PR is Product Design: Ford's Social Media News Release

PR is a field that is currently going through a series of pretty radical disruptions. The rise of social media has challenged the old way of promoting messages, and today's PR practitioners face the daunting challenge of doing effective public relations when it's more and more the public itself that does all of the relating for you.

Enter the social media news release (SMNR), originally conceived by SHIFT Communications, a viable new format to spark and cultivate online conversations about a product. Todd Defren, Shel Holtz, Chris Heuer, and other bloggers have been on the soapbox preaching about SMNRs for almost a year now. The list of companies that have used the SMNR includes Coca-Cola, BEA, SAP, Novell, and Belkin, among many other smaller companies.

And now -- hat tip to Geoff Livingston -- Ford has released an especially glowing example of a SMNR for its new 2008 Focus. It's quite a production and includes a vast array of social media elements. Flickr-sized Images, RSS feeds, suggested meta-tags, YouTube videos, PDF fact sheets, bulleted facts, and a variety of executive quotes make this release eye and conversation candy -- lavish yet informative.

Livingston writes: "This new social media news release takes the emerging form to a new level, and demonstrates that companies can reinvigorate, static and boring parenthetical form with dynamic content. The result: a virtual work sheet that any blogger, journalist or analyst can use as starting point for a story."

It is definitely a step in the right direction even though the release is not yet fully social media-enabled: it lacks broader social bookmarking capabilities, and it also does not allow the recipients to comment on the release itself and pick up the conversation right there. I also doubt that Ford has put their release out over the traditional news wires, as they still seem to lack the ability to handle this kind of rich multimedia package.

Questions for the Social Media Group, the PR firm that crafted the release for Ford (and is probably tracking this conversation): How do you measure its effectiveness? What would make it a successful release for you?

Comments

[Brian Solis]

Maggie's SMR for Ford is an incredible step in the right direction. Kudos and props to her and her team.

As edglings, we also have to point out that social media is different from multimedia in the sense that it facilitates discovery and conversations through entirely different channels.

The goal, at least for for me, is to help SMRs complement traditional press releases and SEO in order to additionally reach people through the social tools they use today.

PR Newswire's multivu service has been offering a traditional online multimedia press releases that also attempt to provide social tools. However, it's still not quite what we're talking about, as it is only discoverable through the multivu site and traditional search engines. They key here is that it's not findable through social search or networks - unless someone takes the information and socializes it on their behalf.

Here's an example:
http://www.prnewswire.com/mnr/kodak/29297/

[maggie fox]

Hey Tim - thanks so much for your high praise of the Ford SMPR! In answer to your questions, we'll be tracking success (and spread) via the usual suspects - RSS feed subscriptions, Flickr and YouTube links & views, plus a few other proprietary tricks we have up our sleeves :-)

With this SMPR, we were seeking to provide tools and assets to enable bloggers and other content creators to discuss the 2008 Ford Focus. In other words, we weren’t trying to build a conversation, but rather join one that was already underway, and hopefully make it a little richer and better-informed with easy-to-access content. I know there's been some discussion about whether this is truly "social". Facilitating discussion seems pretty social to me, but I'll leave that up to the pundits to decide!

Finally, a quick note of clarification: SMG isn't actually a PR firm, we're a pure-play social media agency (one of less than a dozen in North America).

Thanks again for your kind words!

[Geoff Livingston]

Tim: Thanks for the hat tip. Hope you are well.