I could lie and say I haven’t chimed in on the whole Stowe Boyd/Chris Heuer/Robert Scoble social media release controvery because I wanted to stay above the fray. But to be brutally honest, between a client launch and a security attack against one of the blogs I manage*, I’ve been a little busy lately. It’s also difficult to top Brian Solis’ great overview and commentary on the issue. But I’ll try to at least add some more perspective to this as a PR AND social media practitioner…

1. Social media has crossed the chasm.** It’s just about reached the tipping point too. Etc. etc. To put this (loosely) in Moore’s terms, the Pragmatists have gotten hold of this cool social media stuff and are starting to use it… Starting to commercialize it… The Early Adopters are losing control over their babies. We (the Early Adoptors) see our babies–the wonderful tools that we’ve helped create and contribute to–getting corrupted here and there and we don’t like it. But moms and dads, ya gotta kick the baby out of the nest sometime. And you know what? Most of them make it!

2. The social media release is an attempt to provide some structure and consistency to attempts by corporate PR types to use social media. Specifically, it latches on to the old paradigm of the press release (however faulty). It’s designed to give the average PR person–and the average company–more ways to interact with their audiences (there, I said it) online.
3. This is being positioned, essentially, as a battle between the suits and the freaks (I use the word freak lovingly). This is a false dichotomy. First of all, Chris Heuer is no suit. Sure, he’s seeking input from corporate PR types and the wire services. Sure, there have been early attempts to capitalize on the idea of the social media release (and there will be more down the line, especially as the standard gets closer to being finalized). Neither of these things is bad.
4. In software terms, the social media release is a major release, not a new product. The social media release is more than a patch to a kludgy old product. It adds significant new functionality to the old press release. It also offers a way for companies–or their audiences–a way to, as Brian put it, “strip out all of the bullshit and hype from [the] traditional mechanical, … useless press [release] and rebuild it as a focused compilation of relevant facts, links, media and a subscription feed to help readers write, tell, and share a story their way (without having to sort through a sea of crap to find out what’s real, what’s canned, and what’s important).” But, change in formatting and spirit aside, at the heart it’s still a press release.
5. The social media release exists because the press release exists. And the press release exists today for two reasons: 1) disclosure regulations and 2) promotional purposes.
6. If you don’t need to use press releases, don’t spend too much time worrying, or complaining, about the social media release. If you do use press releases, and it’s because of disclosure regulations, then consider the social media release (just make sure it goes over the traditional wires too).
7. For those holdouts who still uses press releases for promotional purposes, consider the social media release as a gateway drug: something that whets their appetite for some of the truly powerful things that social media tools can do.
8. Don’t get caught on the slippery slope. To come back around to point number one, corporations are using social media. Most are using it responsibly. Some are abusing it. There’s no point in lamenting the widspread adoption of technologies that, for years, we’ve been complaining haven’t been used enough. It’s here–so much so that folks like Steve Rubel are claiming that the term “social media” is unnecessary, since all media has become social***.
9. The social media release is the ultimate re-mixable, mashupable, social media-friendly communication vehicle for companies. It puts more power in the hands of the consumers, be they traditional journalists, shareholders or just interested parties.

Brian sums up the social media release nicely: “It takes out what’s wrong with press releases and modernizes them into a usable format for journalists, bloggers, and individuals.”

* WordPress, vulnerable? Sadly, yes. But it won’t stop me from moving this site over to that platform–even though Blogger’s finally out of beta.
** Social media has reached its tipping point, and the social media Early Adopters have reached their “clicking point” (think changing the channel kind of clicking–early bloggers moving to podcasting moving to video, for instance).
*** Again, for the record, it’s hard to beat Brian Solis’ input on this.

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