I’d like to trade my list of Buffalo-area media contacts and online outlets with someone from outside the region, specifically someone who is not in the higher education industry (as would technically be a competitor). Knowledge is power, and you never know when you’d need media information about Buffalo.

This list is 99% publically available, so I’m not sharing anything secret. As I’ve collected this information over the past two years, and it represents dozens of hours of work.

Some specifics:

80+ print, web, and broadcast sources covering western New York and Canada

30+ bonus upstate New York sources

As an additional bonus, I’ll throw in my go-to social media outlets. 

I’ve got my personal one crafted:

The data available to mine from this – in terms of what is working for other colleges, and what technologies are being ignored – is substantial and will guide the work that I do for the foreseeable future. I’m particularly going to pay attention to how colleges are implementing XML site-wide and what social media tools they’re integrating into home pages. I also want to see how other institutions handle the “what belongs on the home page” question.  

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.