Posts Tagged ‘smpr’
Brands are on their starting blocks for the Olympic social media dash
July 10th, 2008
Over the next few moths you are going to see massive amounts of online coverage of the Olympics, most of it associated with huge brands.
One brand quickly off the blocks is Lenovo, who has a blog site called Voices of the Olympic games. As the name suggests the blog content is made up with athletes’ commentary of what they are currently up to. They also have another pretty impressive site called Lenove Olympic podium powered by Google which offers a whole host of video footage, Google maps and other multimedia content. It’s kind of like a start page for the Olympics where you can drag and drop each section to have the page set up to how you want it.
Lenovo has also got on the Twitter gravy train and is promising updates throughout the Olympics - to follow them click here - they have currently not updated!
Hot on Lenovo’s heel is of course Coca-Cola who has produced a social media press release in English and Chinese. View the smpr here. The smpr introduces Coca-Cola’s integrated Olympic campaign. Some of the interesting stuff Coca-Cola is doing around the Olympics mentioned in the smpr are:
Coca-Cola Virtual Olympic Torch Relay
Coca-Cola Olympic Photo Montage
Design the World a Coke” Interactive Tool
To participate you need a good understanding of Chinese!
Just a taste of some of the big brands getting involved in the Olympics social media push. Watch this space for brands wanting to be associated with the wholesome feel good factor of the Olympics.
What’s happend to the Social Media Press Release?
June 6th, 2008
At Liberate Media we have been following the progression of the social media press release for quite some time. Over the last few months there seems to have been a bit a down turn in coverage on the subject.
Marketwire and Webit among others are still doing their thing, Shift has recently updated its original template and you hear a bit from digital snippets smpr reincarnation now and again, but where’s the smpr buzz gone?
It seems like all the guys that were talking about the smpr have moved onto other subjects like Twitter, Friendfeed, reputation management and social media optimisation (SMO).
The smpr is definitely on a go slow at the moment and I’m not really sure why that is, perhaps there’s too much information on it, and it’s no longer a copy and paste job for journalists!
I’m still a big fan of the smpr and will be championing the cause!
South Africa’s First Social Media Press Release - The Standard Bank Pro20 Series (cricket)
April 14th, 2008
You may or may not be aware that Liberate Media has been following the Social Media Press Release for some time.
Following my previous post Will the social media press release (SMPR) reach tipping point by the end of the year?, I was pleased to hear about the SMPR being used in other parts of the world aside from the UK and US.
South Africa-based Standard Bank has been using the release template as part of the Standard Bank Pro20 Series cricket tournament.
Read more about the release here.
I was bowled over (cricket pun!) by the release. It’s one of the best examples of the SMPR I have seen to date, and of course will be added to the Liberate Media research/resource page.
Click on the image to view the Pro 20 SMPR.
What I really like about the Kaboom SMPR is:
- The design: they have taken the colourful punchy format of the twenty twenty game and used it for the SMPR.
- The release is set out on a logical way: Quick facts followed by the multimedia assets and then the core information.
- They have some great quotes for bloggers/journalist to use.
- From the release you can follow Pro 20 conversation on Twitter and join its Facebook group.
It’s a really great effort, and for me, this has set the SMPR standard. It’s clean, well laid out and easy to follow.
Will the social media press release (SMPR) reach tipping point by the end of the year?
April 8th, 2008
This SMPR has been talked about many times before. I’m asking our audience if they think it will reach its tipping point by the end of the year? At the moment it is still very much in early adopter stage, but at Liberate Media we believe it has the potential to reach ’social epidemic’ (as Malcolm Gladwell would say) in 2008. Could it replace the likes of the more traditional press release format?
A few key facts on the SMPR:
- SMNR format (PDF download) originated at SHIFT Communications by Todd Defren
Over at Wadd’s tech PR blog he has a nice post on: UK media and PR industries yet to be convinced by Social Media News Release (SMNR) - which suggests that perhaps the tipping point will not be reached in the UK quite yet, but the US have taken the SMPR format a little more on board. The comments on the post give some other excellent points of view.
Please let us know your thoughts on the SMPR making its tipping point, or do you think it will disappear like Lord Lucan?
Thoughts on the future of the SMPR
April 2nd, 2008
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.