Online Marketing Blog

Social Media News Release – Separating Fact From Fiction

Of the many motivating factors for the use of social media press releases, there are two driving forces that stand out: The changing needs of the end consumer and increasing ease of use for the media.

Due to the increasingly social and sharing nature of the web and the increasing importance of press releases as direct to consumer communication tools, it is important for marketers and public relations professionals to adjust their message format and delivery to correspond with the needs of today’s web savvy audience.

David McInnis of PRWeb dropped me a quick note this a.m. about a new strategic partnership between PRWeb parent, Vocus Communications and Business Wire that includes the licensing of a private label version of PRWeb for use by Business Wire clients.

“Vocus will create and host for Business Wire a co-branded version of the PRWeb direct-to-consumer and SEO service. Business Wire members may disseminate press releases so they will be indexed by major search engines, distributed to thousands of news sites, including Google News and Yahoo News, and delivered through more than 20,000 RSS feeds that collectively reach tens of millions of consumers and thousands of journalists daily.”

There’s a growing amount of buzz about social media lately, but specifically of interest is social media press releases. As we fold the new media press release, press room and media relations tactics into our PR strategy, I’ve been monitoring a number of resources on the topic of new media PR and the hRelease or social media news release and offer some of those links here.

New Media Release Group – A Google group started to discuss the new media release format with participants ranging from independent PR consultants to PR Newswire and Market Wire.

New PR – Constantin Basturea’s “Digg style” site for new media public relations news.

Workspace for Social Media Press Release (hRelease) – hRelease is a community effort to define a new format for press releases via a community standard microformat