By Dominic Jones | Published: January 17, 2007 | 
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"Social media" wire releases are bogus
By Dominic Jones
THERE’s a lot of talk these days from the big wire services about “social media news releases.” However, almost all of it is meaningless because people are mostly trying to reinvent something that is actually obsolete.
Newswires have latched onto social media releases because they’re looking for ways to stay relevant in a world that, with increasing use of RSS, is cutting them out of the information dissemination loop. PR firms, meanwhile, are looking for ways to make money on the buzz around social media, and “social media releases” seem like a sexy way to do it.
In this article, I focus on the kind of social media releases that the big wire services are “offering.” To understand what these look like, let’s start with a case study involving PR Newswire.
Earlier this week, PR Newswire announced that it is including links in news releases posted on its website to Technorati, a blog directory and search engine. When people follow the links to Technorati, they will see which blogs are linking to the news release posted on PR Newswire’s website. They can then go read those blog entries if they want.
PR Newswire has been big on this social media thing. Back in October, they announced a deal with Whitley Media where they would distribute social media news releases cranked out using an online social media news release builder. And before that, PR Newswire added links to Del.icio.us in news releases posted on its public website. Del.icio.us is a bookmark sharing site owned by Yahoo!
If you look at releases on PR Newswire’s website today, you’ll see that news releases also have links to Digg, which is a site where members add links to content on the Web and others vote on or “digg” them.
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| The left arrow points to PR Newswire’s own stock quote, news and filings pages. This sucks traffic away from similar content on your own IR website. The links on the right also rob your site of traffic while boosting traffic to PR Newswire. They make you pay to build their traffic. |
Now PR Newswire isn’t the only wire service doing these types of things. Business Wire does them, too, and there are some smaller press release services doing similar things.
Everyone, it seems, is trying to reinvent the newswire release by making it “social.”
Driving traffic away from your site
But why? Why does anyone paying exorbitant fees for a news release distribution via one of the big PR wires need that? Why do they want to send people from their news release on PR Newswire’s website to Technorati, Del.icio.us or Digg?
The PR firms and the PR wires will tell you it’s because you want to attract interest from the communities using such sites. And, yes, you do.
But what they don’t tell you is that you don’t need newswire services to do that. You can do it on your own website or even a blog (check out the save/share it link at the end of this post).
In fact, by using a newswire to distribute a social media news release you will likely drive traffic away from your website.
Instead of going to your website, people are encouraged to go to Technorati and other sites. When someone “diggs” a news release on PR Newswire’s site, all the traffic flows directly to PR Newswire’s site, not to yours. The same thing happens with Del.icio.us.
In other words, allowing wire services and PR firms to include links to social media sites, comments or trackbacks in your distributed releases results in less traffic for your website and more for them.
News releases should be 25 words and a link
Actually, when you think about it, almost all news releases distributed by wire services today pull traffic away from your company’s website to other websites. And you’re paying for the pleasure.
In the days before we had websites, we had to include all the information we could in the release without making it too long. But we don’t have to do that any more because we have websites where we can post the details.
Today, we don’t have to give people all the information in the release itself. The most important information in your releases today is that mighty invention that makes all of this Web stuff work — the hyperlink.
The single purpose of news releases today should be to get people to link to the details on our websites. To do that, we only need to convince them that it’s worth their while to click the link.
Once people are on your website, that’s when you want them to click on a Digg, Del.icio.us or Technorati link. That’s where you want them to comment, trackback and subscribe to feeds. That’s how you truly engage and join “the conversation.”
News release writers today can learn a lot from the Digg front page. That’s where you will see effective attention grabbers that prompt people to click on links. We’re talking about a linked headline and a 25-word summary.
That’s what a newswire news release should look like in 2007.
Works for everyone except the PR wires
Good luck trying to get your 25-word release and link distributed by any of the main wire services. They won’t do it. There’s not enough money in it for all of them. They typically charge by the word, so if everyone started sending out 25-word releases, they’d lose most of their revenue.
