The Social Press Release

Posted on December 6th, 2006
By Todd Zeigler in Media, PR

Today Steve Rubel unveils Edelman’s take on the social news release, Storycrafter (note lots and lots of others are doing similar work). I like it. I’d rather get something like this than an old fashioned press release. But two quick thoughts:

(1) Regardless of the format, the key with press releases IMO is to produce very few of them. If you are putting out pointless press release every day reporters are going to tune you out no matter how cool or evolved your format. It’s about interesting content more than format.

(2) Why not just release your news on your blog? That’s what we do for ourselves. When you get down to it that is basically what Edelman is doing. They have cleverly deconstructed the content of the press release and added a bunch of features common on blogs. And that’s it basically.

Update: Here is a link to a competing service, PRX Builder, and to Phil Gomes’ post about the Edelman product. SHIFT Communications developed a template for the social news release previously.

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Comments

Joan Stewart, The Publicity Hound

December 6th, 2006 at 9:34 pm

You state: “…the key with press releases IMO is to produce very few of them.”

That assumes that people who write them are only writing them for the media.

People also ought to be writing direct-to-consumer press releases that can result in great success if they can, for example, lure consumers to their website and pull them into their sales funnel.

This is possible even if no journalists think your press release is worthy of their time and attention.
Shannon Whitley

December 7th, 2006 at 3:53 pm

Thanks for mentioning PRX Builder. I agree with both your post and Joan’s comments. I thinks it’s important to consider multiple audiences and that’s why PRX Builder is designed to let you do whatever you want with your release. It has a nice, “Send to Blog” feature or “Save As” HTML, but it also allows you to send your release directly to PR Newswire for wire distribution.

The real power of deconstruction will come later. You’ll see more powerful tools for searching and parsing the release formats that we are developing today.

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