Press Releases

...I contacted Todd Defren - since he's the recognized expert on SMPR templates - and he offered this powerful thought, "It's important to understand that the Social Media News Release is not intended as a replacement for the traditional news release. It's an evolution. The SMNR's core function is simply to allow creators of news to leverage the Web familiarity that is now ingrained in consumer audiences. With 50+ percent of consumers now creating and sharing content online (Pew Research), it just makes sense to democratize access to corporate news and multimedia assets to anyone (reporters, bloggers, laypeople) who might be interested, and, to create a forum for community and context that - to date - has been unavailable via old-world press releases." Amen.

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...[Todd Defren, principal of SHIFT Communications and author of the blog PR Squared] notes that approximately 3,000 press releases cross the wires each business day, overwhelming editors who often discard these notices without ever glancing at their content... Defren developed a social media news release template to modernize press releases and increase their ease of use through five principles...

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...SHIFT Communications aspired to a launch event that would be the talk of the DEMO 2006 technology conference (in February), as well as both tech-oriented and mainstream audiences... The PR team spread the company’s passion to consumers using the media who had seen Pleo’s magic up close and personal throughout the process in a deep enough way to suspend their disbelief and make them product evangelists.

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Who knows better than a marketer that the medium is the message? A midsize Boston PR agency, SHIFT Communications, has developed a press release made especially for the Internet. The impetus for this invention: Web 2.0, that second-generation wave of Net services that let people create content and exchange information online. To encourage PR folks to use these Web tools to get the attention of journalists and bloggers, SHIFT has developed a model for a "social media press release" ...

" Late last month, PR firm Shift Communications released a format for social media press releases that it is making available to the marketing and PR community at large. Todd Defren, principal at SHIFT Communications, said in his blog, PR Squared, that "the banal, unhelpful, cookie-cutter press releases of yore have outlived their pre-Internet usefulness." The new format calls for embedded hyperlinks throughout the release to things like podcasts, RSS feeds, videos and related news coverage."

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