Now, though, the web makes the term virtually meaningless. So many different people and audiences other than the media can access our press releases in real time that calling it a press release is almost a blunder. [If someone's got a better phrase, let me know]

So if reaching many different audiences is now both a given and an objective of our releases, what do we need to know to make the most of the opportunity?

This, in a nutshell, is what we will be talking about on Wednesday at 1 PM ET on the PR University audio conference, “New Ways PR Can Use SEO and Smarter Writing Techniques to Reach Wider Audiences.”

I’ll be moderating and will be joined on the call by:

• Paul Furiga, ABC, President, WordWrite Communications
• Laura Sturaitis, Senior Vice President, Media Services & Product Strategy, Business Wire
• Paul Dyer, eMedia Director, WeissComm Partners, Invigorate Communications
• Greg Jarboe, President & Co-Founder, SEO-PR

We’ll be covering these and other topics:

• SEO Fundamentals: How to conduct preliminary keyword research—plus online tools and new techniques for finding your company or brand’s keyword sweet spot
• Word counts, hyperlinks, headline writing rules and other SEO guidelines for optimizing press release copy without alienating readers
• Using video, audio, photos and multimedia to boost your online footprint
• SMR Update: What a social media news release (SMR) is and how it differs from a traditional press release
• Overcoming the challenges of creating and distributing effective social media news releases
• Online Distribution: How to seed your releases, announcements and ideas in blogs, forums and even Facebook, LinkedIn and beyond
• Measuring your success: new tools for measuring the effectiveness of your press releases

Hope you can join us!

Think about it: aside from pronouncements from the White House, how often are news stories just verbatim press releases from an organization? Virtually never, right? Instead, all news stories are broad stories about a particular situation, with many elements, possibly including you, your boss or your organization.

Yet to this day, the vast majority of press releases are written in that stilted, third-person style (“So-and-so announced today”) as if we were contributing an article to an imaginary media outlet.

Why, just today, I surfed over to PitchEngine.com to check it out — this is a site that intends to help PR people shift from issuing stilted old media-style press releases to new style press releases that are supposedly more user-friendly for the social media environment. But they don’t apparently have editors stopping users from taking their old third-person perspective and jamming it into the SMR format.

A couple of today’s PitchEngine headlines, plucked fresh from the site:

• THE WILMA THEATER Announces Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo as the final selection for its 2009-2010 Season
• Paws Unlimited Foundation Holds their Open House to Raise Awareness and Funding for their No-Kill, Ten-Acre Animal Shelter in the Greater New York Region

Do you care? Why should you?

But, there was a ray of light in this headline:

• Revenue Sharing Cuts from Governor, Legislature to Trigger More Crime, Layoffs Statewide

It’s about Michigan (should have been in the headline) and was posted by the Michigan Municipal League. But at least it’s about other people and not about them!

• The rise of user-generated content (‘UGC’) and blogging means that there is a growing need to be able to monitor, engage with, and respond to what is being said about you, your brand, product or service online.
• Another way of identifying the influential voices is to go into online communities and get to know people by talking to them
  • Discussion and remarks in forums and bulletin boards account for a very large proportion of comments made about brands.
• The idea of brands posting covertly on forums or bulletin boards is “a big no-no”. It can backfire spectacularly if company employees masquerading as normal people are identified as brand representatives.
  • The “embarrassing dad syndrome” is also to be avoided (where brands turn up when they are not really wanted).
  • If brand representatives are taking part in forums it is important to get the tone right and to be as candid as possible.

Yesterday, Adweek weighed in with a story about SMRs.

Thursday, Bulldog Reporter’s PR University will devote 90 minutes to the subject in an Audio Conference called Supercharging Press Releases: How PR Can Use SEO, RSS and Multimedia to Craft “Smart” Releases for Wider Audiences. SMR pioneers Shannon Whitley and Brian Solis are on the panel, along with a rep from PR Newswire — the true 300-pound gorilla in this discussion.

BTW — I would be remiss if I didn’t post a couple of resources for you in the SMR category:

Shannon Whitley’s PRXBuilder, a build-your-own SMR page

SHIFT Communication’s widely discussed SMR template V.1

Also, while we’re on the subject, check out SHIFT’s social media newsroom template. I actually like this a lot more than their SMR template.