Furthermore, if people are coming to your website and then subscribing to your feed, then you’ve started establishing an alternative newswire of your own. Pretty soon, you’d start to realize that you’re getting very little additional value from paying a newswire service to distribute what people are getting from you directly.
Do 25-word releases with links make sense for the audience? Yes.
Does it make sense for the company issuing the release? Yes.
Does it make sense for PR firms? It could, if they also get to write the detailed material on your website.
Does it makes sense for journalists? I don’t see why not. Most of them can click, can’t they?
So who exactly doesn’t it work for?
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January 17th, 2007 at 7:09 am
Hi Dominic
The Web has changed the rules for news releases. Buyers and investors now read news releases on Google, Yahoo! and other search engines, on vertical market portals, and with RSS readers. So smart marketing, IR, and PR professionals craft news releases to reach buyers and investors directly. To do that, the releases need much more than 25 words to ensure that keywords and phrases are included and to make certain that people who do not know the company yet can understand what’s going on.
This is not to suggest that the IR Website is secondary or that mainstream media and media relations programs are no longer important. In most markets, mainstream media and the trade press remain vital. But the primary audience for social media news releases is not people who already know you. It is people who are searching for what you have on the various social media and search engine services.
The best way to publish news releases so they are seen by you buyers and potential investors is to simultaneously post a release to your own Web site AND send it to one of the news release wires. The benefit of using a news release distribution service is that your release will be sent to the online news services, including Yahoo!, Google, Lycos, and many others. Many news release distribution services reach trade and industry Web sites as well.
The significant benefit of this approach is that your release will be indexed by the news search engines and vertical market sites, and then when somebody does a search for a word or phrase contained in your release, presto, that potential customer finds you. As an added bonus, people who have requested alerts about your industry from sites that index news releases will get an alert that something important—your news release—is available.
January 17th, 2007 at 10:00 am
Dominic… This is a great article. I couldn’t agree more with what you are saying.
The new “social media” or web 2.0 is creating a lot of buzz and many ininformed people/firms are making bad decisions based on the buzz. Hopefully reading stories like this better inform people about what is really important.
Thanks for all the good work you do.
January 17th, 2007 at 11:56 am
Hello Dominic,
I appreciate what you’ve laid out here. That may come as a surprise since I represent the marketing side of PRWeb, a newswire. But what you’ve stated is not flummery. If a company has developed enough traffic to its site and can direct enough of that traffic to its pressroom pages, then what you say has merit.
Unfortunately, that is not the case for everyone and that is where our press release distribution platform becomes extremely valuable. The social media aspects will extend the distribution as newsworthy releases get republished on high traffic searchable properties. And since PRWeb releases tend to retain their hyperlinks when republished, these new locations will continue to point back to the release issuers’ Web sites.
The other good news is at PRWeb a brief release will cost the same as a verbose release (although a verbose release’s issuer may receive an editor’s suggestion to pare it down). We’re not big fans of the “per word” legacy pricing scheme.
Thanks for letting me comment.
Joe Beaulaurier
PRWeb
January 17th, 2007 at 5:29 pm
David, Joe:
Thanks for your comments. I don’t disagree that you want your news in front of as many people as possible, but I don’t believe you should have to pay a wire service for the pleasure of diverting attention. As long as we continue distributing full-text releases (social media-enabled or not), there’s little incentive for interested people to visit or link to your site where you can best deliver your message and engage with your audience. As for search engines, I want my information on my site to be what comes up, not my news release on Yahoo or PRWeb or some other site that stands in the way of people getting to my site.
Wire services’ only value proposition at present is their proprietary distribution networks. That’s why I didn’t say you should stop sending news releases. I said you should do them, but with the sole objective of directing people to your (social media-enabled) website. If that’s 25 words, 50 or 100, whatever will get people to click through, then that’s all you have to do.
