Yesterday I had an opportunity to speak to a group of graduate students earning their degree in Strategic Public Relations at George Washington University. I focused primarily on the Social Media Press Release and what steps they can take as PR professionals to create shareable, interactive news releases.
Here are two questions from the class:
My Answer:
Sure, if you felt it would be well received you could include an SMPR as an HTML document in the body of an email; however, each journalist or blogger will vary on how they prefer to receive press releases.
What’s your answer?
How would you think organizations should email SMPR formatted news? In an email, a link…?
Question #2
My Answer:
I am not sure how many journalists or bloggers are publishing the full text press release to begin with? Of course there are certain news sites have automated, full text postings of the press release in which the SMPR may or not be retained, depending on technical limitations of the news site. In general, I would venture to say that the SMPR does not lend itself to full text re-posting, but rather- it seems to lend itself to well-reasoned and well informed reporting, thus encouraging the journalist or blogger to use the facts presented to craft their story.
Please feel free to leave some comments and help answer the questions from these students.
Don’t think the SMPR should be inserted into the email. You never know what kind of email filter the reciever has which may just flag your email as junk or spam.
Probably better to include a couple lines of text explaining what’s going on with a link to the release.
Also, I know very few journalists and bloggers who will run things as is. Bullets are great because they’re easy to scan for the key info you’re interested in. With bulleted facts and quotes, I think you do increase the chance that they’ll get used in posts and stories. It’s so easy for the writer to pull out a bullet and insert it into their piece.
From my experience – For the first question e-mails are tricky because some mailboxes will throw anything with multimedia embedded etc. into junk mail. Generally speaking I’d say to go with something more stripped down and embed links to the good stuff.
For question 2, as you said the primary purpose of your press release is to spark a journalist to re-use your content in their own story not so much to republish verbatim. SMPR does add another wrinkle in that a well optimized SMPR release can generate traffic and bypass the journalist entirely.