I have had the opportunity to contribute to an incredible industry initiative to define, or rather redefine the news release and help establish a recommended framework for the proposed Social Media Release. This was sparked by Tom Foremski proding the PR industry (that’s putting it lightly) to revisit the traditional press release. The initiative is being driven by Chris Heuer and is a project of the Social Media Club.
Today, Chris posted the initial social media release guidelines and considerations for discussion. Most of the conversation will take place in the New Media Release Group which is open to anyone. If you want to have a hand in shaping one of the core PR tools, check it out.
“The Social Media Release is intended to make it easier on people to identify and share the most important pieces of information with others around the globe while adding their own valuable perspective and/or editorial. It also takes full advantage of HTML, multimedia and the network effects enabled by the Internet by using structured data via the Microformat, which ultimately increases its findability by interested parties - which is ultimately the driving purpose of public relations and the press release specifically.”
Chris has also posted a follow-up called “The impact of the Social Media Release and how it changes everything.” Here’s a quote that pretty much sums up what it’s all about.
“The combination of RSS, tags and structured information is a powerful force for connecting people and organizations who have information to share, with the people and organizations who are most interested in that information.”
Technorati Tags: social media release, hrelease, new media release, social media club
December 7th, 2006 at 11:25 pm
david, perhaps you can help me out on this. what’s the benefit to using microformats in the optimized news release? how would it help end users/journalists a) find the piece and b) understand or be engaged by the content?
i’m all at sea on the talk of microformats and hAtoms are going totally over my head…
cheers!
Ed