Increasingly bloggers are being targeted for news releases and one of the techniques that some are calling, “PR 2.0″, is the Social Media Release. Started in May of 2006 by Shift Communications, this technique has spawned a working group to explore future improvements and is being used for blogger outreach for technology products and services. Yesterday, Shift released an updated template based upon their experiences and feedback over the past two years.
The basic idea is to create a website that contains the information from the press release in a blogger-friendly format. Bullet points of the key information, approved quotes, photos and video and links to outside resources via a del.icio.us feed are the main elements. Since bloggers are used to direct feedback, moderated comments are also a part of the social media release.
I’ve recently used this technique in some work done with one of my tech clients but I think this would work well in the wine industry, as well. As a wine blogger, I get several releases each week but few ever make it into my posts at Winecast. If I was pitched with a social media release, the hit-rate would be higher because I would grasp the main points faster and turn this information into an informative post… if the release was newsworthy, of course.
So I’d like to challenge any winery in the U.S. to issue a social media release. In fact, I’ll be happy to do the work for free in exchange for being able to link to it from my forthcoming portfolio page on this website.
Who is ready to take the plunge?
Image from the PR-Squared blog.
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