Downstream Blues Lead To Latest Social Media Suggestions

As noted in earlier posts, I’ve been meeting with representatives of the Big Wires to discuss the Social Media News Release’s progress at 1 year. Rather than post it all in one big write-up, I’m breaking up some of what I’ve learned into smaller chunks. (Also, I still have a couple of meetings left to do.)

I heard good stuff. I heard from PRNewswire, for example, that they’ve had “literally hundreds of conversations with agencies & corporations about the Social Media Release.” I met a guy yesterday whose sole job is to talk to agencies and corporations about Social Media in general, and SMNRs in particular!

I heard interesting stuff. I heard about how each of the Big Wire services has removed barriers to their content, in the past year or so. No more need to sign-in to their sites as a credentialed journalist in order to access news release content. Just pay ‘em a visit and hit up the Search box for what you are looking for, whether you are with the Wall Street Journal or Wally’s Wonderblog. “Democratizing Access” is one of the core principles of the SMNR.

I also heard troubling stuff.

For as much progress as the Big Wires have made in terms of embracing Social Media (in word and in deed), there are some facts that PR pros and SMNR evangelists need to realize:

• The Social Media “tags” associated with the SMNRs distributed by the wire services only exist at the wires’ own websites. In other words, the links for del.icio.us, digg, et al. that you see appended to the bottom of a release like this one, only appear at this wire site (in this case, at the Marketwire.com domain).
• The same goes for ALL the wire services. None of the wire services can automatically ensure inclusion of Social Media-related links.
• The news content – the words – are being distributed to thousands of “downstream” services like Comtex, the AP Wire, etc., but generally without these social tags.
• Why? Cuz these downstream news outlets don’t want yer stinkin’ social media tags. They’ll add ‘em themselves, maybe, but that’s their call. (Some of ‘em want straight ASCII text.)

• Meanwhile, the pictures and multimedia are being sent to places like the AP Photo Wire and to video distribution outlets like YouTube. “Cool,” you think, “The wires are pushing my video content to YouTube!?”
• Yep, but, the YouTube “user” publishing the content is not the newsmaker but the wire services, as seen here (MultiVu is PRNewswire’s multimedia service).
• Of course, that doesn’t preclude the newsmaker from posting their videos to YouTube on their own, as well.

So … whether your SMNR appears on any other site with the Social Media tags is dependent on whether those “downstream” distribution outlets (MarketWatch, Yahoo Finance, et al.) decide to add features like Digg, del.icio.us, email-a-friend, etc., to their own sites. The wires have no control over this situation.

Why is this important? Because according to all of the wire execs I met, fewer than 10% of the online population look at press releases at the wire service’s sites. Most people – most bloggers – see press releases in a re-purposed format, at any one of thousands of different places across the web.

Which leads me to these interim suggestions for SMNRs:

• Go ahead, create and post a Social Media News Release on a major newswire’s site. It will ensure a high-quality version of the SMNR exists on a credentialed site that is well-regarded by the Search Engines.
• Doing so also ensures that the core content (the news, if not all the fun stuff) will be distributed to thousands of downstream outlets.

• Re-purpose the release, in all its Social Media glory, in the newsmaker’s own corporate newsroom (you should enable moderated comments, trackbacks, and other “social” features like del.icio.us, Digg, et al.). More so than anything else, the SMNR is about enabling conversations between companies and their stakeholders: these conversations should ideally spawn at their own website, not at “_____wire.com.”

• If you do issue an SMNR via the Big Wires, you should use the resulting GoogleJuice to your advantage: be sure to include a link in the wire version of the release to the corporate newsroom version of the release. This requires asking a favor of your webmaster (“tell me the permalink in advance”), if PR doesn’t already manage the newsroom content online.

More to come in the weeks ahead…

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