While this is a good discussion, I’m not sure I see how this is hugely different from a traditional virtual press room, but with some social media fairy dust. Still worth playing around with.

That’s our fault for not fully briefing you yet.

Access CNW, our new product, is a do-it-yourself client service portal that gives CNW clients hands-on control over the traditional news release distribution process at no extra cost.

We do offer a Multi Media News Release service (analogous to a social media release product) and have since 2005. We used it for our Access CNW announcement: (http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/mmnr/access_cnw2008/).

In addition, we do also offer a NewsML distribution system which is capable of pushing out rich information to users capable of receiving it.

We don’t (currently) offer all of those services bundled into one product, but thanks to conversations like these, we’re working on it.

-Laurie (from CNW Group)

Great conversation here. I like your approach and think we’ve been promoting the same process on PRX Builder.

Developing a standard template or using a tool like PRX Builder can really streamline the process. Even when using plugins, I’ve seen quite a few people have issues with social media links, video, and image integration. PRX Builder will take care of that for you and generate the code that Shel Holtz described for making your release more discoverable.

One of the distribution options in PRX Builder allows you to post directly to your blog. Using your “teaser” newswire release with a link back to your HTML news release seems like a great plan to me.

Now could we have also tagged and made the page itself more share-able? Yeah, sure, but in two weeks time – without *any* optimization or social-ization – this page has become the #3 search result for “social media monitoring.”

This factor alone is pretty interesting when you consider the marginal cost(s) of this approach; also when you consider that several companies on this very same search result page are forking out good money (more money) for sponsored ads for this same topic…

Content and substance certainly have to come first, and I don’t think anyone ever envisioned every social media release adopting the same format. How dull. But one of the goals of the SMR is to tag the release and its elements so news from within a specific industry can be found using a search engine, or quotes from a certain executive. Helping people make sense of all the data out there wasn’t an issue when everything was in print. Now that it’s all digital and (as David Weinberger would say) any leaf can hang on multiple branches, a certain level of agreement on some core standards doesn’t hurt!

By the way, Canada News Wire just announced a do-it-yourself multimedia press release service that automatically codes your information in NewsML.

I guess one of my bigger points is that “socializing” this press page is a lot easier, more efficient, cheaper, and (longer term), more valuable for the company hosting this sort of thing than a press release can ever be.

Another point to be made is this:

The press release (and the social media release) are incapable of being “complete” reflections of the news. It’s just a limitation of the medium. You have time (attention), cost (money) and distribution (reach) factors handicapping this process from the onset.

It’s frustrating to watch people in the industry pretending these limitations don’t exist, by either over writing and over developing the copy, to the point where it’s just too dense to digest or over complicating the copy (and sadly, their story) through over contextualization.

I’ve always thought a news release, be it traditional or otherwise, is at its best a functional teaser of sorts. It’s the bait, to be completely crass, that prompts action (e.g., to pick up the phone, to send an email, to click on a link, basically, to get more information).

I’d like to think the press release page frees folks up a bit, by focusing less energy on the release and the wires and the formats and the costs, and more on just making sure the release is a simple (functional) bridge back to the larger news page…which can be as rich and dynamic as your announcement requires…

To my way of thinking, your “press release page” is kind’ve a brochure, no? There’s multimedia but no clear way to share it, and on the page itself it’s not clear that “this is news.”

That doesn’t mean that a “Content Page” devoted to items mentioned in a release is a bad idea – not at all. And it doesn’t mean that this is not a relevant, good approach.

I guess where I am confused is in the “integration” of the press release and the “press release page”?

My latest thinking on the SMR would probably represent a hybrid/combo of your actual release with the subsequent “press release page,” and, yea, ideally with more interactivity in terms of making the content shareable and “commentable.”

.02