The blogosphere in the past few months have been buzzing about Public Relations. Specifically, there has been discussion about the changing role of PR and the social media space. My disclaimer before you read the rest of this post: I’m not an expert in PR — but based on my experience and personal knowledge, I have some thoughts in regards to this recent discussion and the “Social Media Release”.

In my opinion the “Social Media Release” is only one piece of a two part puzzle. There’s a distinct difference between the Social Media Release and having a Social Media Strategy. In my mind, PR should not only understand these are growing trends… they should already be doing it, and perfecting it.

So what’s a social media release?
It’s a clean, clear, humanized press release. It should be outward focused (on the customer and audience). Similar to a 140 character Twitter message, it should be short and sweet — and it should lead with the “meat and potatoes” first and be supported with the finer details farther into the text (also known as the inverted pyramid approach).

Most importantly it should the ingredients for what truly makes it a social media release:

• embeddable content
• embeddable photos
• embeddable video
• links to other relevant websites
• key quotes and testimonials from the source
• the use of social tools to bookmark it (digg, delicious, facebook)
• tags for indexing, SEO and discoverability (so there’s an understanding of what keywords are relevant)
• subscriptions via RSS

Bottom line, a social media release gives you everything you need to discover/learn, share, and MOST importantly — everything you need to retell the story.

The second piece to the puzzle is having a Social Media Strategy. This is having the wherewithal and experience of how to engage in the right areas online to publish and post your information. It also needs to be within the areas it’s most relevant and has value. Brian Solis recently created a helpful ‘Conversation Prism’, a chart that illustrates where conversations are taking place in the online space.

The implications? No longer does your website function as just the hub in which you disseminate out information. Much like in marketing, where the people are communicating — you should be there too, engaged as well.

On a more holistic level, PR is shifting to a role of understanding how to tap the key influencers online and/or allow anyone to have the necessary assets to provide their take on the story. Being a gatekeeper of information shouldn’t be the focus in PR. Establishing an open relationship and conversation with the people who are writing the stories is what it’s all about. It’s happening already — except people are going about extracting the information on their own (also referred to as the groundswell). PR should embrace and augment the “story creation” process for bloggers and people online. While it’s scary to swallow, it’s about enabling audiences to take your information and run with it.

*UPDATE* If you want to see an example of how CNN is already embracing this shift, see a great example of a recent social media release here.

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