Social Media Press Releases: A Step Forward or Two Steps Back?
If you follow the PR industry, you’ve likely seen the term “social media press release” thrown a lot lately, and more recently the “social media newsroom.” PR 2.0 has certainly arrived. But is that a good thing?
I have to admit, I’m not terribly keen on the Web 2.0 push in public relations efforts. I’m too young to be called “old school,” and fully embrace online PR - most of my PR clients are online entrepreneurs and artists looking for guerrilla tactics, so the Web in PR is unavoidable. That’s a good thing… it’s a direct outlet to your audience. And everyone loves social media, right? From del.icio.us to Digg to Myspace, you can’t escape it these days. But I see some major issues with social media press releases and social media newsrooms.
I’ve already posted recently on one particular aspect of social media newsrooms, and why I see problems with this idea of a “pull” distribution to the news (with opt-in, password-protected RSS feeds). So I won’t delve deeper into that right now. Let’s focus on the social media press release, for all its hype over the last several months.
Problems With Social Media Press Releases:
- All press releases are not created equal. Bullet points on every press release won’t work. The idea is to make it “scannable” or basically a quick snapshot of the news. Not all news lends itself to this, and frankly, as someone who’s worked both sides of the fence, if I receive overly short releases with a few bullet points (a la media advisories) it’s ending up in the trash or simply ignored.If you’re too lazy to give me real information (including the details of “why” I should give a damn about you and your news), then don’t waste my time. Personally, I try to offer journalists that same respect.Newsflash: from major metropolitan newspapers to on-air radio shows to major online niche and news publications, the system does work (if you bother to learn how to work it). Here’s another newsflash for ya: bullet points in press release writing is nothing new. If it’s appropriate to a release’s content, you should have been making “scannable” releases to some extent all along. But apparently a lot of people need a new fancy name to get a clue.
- Another thing with social media in PR is the idea that you should give journalists links to more information to make their lives supposedly easier. There are some major flaws with that concept: For starters, journalists are busy. Your job is to give them all of the information they’ll need, and let them contact you if they need more (hell, the idea is to get yourself contacted and quoted if you do your job right). They shouldn’t be directed all over the Web to sources just because you think they’re valuable, where they’ll have to do even more reading to pull out relevant details. Again, if you’re too damn lazy to do your job in writing a proper news release, then find other ways of promoting your company rather than becoming a thorn in someone’s side.Another problem is that many people utilizing press releases aren’t working through PR pros or even taking the time to figure out how to use them in the first place (anyone owning a website these days can throw together a crap press release and post it to PRweb or similar sites). Who are they to know what sources are considered credible for journalistic purposes in the first place? Chances are, they don’t have a clue. So in many cases those links are worthless and going to leave the journalist with more work to do if they want to cover the story. Again, sure way to have your release scrapped.
Let’s hit on one more (and potentially the biggest) problem with this idea of directing the journalist to various sources. The more research outside of your company and your press release a journalist has to do, the more likely they’ll bump into your competition in the process. And frankly, if they look like they might be a better source of information or that they might make for a better story (especially since your competitor didn’t piss them off by sending them on a wild Web goose chase), the journalist won’t be bothering with you. Score some points for your competition. Yay for social media press releases!
- Now let’s get into the social media links included in social media press releases (such as to Digg, tagging for Technorati, Del.icio.us, etc.). Can these sites lead to direct traffic? They sure can! Does that traffic usually convert to anything worthwhile? Ummm, no. But it looks really good to tell our clients that this new tool will up their traffic right? Shame on them if they’re too stupid to know the difference between quality traffic and crap traffic. But this is what happens when you confuse Public Relations with Internet Marketing. Let’s litter social media sites with a bunch of lousy press releases that no one gives a damn about… but oh look, they’re in pretty bullet-point lists, so now it’s ok.
- As for adding multi-media elements to your press release, unless you’re a total moron, this shouldn’t be anything new. Appropriate addenda to a press release is standard practice. If calling it a “social media press release” makes you feel all enlightened, then good for you Gandhi. Welcome to the club.
Don’t Fix What Ain’t Broken (or, Maybe the Problem is With You!)
The fact of the matter is that press releases were never “broken” to begin with. The only problem with press releases is that people in general don’t care about quality. Sites like PRweb showed webmasters and business owners that they can get backlinks with press releases. They rather ignore the real potential benefits of significant media coverage. In light of that, everyone and their brother litters the Web with worthless “news” releases. Rather than teach them how to do it right (shame on us), we’ve caved in and tailored a highly effective tool to fit their short-sighted needs.
Press Releases, Link-Building, and SEO
The fact still remains that quality press releases distributed effectively will lead to coverage where it’s deserved. As for SEO and link-building with press releases, traditional press releases can lead to better results; not worse. The trick is knowing what you’re doing, having quality news, a well-written release, and like I already said, effective distribution. Golly gee. Who’d have thunk it?? Most media outlets have online versions. Get picked up, and you usually get a nice quality backlink on a relevant page from a highly-ranked authority site. There’s a natural trickle-down effect.
