Thoughts on the future of the SMPR
April 2nd, 2008 by Wendy McAuliffe
At Liberate we’ve been keenly following developments in the Social Media Press Release (SMPR), which is yet to reach tipping point within the PR industry. We therefore listened with interest today to a podcast on the subject with Tod Defren of PR Squared, sharing his insight on the take-off of the SMPR through his day job at Shift Communications.
We firmly buy into efforts to make news releases more social and useful, with greater differentiation between quality announcements and spam. However, while there has been a lot of talk about the SMPR and its benefits, we’ve had our ear to the ground for case studies where it’s worked successfully among early adopters.
To summarise Tod’s feedback (although it will take you just eight minutes to listen to the whole thing)…
- The volume and level of companies using the SMPR is growing, and includes brands such as Coca Cola, Gatorade, Semantec, Horizon.
- The most successful case studies have seen SMPR content being discussed on Twitter and in blog posts, with content such as logos being taken and re-used.
- As part of the sales process for PR agencies, it’s important that brands realise the SMPR format is not just useful for the blogosphere, but for traditional media alike, offering more content and context than the traditional news release.
- Comment functionality is most successful when moderated.
At Liberate we have our own developments in the pipeline, and have recently pioneered the Social Media Video Release, which we believe is the next step for the SMPR by enhancing its video and interactive components. Our case study for iCrossing is available here.
Our experience to date on the B2B side of things is that there’s a big education gap still to bridge, but gradually organisations are coming to understand the benefits of the social release format and want to give it a go.
We’re particularly keen to hear more stories on how PRs are currently approaching the sale of the SMPR, so please share your experiences with us here.
Tags: podcast, PR, press release, shift communications, smpr, smvr, tod defren