However, even the wire services’ distribution networks are not sustainable in an era of open syndication. Instead of picking up a third-party wire service for company issued news, why can’t all of the network points pick up companies’ RSS feeds directly or from an aggregator, such as the SEC’s Edgar or one that has yet to emerge? It could be PRWeb, FeedBurner or who knows who?
But even when we have this new distribution model, the objective still should be to direct people to our websites.
Ryan: Thanks for the compliment.
January 17th, 2007 at 8:02 pm
I really appreciate your thoughts on this subject. If you want to use examples of what social media releases look like, I would point you to what ‘early adopters’ and savvy communicators are doing: http://www.prnewswire.com/mnr/cymfony/26320/
Although this one is a bit verbose, it’s got all (read: most) the multimedia content media, bloggers, consumers want… thanks again!
January 18th, 2007 at 10:32 am
Dominic,
Thanks for noticing that PR Newswire has been, in your words, “big on this social media thing.” In the same vein as our earlier conversation about the role of the newswire as it relates to disclosure, it is vital to share our opinion on the role of the newswire as not only a distributor of content, but as a vast resource and aggregator of content from tens of thousands of organizations.
Today, people use search engines as a starting point to find content of interest to them - rarely does a person go directly to one given website, simply because they are interested in seeing more things that relate to their needs and interests, not less. It’s the same with a newswire. Someone interested in news about the software industry is not going to go to each individual company’s website to read news releases or sign up for RSS feeds – that would require a lot of time and effort and the possibility of missing important news if you were not aware of a particular company. The newswire, on the other hand, acts as a huge repository of information, and enables news consumers to easily retrieve information that is relevant to them. And that’s what’s happening. The proof is in the numbers - PR Newswire’s public website receives 1.2 million unique visitors a month.
Furthermore, news consumers are rarely interested in only one point of view – they want to read/hear the conversation around the news as much as they want to read/hear the news as soon as it’s available. That’s what http://www.prnewswire.com is focused on – providing a resource of news directly from the organizations issuing it, enabling conversation around that news, and giving our clients a means to keep track of it all.
Lastly, linking from press releases back to an organization’s website is a valid SEO strategy and one we encourage with our own clients. We strongly believe the news release is a starting point and that readers should be encouraged to seek more information from the organizations they are reading about. That’s why we optimize our news releases for better results in search engines, and provide feedback to clients on how the release is being accessed and what actions visitors are taking.
There’s nothing bogus about the social media news release or how the newswires are helping organizations leverage the medium.
Dave
January 20th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
[...] As he (and Scoble and Jeremiah and probably many others) have expressed, it’s a bad idea in so many ways. Dominic Jones also blogged on the topic this week, and he proposed a different solution: News release writers today can learn a lot from the Digg front page. That’s where you will see effective attention grabbers that prompt people to click on links. We’re talking about a linked headline and a 25-word summary. [...]
January 20th, 2007 at 11:45 pm
[...] I know when Ed asked me what I thought of the SMPR that High Road put together for Weblo, I said I thought it was a good step, and I still think that. A baby step, perhaps, but still a step. Not everyone is going to jump feet-first (or head-first) into blogging. But I would also agree with Stowe and Jeremiah — and Brian Oberkich here and Jeremy Toeman and Dominic Jones — that it does not go nearly far enough. And it looks like my friend Tony Hung agrees with me. [...]
January 23rd, 2007 at 4:56 am
[...] I figured that since I’ve recently been knocking newswires as a tool for disclosure, he wanted to rub my nose in the fact that regulators in Europe are just now adopting the very technology I’ve been dismissing as partly irrelevant. [...]
January 24th, 2007 at 4:36 pm
Dominic,
I enjoyed the article, but I was waiting for the payoff on the “obsolete” comment and never really got it. For public companies, the press release is still a necessary evil.
