With the evolution of media has come the evolution of the news release. Just like successful corporate entities incorporation of community value within their social media outreach, the news release has begun its evolution towards a second generation incarnation.

The Press Release

Traditionally, the press release was a mass communication tool, blasted out over a wire mechanism to media outlets. Businesses and organizations filled their news releases with positioning statements, posturing to the media and their perceived publics. It was a very corporate-centric activity, and as PR became an increasingly popular marketing tactic in the eighties and nineties, news releases really started to diminish in value. They were no longer news, mostly because companies and PR pros didn’t understand what media outlets considered news to be, and the news needs of companies’ communities.

As a result, increasingly over the past seven years the news release has become a weaker and weaker form of promotion. This is particularly true when a business or its agency issues a release that has no real news value to the media or associated communities. Unfortunately, as any seasoned PR pro or journalist worth their salt will tell you, this is all too common.

News is something that’s new, and as media are dedicated to business trends or events of significance that their communities care about, they use filters to tune out the increasingly larger number of corporate releases thrown at them. Though the press release does have some search engine optimization and secondary direct community outreach value, it’s not optimized for ultimate results. Thus the diminished value of news releases.

Enter Social Media

Enter our new media environment and the great amount of content being created in blogs, podcast and video networks, and then the dissemination and discussion of them via social networks. Suddenly there are many more ways to propagate a message to many audiences. But the news releases doesn’t work for new media communities either, for the same reason that traditional media increasingly don’t use press releases as a primary source.

Originally created by Todd Defren of SHIFT Media, the social media release combines the best elements of new media and significantly streamlines the valuable elements of the news release. While there are many variants of the original template, social media releases are an attempt to provide these communities information that matters to them. As Brian Solis says on his PR 2.0 blog, this information is provided to communities, “in the ways that they use to digest and in turn share with others through text, links, images, video, bookmarks, tags, etc., while also giving them the ability interact with you directly or indirectly.�

The social media release provides new media community members dynamic information, including a statements of value, additional sources, multimedia content (podcast, video, graphics, etc.). Readers are provided social media methods of publishing via network tags ( a la Digg, Reddit, etc.), and can use these elements independently or as a whole, really to their tastes. And media members like them, too.

Coca-Cola entered by taking an approach other than buying real estate and creating a store. Working with the crayon agency, Coca-Cola opted to break into the 3D metaverse by getting out amongst the population. During the Second Life launch event, one blogger in attendance told crayon agency team member Shel Holz that that the event was like a class in “How to do social media right.� Shel’s very successful blog details the results to date, which have already been significant, in turn validating the experimental social media release.

What It Means

The combination of outbound promotion and social network attraction creates a new dynamic marketing mechanism. This next generation press release is much more valuable to its audiences, is community centric, and enables widespread dissemination. It creates multiple methods of pulling in community members who may be interested in your service, product or ideas.

In a blog entry dedicated to social media releases, Online Marketing Blog writer Lee Odden said, “By optimizing your media release and adding social media, you can increase the distribution channels and take advantage of increased visibility to demand driven traffic. A PR strategy that involves both push and pull provides many more opportunities for coverage than any single tactic.�

This does not mean that the press release should be abandoned. Indeed the social media release still must be defined and evolved further before widespread adoption occurs. Find in this October entry what we believe to be the content benchmarks of a media-attention-worthy news release. But if you’re involved in new media promotion (and if you’re not, strap in, you will be), then the social media release must be considered a viable tactic to reach out to your community.

If you’d like to learn more and want to go beyond what’s listed, visit Chris Heuer’s Elements of a Social Media Release.

LComm + Weekly Quotes

Not much is going on at LComm. We expand our office space on June 1. Until then we will be very, very busy.
Here are the quotes to get your week started:

• “All evolution in thought and conduct must at first appear as heresy and misconduct,â€? George Bernard Shaw.
• “The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations,â€? George Santayana.
• “Change is at the very core of evolution and without it, all creatures would look alike and behave the same way,â€? Martin Dansky.