It’s 2009 and Social Media Releases Are Still Terrible
I hate to be the bearer of bad news for PR people (ok, I actually like it a little) but those social media releases you’ve been pushing aren’t any use to anyone.
You could make a larger case that press releases themselves are of little value any more but what I’m more concerned with is how some wire services are repositioning press releases, marking them up and selling them as “enhanced” releases for “social media.” Yes, just go ahead and ask any blogger what they want more than anything else in the world and they will most certainly tell you “press releases, more press releases please.”
It’s easy to poke fun at the worst releases but for this example I will use something that is being positioned as best-in-class by some. One of my favorite PR bloggers, Todd Defren, recently posted a case study where Shift Communications, the poster child for the social media release and IMHO one of the best tech PR firms out there, was hailed for a campaign in which this social media press release played a supporting role.
Really?
Let’s take a look at some of the “social media” features that are so valuable in this release:
- YouTube videos. Great, everyone loves YouTube videos and you can grab the code and insert them into your blog posts. Well, normally that’s true but Marketwire shrinks the YouTube videos to a size where the button for links and the embed code are eliminated, forcing you to click the video itself to go to the page on YouTube where it is available (you have to figure this out for yourself, Mr. Bloggy McSmartypants).
- Head shots of the founders. Nothing wrong here, except for the fact that the image is 800×530. It’s too big for any blogger to use and too small for anyone in print to use. If you want to use this picture in your blog, you’re going to have to resize it. Add another step.
- The obligatory social bookmarking links. If Steve Jobs issued a press release about how he was the offspring of two government baboons, I still don’t think enough people would Digg the release enough to drive any traffic. I still don’t understand why these social bookmarking sites are being pushed on people when the content doesn’t justify it. Case and point: the total amount of people who click “Digg” for this release is a whopping zero. Want to know how many “Technorati‘s on this release”? Spoiler alert…zero.
- Search stats. Yes, the search stats…finally, it all makes sense. That is until you actually look at the results and see that it’s all just a bunch of sites that regurgitate news releases. Hardly the big influencers of social media.
- SEO? You’d think SEO would play a major role in a social media release platform but I’m giving this release a C- in that category too. It’s nice that they have a descriptive page title and everything but what about the URL? Is Google going to fall in love with “http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Mobilesphere-880759.html”? Where’s the product name (“Slydial”)?
- Content. I’m not sure what happened to Shift’s original model for the SMR but this release looks a whole lot like a regular old press release. Apart from the quotes being broken out, I’m not really seeing the bulleted information that is going to eliminate barriers to publication.
Of course, the results of the campaign were still impressive. The company was covered in 381 blog posts and they attracted 200,000 beta testers. I think that Shift is a great agency and they probably played a direct role in driving those results. I just don’t think a social media press release had anything to do it.
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Ha! Thanks for the kind (and not so kind) words.
As I’ve noted many times, the BEST examples of SMRs are deployed within online corporate newsrooms, where the SMR becomes a glorified blog post that:
a) aids SEO (including sharing links/content from the official site)
b) allows dialogue between Company and Customers, and,
c) aggregates reactions from external bloggers
So – yea, imperfect: granted.
Having said that, if you were to check out the 381 blog posts, you’d see that many of them ripped content directly from the SMR to append to their posts. Beats the ol’ text-based release, imho.
Cool?
@Todd Defren – I couldn’t agree with you more on how SMRs need to be within corporate newsrooms. The idea of optimizing a release that sits on a wire service always irked me.
I think my criticism lies mostly with the Marketwire platform but if bloggers found the content useful then I guess that’s all that really matters. I still think video embed codes and search friendly URLs aren’t too much to ask out of an SMR provider though.
All things considered, the announcement appeared to be a success. I would just like to see the SMR platforms catch up with what the industry really needs.
Great points Peter! I think a lot of what the wires are doing today is smoke and mirrors. Case in point the hugely expensive multi-media releases that PR Newswire provides. These are formatted in the same poor manner that Marketwire offers them. In addition, why pay the wire all this money to host you video for 30-60 days and offer it as a windows media player file? Just issue a standard release on the wire and link to a well designed page on your corporate newsrooms. Take a look at what we’ve done with Toyota’s new corporate online newsroom: http://pressroom.toyota.com
Toyota Releases with Images:
http://pressroom.toyota.com/pr/tms/toyota-launches-microsite-to-support-78484.aspx
http://pressroom.toyota.com/pr/tms/toyota/all-new-prius-reveal.aspx?ncid=12045
Toyota with Video:
http://pressroom.toyota.com/pr/tms/lexus/2010-hs250h-debut.aspx?ncid=12045
All images are provided in multiple formats. Video streams right from the release page and when available B-roll can be downloaded for immediate use.
For SEO: Browser page titles are created automatically from the press release headline, meta data and URL’s can include keywords and before a user uploads or finalizes a release they can perform keyword discovery and validation to ensure their release contains keyphrases journalists and other key audiences will actually be searching for to find the news.
Finally, what is the value of creating a bunch of inbound links to a release hosted somewhere other than your corporate newsroom? The only reason is happens today – is not enough companies have the easy ability to create a newsroom they way it should be.
Your title says exactly what is wrong. Social media AND press release don’t belong in the same sentence.
I’m a PR person and a blogger, hopefully I have at least a little authority to make that observation. Being that I’m getting press for my clients on blogs and not using press releases, I guess I found a workaround
Seriously there are smarter ways that WORK. Be creative.