To announce the forthcoming public beta release of FortiusOne’s GeoCommons site at Where 2.0 this week, we decided to engage in the new social media release (SMR) format. Our goal was to create excitement in anticipation of the release.
It seemed like a logical move as one of GeoCommons’ core communities will be publishers of social media, for the most part bloggers, as well as contemporary media. So we opted to make the announcement as an SMR, optimizing it’s format for maximum success. Further, the use of an image in the release seemed to play to GeoCommons strengths, showing the powerful information conveyed on a singular map.
After a couple of weeks of research, getting used to the bulleted form, researching press wire services, and determining how to push the information out to target audiences, we executed a GeoCommons SMR late last Monday. As you can see it was a highly visual document.
The overall success of the project was outstanding. We received significant media coverage in a variety of traditional and new media forms. This included Information Week, Directions Magazine, O’Reilly Radar, Google Earth Blog, Mashable and 3 Point D [Since publishing, Wired joined the mix]. Several more stories are in the works. Overall, the blogosphere picked up the story creating scores of mentions in a very short time period.
Further, our outreach to the blogging community was value-based, not simply pitch centric, inviting the community to use the maps for their own purposes in whatever way they wanted. As such we started a dialog with several bloggers, and anticipate they will give GeoCommons a whirl. We really see this as a peering technology, and the world of social networks will drive the actual usage of GeoCommons maps to its tastes. So we anticipate that GeoCommons will be found valuable to bloggers and other social network users, and that the maps will start being used in place of older push-pin types of mash-ups.
The end result was the site got hit hard when we turned the lights on this week, bringing a total of well over 1000 potential users into GeoCommons [Note: As of 11:07 p.m. on 5/29 we had more than 2000 potential unique users visit GeoCommons].
Lessons Learned
Here are some experience-based tips from our GeoCommons SMR effort:
1) Reporters got the gist of the SMR. It seemed like we had less conversations about having to resend the release, and more discussions right off the bat about how the technology works. We also got many more proactive calls from the media. I attribute this to how the SMR’s bulleted form quickly distills facts and eliminates the need to de-spin stories. Bullets also help writers spin their own stories.
2) Use the multimedia options and show SMR readers your story. The embedded intelligent map greatly helped this announcement.
3) While Vocus’ PRWeb seemed like the best option with its hard-core social network tagging and search engine optimization capability, it was not optimal. As you can see, the SMR was garbled by their quoting technology, slamming the text between the quote and the map. This hurt the effort as we did not promote the PRWeb version of the SMR with its Digg, del.icio.us and other social media tags, instead referring community members to the FortiusOne site version, which was more aesthetic.
4) PRWeb’s editorial team almost rejected the SMR on Sunday, the day before release. We had to appeal the decision on Monday, and scrambled to find an alternative. This was after researching and confirming with PRWeb the week prior that they could send the SMR via their web service. It also made the firm look bad to the client. Points three and four are the pains of breaking new ground, but until PRWeb can iron these wrinkles out we’ll use MarketWire.
5) Because FortiusOne was in stealth mode for a few months, we needed to come out with a bang. This presented issues as the social network community and media corps had not heard from us in a while. We preceded the GeoCommons announcement with a funding release that was picked up by Red Herring and the Washington Business Journal. This eased our credibility factor when community members did a quick search on FortiusOne.
All in all, it was a very successful effort, and there’s no question that we’ll suggest usage of this format with all of our clients. We think this is a great and better way to help companies communicate.
Congrats! The first one is always the hardest.
We have found MarketWire to be the best for SMRs, as well as the most cost effective. It will be interesting to see how the wires stay relevant as this format takes off.
/kff
Fantastic. I am dazzled and grateful.
Fantastic! Using social networking to break through the clutter of social networking!
Congratulations, Geoff, on your launch.
I see from visiting the PRWeb-hosted PR page (http://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/5/prweb527737.htm) you have since disabled the pull-quote feature that mangled your bullet points. We at PRWeb are all ears if there are other aspects of the PRWeb-hosted version you would have liked done differently to support your SMR format.
Regards,
joeb at prweb.com
Thanks — I really needed a real-life example. I’ve been promoting the idea of social media releases and incorporating more social media into our website for several months now. I think I’ve got most of the marcomm and some of the exec team on board, but now we’re working on execution. And yes, like many companies we still struggle with the issue of access to social media for our employees.
Michelle
Thank you all for your great comments, and also for the kudos. We’re honored. I’d like to say the marketing team at FortiusOne, and specifically Marketing VP Jim Ishikawa and CEO Sean Gorman deserve praise for being visonary and allowing us do this. Also, I will give kudos to PRWeb for reading this and reacting, shifting their service to meet the market’s needs.
Lastly, we had a client see this case study and decide to move towards the SMR format. I think that’s our real goal here, to share best practices and make more people successful.
Hi Geoff,
Congratulations on a successful SMR! I have to say that your format was good for this release, but most importantly it’s your content that is good.
Like any news release – whether traditional or non-traditional – if your content is presented well and you have a clear and co-hesive message, you will have some success.
There has been too much focus on the form of the news release and not enough attention to the content and message. A successful message will always ring true. While there are many methods for SEO and making your news “social” the message is still what counts most. This is something that we try to work with our clients on while making their news as accessible as possible.
Bravo on a successful campaign.
Michael Pranikoff, Director of Emerging Media
PR Newswire
I agree, Michael. The only knocks we’ve gotten were on the tags not being in the release on F1’s site (though they were in the PRWeb version on the wires). Did it matter? No, we had a great story and people acknowledged it.
More importantly, if PR pros hadn’t corrupted the current version of the news release with so much — shall we say SPIN (short for Stupid PR Infiltrating News) — then we wouldn’t be in a situation where reporters don’t bother to read. Further, even if the SMR takes off, if flacks treat it the same way then this new form will have little success in the long term, relegating it to news release status.
Am about to launch an SMR for a client – do you still think Marketwire handles them most effectively? Thanks so much for sharing all of this with the rest of us.
Yes, Marketwire is good and PRWeb has also made significant strides.