Think of the Social Media Release as an Online Press Kit

The social media news release concept has been in a kind of development stage for several years. During that time, we’ve seen creative ideas and lots of confusion. The main point of contention is the mistaken idea that the social media news release should replace the traditional release. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

What is the Purpose a Social Media News Release?
The social media news release is really an online press kit. It provides your news in ways that assist journalists and bloggers to write stories about your news. It gives people tools to share your audio and video clips, download logos and photos, and immediately find key stats and quotes rather than sorting through prose. Since a sizeable percentage of stakeholders are generally online, they are more likely to get your news there.

How do You Use Both Kinds of Releases?
There is still value in the traditional release. Some trade publications in your industry may still practically print your release unaltered. And it presents your story in a narrative form. Storytelling is good. I’ve also found that when there are lots of internal levels of approval, the final traditional news release serves their purposes, while the social media version is more of an aid to journalists.

There are several places you can go to learn more. One of the best recent ones is an audio presentation delivered by Shel Holtz, ABC, co-host of the For Immediate Release podcast. You can listen to his engaging down-to-earth speech and see his ppt presentation online. It’s a great way to get a crash course on a powerful communication tool.

Using Delicious in Public Relations

Learn About Social Media from Your Desk

In this set of lessons, I introduced readers to Delicious and talked about the value of using it to share your bookmarks. But what I find fascinating is how many ways there are to use Delicious in your public relations work.

One thing is to come up with a special tag for a particular topic, and then you and others can start building a set of bookmarks related to your topic. The advantage is that your searches will filter out items you are not looking for. For example, the folks who have been coming up with the social media release formats are using the tag: hRelease. I don’t know how they came up with that particular tag, but they’ve been using it, along with any other relevant tags.

You also can set up an account for a client or your organization and tag related items. For example, let’s say you are about to have some major announcement to media. You could create a “purpose-built” Delicious page that already has a set of bookmarks for web pages and related news stories on your topic. Include a link in your news release. Todd Defren of SHIFT Communications wrote more about this in his blog post, “Tagging: ‘Crowdsourcing’ vs. ‘Purpose-Built.’”

But why limit this to when you have big news announcements. You could do the same for topics that you deal with consistently. By creating a Delicious account for such a topic and tagging new items regularly to keep it updated, you are helping journalists in their research, but the information can seem more credible because it’s not always created by you. More on this too by the insightful Todd Defren in his post, “Daily Servings of del.icio.us Delights.”

Of course, you can use Delicious to help you keep track of trends in your industry or to see how your issue is being covered prior to your big announcement – along with your other media and web monitoring tools.

Some excellent tips are available on the Information Age Education blog post, “5 Things You Need to Know Before Using Del.icio.us, a Social Bookmark.”

For those who are feeling brave and a little geeky, Web Worker Daily provides some useful suggestions at “8 Tips for Better del.icio.us Bookmarking.”

If you haven’t started using Delicious, give it a shot. This is one social media tool that is really easy to jump into.