great case studies of how the folks at SHIFT have integrated social media with traditional PR methods. It’s not all pie-in-the-sky stuff, though. The last half is focused on innovative tactics, with more case studies to back them up.

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Getting a Foothold in Social Media

Amber Naslund, Altitude Branding
Key Topic: Building online communities
Share this with: Upper-level managers who need basic SM rundown; community and customer service leaders
Why it’s stellar: This 16-page eBook is packed with links to plenty of online resources. But what makes it great is that it’s so simple. Amber lays out a high-level game plan for getting started. At each step of the plan, she tells you why that step is important and clear steps you can take to incorporate it into your existing marketing efforts.

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The Essential Guide to Social Media

Brian Solis, PR2.0
Key Topics: Social sciences behind the social technologies; customer research; social mapping
Share this with: Senior marketing staff
Why it’s stellar: Really, I could have listed any of Brian’s five eBooks here. But I like the ”Essential Guide” because it delves into the principles of effective social media participation. He of course lists all the tools and platforms available but the real meat is that Brian lays out the purpose of these tools, the social sciences behind why people are drawn to communicate online and the importance of listening and customer research. He also touches on the resources (both time and money) needed to have a successful social media presence and the importance of having appropriate company user policies and guidelines when engaging online.

Also check out this Mashable.com list from a while back that lists even more eBook resources.

Feel free to share your links to other great resources in the comments.

Don’t let the “experts” intimidate you

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brainThere’s been much discussion on blogs and Twitter recently about people proclaiming themselves social media experts or gurus or a host of other terms. Is there such a thing? Can anyone already claim to be an expert in such a nascent space? Will shoddy “experts” tarnish the reputations of those who really and truly are adept at using social media to enhance communications strategies? Is it bragging or bravado to call yourself (or allow someone to call you) a social media expert?

The reality is that many people who are actively engaged in social media could be considered an expert at some level– simply by the fact that they’re learning about the tools and using them. When you spend all day on Twitter with people like Todd Defren, Jason Falls, Beth Harte, Amber Naslund and Mack Collier, it’s easy to forget that some 5.99 BILLION people in the world don’t use Twitter and probably have no idea what it is capable of. Or that 5.82 BILLION people do not have Facebook accounts. They have never heard of FriendFeed, Flickr, Delicious, MySpace or Plurk. Heck, I have customers who run businesses and they don’t have an e-mail address! Even if you only know one-tenth-of-one percent as much as the Todds, Jasons, Beths, Ambers and Macks of the world, you are still ahead of the curve.

Now I am not saying that just because you have a Twitter account and a blog that you should christen yourself a social media expert and start selling or representing yourself as such. But you CAN teach people about social media and demonstrate its effectiveness. You CAN share your knowledge with co-workers and customers and suggest ideas for how to incorporate social media into existing communications and outreach efforts. Don’t be afraid to try things out simply because you’re not an “expert” about social media.

Experts are those whom others go to for advice because they are more knowledgeable about a particular topic than the average Joe or Jane. As Scott Hepburn said, “They chop lettuce.” The people I listed above are social media experts to me, and I have a huge amount of respect for their knowledge and skills in this space. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t add any value to people who know less than I do about the topic. I can give my co-workers blogging tutorials and explain social networking to my customers and try to help my parents figure out what it means to subscribe to my blog.

The only way people typically become expert at anything is to try something, fail a few times, learn from mistakes, and try again. No one is born as an expert at anything– expertise only comes as a result of knowledge and experiences.

Remember to keep things in perspective: the vast majority of the world is still in the dark on social media. So don’t let the social media experts intimidate you. Learn from them and then don’t be afraid to let others learn from you.

Image: Flickr user dierk_schaefer