Social media news releases were a breakthrough in the form of public relations. The reason it is considered a breakthrough for news releases is because there are multiple add-ons that can be put on a SMNR that was not on the traditional news release. How we would define a SMNR comes from the website realwire. The news release portion is written like a traditional news release, but there is information that is used for other people in online entities so it can be shared in social bookmarking, microblogging and social networking communities. What this means is that there are other elements in the SMNR that other people in the internet media would find appealing. Some these things consist of:
- A high resolution photograph
- Embedded audio
- Embedded video
- Access to major search engines
The useful tips that would be helpful for someone who wants to create a SMNR are listed in the Wilcox Public Relations Writing and Media Techniques and the website Writing Matters by O’Flahavan and Marilynne
- Make each section of the SMNR stand alone
- Use many hyperlinks, so you would have search engine visibility
- Write short lists with bullets because the audience is an online one
- Make the SMNR interactive
- Use multiple Visuals
- Put key terms in headlines and first paragraphs
As stated on Brian Solis, A public relations practitioner might want to use a SMNR because they want to get their news releases exposed to more people. In a SMNR key words are put in headlines so there is more accessibility to search engines, and then more people have access to the news release. Another reason is since the SMNRs are interactive more people will want to read them because they can respond to them and on a regular news release people cannot respond to them instantly.
There are many advantages of making a SMNR which consists of:
- The journalists and bloggers want to see them because there is a lot of information in one place.
- A PR practitioner can bypass the middleman and the right person could read it at the beginning.
- More people will read them
- It plays to the web which is a growing medium and the newspaper is declining
There are also some disadvantages of using a SMNR which consists of:
- Too many links will confuse the journalists
- Using low resolution images can look bad on the website.
An example of a SMNR is one produced by Converseon: http://blogit.realwire.com/?ReleaseID=6166
There are templates on particular websites, so it will be easy to produce a social media news release:
