CIPR Social media for PR practise workshop

November 6th, 2009 by Lloyd Gofton

Yesterday I attended the CIPR Social media for PR practise workshop - focusing on the CIPR’s Education and skills group. Liberate Media was represented by my colleague Tim Greenhalgh, who was on the sharing best practise panel discussion with Simon Collister of We are Social and Nic Mitchell from Teesside University and led by Tracy Playle, Vice-Chair, CIPR Education and Skills sector group and Pickle Jar communications.

My colleague Andy Merchant and I led the afternoon session focused on building social media news releases with our Pressitt hats on. For those that don’t know, Pressitt is a free social media news release platform that Liberate Media developed with our partners Best Served Cold and launched earlier this year.

The morning session was focused on discussing the findings of the CIPR’s research into the use of online media in UK higher and Further Education institutions as a means of enhancing press and media relations, called PR 2.0 - managing news in a digital world, which launched on the day. (I’m chasing down a link and will update ASAP). The work group session was used to explore how PRs should use social and online media to communicate with journalists, looking specifically at the most useful online tools, how to manage time to engage with social media and how do you get senior management buy-in for supporting your use of social media, etc.

Of course they also discussed the findings of the research, which includes a host of interesting stats and feedback, my favourite of which was this little gem from an unnamed former FT journalist who confirmed the following about the traditional press release, which takes us back to where the social media news release movement all started.

“Press releases are nearly useless. They typically start with a tremendous amount of top-spin; they contain pat-on-the-back phrases and meaningless quotes. Often they will contain quotes from C-level executives praising their customer focus.

“Press releases are created by committees, edited by lawyers, and then sent out at great expense through Businesswire or PRnewswire to reach the digital and physical trash bins of tens of thousands of journalists … this madness has to end!”

His proposal: “Deconstruct the press release into special sections and tag the information so that as a publisher I can pre-assemble some of the news story and make the information useful.”

Hear, Hear!

In the afternoon it was over to Pressitt and the Social Media News Release. The session seemed to go well, and we had a mixed group in terms of social media understanding.  When asked for a show of hands of people that had published an SMNR I received nadda, no hands, no expression…gulp, I thought, this could be difficult. However, preaching to the converted is easy, but helping PR professionals to understand the benefits of a social media news releases was much more rewarding.

We faced some tough questioning which we welcomed as this wasn’t an audience of converts, this was an audience of concerned professionals that wanted to embrace new tools, but needed to ‘get-it’ first of all. I think Andy would agree that this made us re-think our approach and we also got some good ideas for Pressitt 2.0, which we hope to launch in the new year.

After the event we had a great deal of positive feedback and promises from a number of people to give Pressitt a go, which at least one has already done, and after all that’s all we can ever ask.

So what did I learn from the event?

1. We still live in a social media bubble - it’s easy to talk about the development of social media in groups of likeminded social entrepreneurs, but is that helping the development of social communications?

2. It may seem obvious, but it’s true, if you want to develop a product, take it to people that have never seen it before and let them pull it apart! We probably learnt more from a group of SMNR novices than we would from hours of feedback from the so called experts

3. Every sector of PR is different we might argue that social media is the way forward, and I still stand by that, but its acceptance, relevance and use in the various industry sectors is vastly different.

Thanks to Tracy Playle, Vice-Chair, CIPR Education and Skills sector group and Pickle Jar communications who not only developed and led the session but gives up her time to the CIPR for free - top job!

And if you’re reading this and haven’t given Pressitt a go yet, please do - join up, develop your release and hit publish - it won’t cost you a thing. Then let us know what you think and we both might learn something out of it.

      

Tags: CIPR, PR, pressitt, smnr, Social media, social media news release, social media press release

This entry was posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Blog, Blogging, Content, Digital communications, Digital media, Social media, Social networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.