Social media releases, PR stunts and Facebook makes an acquisition…a week in review

July 20th, 2007 by Lloyd Gofton

It’s been a busy week at Liberate Media, I know, I know, we’re all busy…But between a hectic travel schedule, announcements, meetings and a few surprises along the way, the blog posts have dramatically dropped off this week - bad Lloyd and Wendy!

Therefore, I thought I would do a quick round-up of some of the issues that attracted my attention this week.

PR Week reports that 75 per cent of journalists would prefer to receive media-rich press releases than a standard email or Word file attachment. To confirm, a media-rich press release is one that links directly back to a website where journalists can access additional information, images, video or sound clips, graphs and statistics. This supports the movement towards social media releases, which we at Liberate Media are following avidly.

The research comes from software designers Glide Technologies, and I’d be interested to hear any direct experiences or opinions from any journalists that are reading this post. Although this may not be possible as the piece also confirms that most of the surveyed journalists do not receive such releases on a regular basis.

PR Squared has the full story.

Sticking with PR, and relating directly to the image attached to this post, hats off for this supreme PR stunt linked to the opening of the Simpsons movie in the UK.

The story broke at the start of the week, and as you can see, the Cerne Abbas giant in Dorset has a new neighbour in the shape of a doughnut-toting Homer Simpson. Brilliant.

The BBC has the full story.

Finally, Facebook, (did you spot the new widgets BTW?) has made its first acquisition in the form of web-based operating system start-up - Parakey, the latest project from the founders of Mozilla Firefox.

The purchase will boost Facebook’s open source strategy, allowing developers to write applications that can be shared by Facebook users.

The Times has the full story.

That’s it for the round-up, onwards to the weekend, we’ll be back on track next week.

                              

This entry was posted on Friday, July 20th, 2007 at 7:47 pm and is filed under Blog. 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.