The #1 Reason You Don’t Need a Social Media Press Release
With the exception of a few people who just want to change the approach, just about everyone agrees that press releases need to change or they risk becoming completely irrelevant. Unfortunately, this staple of public relations is so ingrained in how agencies and PR managers go about promoting their brands that it will take a long time to kill off. When you think about it, it’s one of the only pieces of tangible work that many PR practice areas produce, especially in sectors where getting actual coverage, or “ink,” is rare.
In my first job in PR I had a Japanese electronics client that invested millions of dollars a year in their trade show appearances. They trotted out dozens of new and existing products at each of these shows and each one of them needed their own press release. Due to distance and the language barrier, we probably spent more than half our time, in a group of eight people, sending releases back and forth and editing and reformatting. When all was said and done, I doubt more than five, of the hundreds of releases we generated, were ever referenced in actual media coverage, which there was clipbooks full off.
Still today, people issue press releases for two primary reasons:
- To distribute an announcement
- To be persuasive about brand attributes
In terms of making an announcement, press releases do serve a function. For the simple fact that releases are picked up by Google News can alone probably justify the couple hundred dollars you have to spend. But it’s still dead content. You’ve basically just dumped indexable text on a third party site and crossed your fingers that someone finds it.
In reference to the second point, attempting to shape sentiment or being at all persuasive in a press release format is a total lost cause. A journalist can see a press release from a mile away and knows that it’s really only good for finding basic specs and official numbers. It would be embarrassing to be caught using a quote from a press release at any reputable news organization. The hours spent crafting the language of a press release and picking the perfect jargon is a waste of time.
This brings us to the social media release, or SMR, which is supposed to bring the press release into the 21st century. Brian Solis does a great job of breaking down the difference in the various SMR flavors in his “Definitive Guide to Social Media Releases.” What it basically boils down to is that the major SMR providers, which includes PR Newswire and BusinessWire, are trying to add as much blog functionality as possible. However, none of their offerings speak to the heart of the issue, which Brian sums up neatly here:
I think we’re learning “how” to create Social Media Releases, aesthetically at least. But, I don’t see many discussions that effectively and clearly say “why” we need them.
Exactly! Social media releases aren’t needed because blogging has replaced them. Although many of the SMR providers get close, none of them offer the flexibility and power of one of the major blogging platforms. If you’re looking for more distribution options, getting your press release bookmarked on Digg or Del.icio.us is going to be a lot harder on Marketwire’s platform than it would be if you had Movable Type installed on your corporate site.
Then there’s the issue of trust. You can dress up a press release with as many Web 2.0 applets as you can dream up but it’s still a press release and no one will trust anything but the hard facts contained in it. If you want to be persuasive (reminder: that’s one of your main roles as PR practitioner), people don’t want a canned quote from the CEO. They want to read something authored by the CEO that he stands behind and explains why your HDTV is better than the hundreds of competitors on the market or why this quarter’s earnings really do signal a turnaround for the company.
A commenter on Brian Solis’ blog followed up by saying that the audience wasn’t as important as some of the other benefits of the SMR, mainly being “findable.” I agree that creating content that indexes better is certainly important but without changing the format to something more credible you run into the same dead content issue. No one cares what Apple’s PR reps think of the new iPhone but they do want to hear what Steve Jobs thinks. Why put up a barrier? Steve Jobs is happy to stand behind open letters posted to their sites, why can’t their press announcements be delivered over a more compelling and personal platform? Plus, a blog announcement is still more “findable” than any of the SMR platforms.
Regardless of how you feel, the debate over SMRs is one worth having. Most will agree that they’re an improvement over standard wire services but they’re probably not the giant step in tactical evolution that PR needs right now.