The key in SEO with press releases isn’t just to get every crap release that you can for temporary boosts (like scraper sites picking up a PRweb feed or random sites copying the press release verbatim, because the site or blog author is too lazy to write their own stories for unique content). The key is one-way, permanent, incoming links on high-ranking, relevant, authority websites. That’s not difficult to achieve with press releases. One major pickup tends to lead to more, and on niche sites actually related to your news. It doesn’t happen overnight. Nothing good does.
Social media press releases are a quick fix for the SEO junkies. Let’s get our heads out of our asses for a minute and remember that PR and Internet Marketing are not the same thing. They’re both players in the same game, but they play different positions. Let’s spend our time worrying about showing IM gurus how to use PR tools even more effectively, rather than letting them turn press releases into what’s verging on a black hat tool (focused more on search engines than readers, out for that quick fix, exploiting social media until those sites are sick of the crap releases and force us to go back to the drawing board, the obvious lead-in to abuse of keyword stuffing, etc.).
No, I won’t go so far as to say we’re there yet… but we’re too close for my liking. And why? Because people are too damn lazy to learn how to do it right in the first place? All “social media press releases” do is take old standards that far too many PR people neglect and laymen don’t yet understand, and dumb it down into a pretty little template with major “pushers.” Let’s grow up and get back to work.
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Comments
“The IDEA is to strip out all of the hype from traditional mechanical, press releases and rebuild it as a focused compilation of relevant facts, links, media and a subscription feed to help readers write, tell, and share a story their way (without having to sort through a sea of crap to find out what’s real, what’s canned, and what’s important.)”
Here’s the problem I see with this claim (and hey, it might just be me):
Press releases shouldn’t be loaded with “hype” to begin with, if they’re written well by someone who knows what the hell they’re doing. And who knows… maybe it really is just me, but I’m still a big fan of news and transparency, and never once played into the whole “spin doctor” image in my PR work. A social media press release is just taking some of the basic aspects of what a press realease SHOULD be already, and giving it a new name, and throwing in a few new tools for good measure. It’s a marketing gimmick to get people interested in PR again, as far as I’m concerned. It won’t eliminate hype. That kind of crap litters press releases often written by webmasters and business owners, who don’t know what press releases are really about (nor do they often care, as long as they get hundreds of crap backlinks… something I see and hear every day). No matter what the release looks like, they’ll find away to promote their crap wares and sites with no news value (not all of them fit within this group obviously, but I think it’s safe to say the majority do). Changing a format isn’t going to change their goals, and without educating people to use a release properly for even better results, they’ll find a way to abuse new tools and systems pretty quickly (webmasters collectively are outstanding when it comes to abusing promotional vehicles online). So good intentions aside, there are major flaws with the idea being some kind of “fix.” Any actual PR person should know better to begin with, or we’ve got some bigger issues. The problem comes in the fact that everyone can now write a release (although rarely well), and rather than teaching them, we’re dilluting the effectiveness of the tool in general, b/c the good ones get so watered down in “sea of crap” as you said. The issue was never with the press release… it’s with the people writing them. That problem won’t go away with a new name and new look, especially with 2.0-izing press releases will simply make the tool more attractive to the layman more apt to abuse them. But hey… just my opinion.
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Although I don’t always agree with you…..your comments can be quite spirited. And, I guess that’s what keeps me coming back.
You have some great points in this post…nice work!
In my opinion PR is lazy and too much of a “yes man.”
Your point “The fact still remains that quality press releases distributed effectively will lead to coverage where it’s deserved.” is right on the money.
While not broken per se, most press releases in general need CPR. Quality is debatable, but spin, jargon, and wordcount are a pretty common pitfalls.
I wrote a series of articles that talked about creating press releases as “stories” that spoke to the people that they were trying to reach (taking into account that many readers would find them through search engines.)
It all starts with the need to tell a better story in a way that means something to someone. One release no longer serves everyone. With wire services and savvy web marketers placing them in search engines as well as news desks, it’s now more important than ever, to improve the foundation. Garbage generates garbage. Benefits and relevance specific to individual needs produces interest and ignites dialogue.
Re: the Social Media Release (aka new media release) you’ve distilled it a bit too simply.
It’s not about capitalizing on trends in order to take an archaic, dying press release formula and present it to newsmakers in a fancy new package labeled as “social media†just because it has trackbacks, Technorati tags, RSS feeds, links, etc. It’s not about bullets either.
The IDEA is to strip out all of the hype from traditional mechanical, press releases and rebuild it as a focused compilation of relevant facts, links, media and a subscription feed to help readers write, tell, and share a story their way (without having to sort through a sea of crap to find out what’s real, what’s canned, and what’s important.)
This is what a good release should be anyway, regardless of trends and titles. Basically it’s the press release redux. It takes out what’s wrong with press releases and modernizes them into a usable format for journalists, bloggers, and individuals.
It does not replace a traditional release however.
Here are a couple of great articles for your reference:
#1
#2