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Northeast PRSA Conference: On Social Media

Two of the sessions I attended at today’s Northeast PRSA Conference dealt explicitly with social media. The first, on the SMR, or social media release, is the one I will go into detail about here, having already written about it back in April 2008. The second, on blogging ethics, gave me tons and tons to think about, but I’ll have to let it all sink into my noggin more before trying to analyze it.

The Social Media Release is a hot, messy term for the old, busted press release. Take your standard, plain text news release - the one designed to languish in the stale piles of other press releases sent by eager, yet clueless, public relations professionals - stir in some multimedia content, shake it up with hyperlinks to web sites that stretch the bounds of standard spelling (Flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us), and send it out to the Intertubes.

It really is that simple. Joe Stabb gave a good overview of what the SMR is and how it’s developed, but I fear that some in the audience were so blinded and befuddled by the sheer volume of social media options that the creation of an SMR for their use will just be something they forget about.

Well, I’m not forgetting about it, and I learned today ways to make my social media release template that much more useful to the end user: the media. 

A thought about data and digitization. We’re in the digital age, apparently, and the most useful information is that which can be easily manipulated into other formats. Sending a PDF to a news organization that will have to then copy/paste/reformat text content before rewriting it into a form they can publish and/or broadcast adds an extra layer of steps that significantly reduces the chance that that information will make it beyond that gatekeeper.

Gosh, gatekeeper. I haven’t used that term since COM 101.

So, the digital data of a social media release takes some of the onus of work off the mass media outlet. I will happily take on a slightly more difficult production task, especially since it makes my ultimate goal, publicity, more likely.

Hearing from Joe about his work in the trenches as an online media producer for WIVB-TV made me consider more strongly the workload and attention span of the people to whom I’m sending releases. They’ve got a job to do, just like me. As a fellow professional if I can make life a little easier for them, then that’s what I’m a-gonna do.

Aside from beefing up medaillenews.com with multimedia/b-roll content and reference materials, such as administrative biographies and an extended fact sheet, I’m pleased with my current social media template. I don’t use all the components all the time, but I grok enough social media service to make my template morph and evolve.