Have you embraced the social media press release?

The social media press release is still a newborn while the traditional release is far from dead

Two and a half years ago, Tom Foremski, author of the Silicon Valley Watcher blog, wrote an obituary for the press release. “Press releases are created by committees, edited by lawyers and then sent out at great expense through Businesswire or PR Newswire to reach the digital and physical trash bins of tens of thousands of journalists,” Foremski wrote. “This madness has to end. It is wasted time and effort by hundreds of thousands of professionals.”

Shortly thereafter, PR firm SHIFT Communications announced that it had developed a “social media press release” template, which stripped out the empty fluff and distilled the release down to its basic elements. Instead of a narrative, the social media press release contains blocks of information: a headline, news facts, stand-alone quotes and links to videos, photos and other multimedia elements. The hope of many PR people—and probably not a few journalists—was that the bloated, uninformative press release might really be on its deathbed.