The idea behind the development of the social media release, or SMR, is to leverage the resources of the Internet to generate wider distribution of your press release as well as to make the release more user-friendly for non-traditional journalists and others who might want to repurpose your news.

Here are some links on the subject:

• “Social Media Release Moving Forward Again”: A post by Chris Heuer of the Social Media Club
• Chris Whitley’s PRXBuilder: Online tool for creating SMRs
• Edelman’s Storycrafter SMR tool (example only — it doesn’t appear that this is posted for use by non-clients)
• Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About SMRs: A comprehensive post by Brian Solis
• New Media Release group: A Google group for discussing SMRs

Of all of these links, I think Edelman’s Storycrafter page gives you the best overview of what an SMR might look like.

My big concern about all these efforts is that they appear to place the highest priority on designing releases that look like web pages, rather than placing the emphasis on storytelling. This may help leverage the net to create higher visibility for your story, which is of course a worthy goal. But I’d like to see research on this point first before I take it as gospel.

What these versions of the SMR leave out, which is crucial, is using releases to tell stories. Today’s jargon-laden, poorly written releases are hardly paragons of storytelling. But at least they try to tell a story based on age-old and proven journalistic style.

So if we are going to develop a successor to the traditional press release, let’s at least start with the premise that we’re going to tell a story. Then let’s overlay it with SEO tools and other Internet-friendly content and coding.

So if you’re a blogger who uses news items, take the survey. We’ll be watching for the results when they come out.

• Corporations will/are taking over social media: David showed a screen shot from iTunes of the most popular podcasts, and almost all of them were generated by large media corporations (including NPR)
• There are really 2 blogospheres: the personal (“what I did on my vacation”) and ongoing large-scale blogs such as the Gawker blogs, which are designed to generate traffic and sell ads. David calls these “clogs”
• The power is not the technology, it’s the content
• The corporate world is loosening up regarding social media. For example, one day the Times simply decided to give David permission to post his personal technology videos on iTunes and YouTube.
• PR opportunities: harness the media, figure out how to use it; but don’t abuse or people will stop believing you; people want things that are real
• David’s ideas for corporate social media: behind-the-scenes information, design prototypes that didn’t work, customer-generated content
• Diffuse negative information about you on blogs by setting up a Google Alert that’s tracking blogs and when you see something inaccurate or unfair, jump on it and comment immediately — it will diffuse the situation (this from his personal experience)
• He said he went looking for a good summation of the value of social media and came across this post from Chris Heuer of the Social Media Club — it’s worth a read

First of all, the Social Media Club’s SMR site. Lots of good stuff there.

Secondly, Brian Solis’s PR 2.0 blog. Lots more good stuff there.

Shift Communications has posted a template that seems to sum up the current thinking on SMRs.

And so on. Just Google Social Media Release and you’ll find plenty of ideas.

Still, I don’t think we’re there yet. To add to the bullet points below about SMRs, here are some further thoughts:

• An SMR needs to use web technology to tell the story. It shouldn’t just dump a bunch of links and tags on users. Those are fine for people in the know, but 95% 0f people aren’t in the know yet.
• The whole idea of including canned quotes strikes me as absurd. Does anyone have evidence that these quotes are being used? (Seriously, show me some examples and I’ll eat my electronic words)
• Further to that point: shouldn’t an SMR be designed specifically for use by online media and social media outlets? Has anyone really asked these media or studied their use of corporate information to figure out what would be most useful to them? (Again, this is not meant to be a challenge, but more of an open question)
• The current traditional press release model is most definitely broken and in need of a 21st century fix. So this is an incredibly worthy effort and I look forward to watching and participating in the evolution. But I would hasten to add that clients/companies are going to be reluctant to change their release model until we PR folks can demonstrate to them in a slam-dunk, no brainer way why this is better for them.
• To this last point: Visit PR Newswire and take a look at an random handful of releases. You won’t find many SMRs among them. And don’t pooh-pooh this and say, well that’s traditional business, blah blah blah. These are the people spending real money on issuing releases. You’ll know the evolution is happening when you see it happening there.