The press release will be around at the very least until the SEC deems wire service distribution unnecessary for satisfying disclosure requirement. And even after that point, it will likely live on in corporate News pages and RSS feeds.
Given all that, the social media release tries to put enough structure on the gobbledegook that goes into press releases to allow the consumer to separate the wheat from the chaff.
You hit the nail on the head on at least one aspect: “News releases should be 25 words and a link.”
The social media release standard (http://www.socialmediarelease.org/) that is being worked on is based on this principle. More specifically, it’s based on the structure of hAtom and RSS–but allows for more capabilities (and content).
A properly marked up hRelease announcement (as the microformat standard might ultimately be called) shifts the balance of power from the corporation to the information “consumer,” giving them the power to pull what they want out and discard the rest. If you just want a headline, or a 25-word summary, grab them. If you just want those wonderful canned quotes, grab ‘em. If you want a bullet list of key features, grab it. If you just want the link to the company, grab it.
January 24th, 2007 at 5:40 pm
VHS video machines are obsolete, but many people still use them. Full-text releases are redundant, but everyone still does them.
That doesn’t make them any less obsolete or redundant.
But I hear you. We’re a long way from that.
As for the XML-based news release concepts in development, they’re worthy initiatives that deserve support. But they shouldn’t and don’t need a proprietary newswire network to distribute them.
January 26th, 2007 at 6:41 am
If releases are disseminated by RSS, they should, in my view, be full-feed rather than a 25-word summary or be offered in parallel. The difference in bandwidth consumed is minimal if it’s all text. If you’re traveling, letting the feed reader update and then checking stuff offline is much more efficient. It’s also quicker to scan through stuff that way.
However, 25 words would be better than the chocolate-teapot service PRN currently offers, which is headline only, and based on broad category feeds rather than custom selection by keyword or company. Nine times out of ten you have to click just to work out if you care. Not only that, you get the same release duplicated three or four times over if you are subscribed to several related categories. Enabling conversation around the news is all very well, but a little more attention to the core business would be an idea.
January 26th, 2007 at 9:16 am
Chris,
Really helpful points. I didn’t think about off-line use as you’ve described.
Since companies aren’t paying anything more for full-text RSS, I assumed that’s what they’d do.
But your comments suggest a strategy for companies to drive adoption of their RSS feeds i.e. issue summary releases with links via the paid wire services and provide full-text only via RSS.
Unfortunately, this introduces a further coordination challenge to the process because the regulators would want the wire release to go out before the RSS feed is updated with full-text so that no one is disadvantaged.
Which brings me back to why don’t we just let companies issue news via RSS and be done with press release wire services for regulated disclosures so that we can take some of the costs out of securities compliance?
RSS gives equal access to everyone who wants it. And it’s free. Can’t beat that.
Of course, if you want customized feeds by industry, keyword or whatever, I’m sure there’d be many services eager to serve them up to you — even in real-time, for free. One just launched in beta, but I’m not done testing it so I won’t say more yet.
January 26th, 2007 at 1:30 pm
I totally agree with making RSS (or something like it) the standard way of disseminating this stuff. It will be more flexible overall than what the wire services offer as you have much more choice over how things are presented. Folders for companies in the main beats, for those in peripheral areas and maybe wire service RSS for companies who are too small or too new for people to have added to their main feeds.
Maybe what could happen is that companies offer a real-time feed with summaries that matches the newswire feed, then have the full text feed on time delay until such time that the SEC decides that more people end up seeing the disclosures thanks to RSS than through newswires or services with category feeds (which is probably what newswires will become).
Let’s face it, it wasn’t so long ago that newspaper offices were knee deep in fax paper.
January 26th, 2007 at 8:03 pm
Chris,
I hope the newswire folks who’ve been watching this story pay attention to what you’re saying, especially the part about them getting the basics right first.
There’s so much talk about “Web 2.0″ and “new media” that it seem people forget that most of us still haven’t quite gotten Web 1.0 right yet.