Tech Corner Post: SMNR

Technology Corner Post

Anslee Schroeder

Social Media News Release

For our technology corner post, I decided to talk about social media news releases (SMNR) and how companies and organizations are using this exciting and unique way of distributing information to the online world. Social media continues to stretch the abilities of communication so it is no surprise it can take promotion for small to large corporate businesses to a whole different level.

Ordinary press releases, while still having similar characteristics to the SMNR, lack the outlet capabilities of a SMNR. According to 3WPR.com, here are some similarities between them and then premium features SMNR offer:

Similarities:

-          Headline

-          Facts

-          Quotes

-          Boiler Plate

-          Contact Information

SMNR Additions:

-          Images

-          Audio

-          Videos

-          Social bookmarking

-          RSS Feeds

-          Hyperlinks

-          Technorati Tags

Some important things to remember when preparing an SMNR are audience, content, hyperlinks, and visuals. The audience (the online community) consists mainly of bloggers, social networkers, and journalists. Journalists are going to be the driving force determining what news site the SMNR goes to. The bloggers of an online community usually deal with more centralized interests so your SMNR is more likely to distribute faster though those communities.

With the content of the SMNR, there are the basics: headline, contact information, body, boilerplate, etc, but with a twist. On the Internet, the viewer’s time visited on a web page is extremely important so the need for eye-catching material and scanability is a must. Have the headline be short and creative. Contact information won’t just be a phone number and email. It’ll be a Twitter handle, Skype username or blog name/link along with the email.

The format of the body copy is also different. For SMNRs, a bullet point format is preferred with facts about the business or organization and the followed with quotes from authorized personnel. Following this would be links to their direct website and/or social media pages. On the Internet so much is visual so having graphics, pictures, and videos available for journalists to use can help out a lot. The videos will usually be linked to a social med account, i.e. YouTube, creating more traffic to their page. Lastly, the page will have tags (keywords) connected to it enabling search engine optimization for the company or organization.

Here is a good example of an SMNR:

Distribution:

When distributing the SMNR, you can do so either by normal means of email or through sites dedicated to distributing them out, such as Pressit.com.

Good luck with your SMNR!