Okay, those of you who aren’t into science fiction won’t “get it.” Too bad; you need to get out more.

Shel Holtz, ABC, has posted an interesting description of SHIFT Communications’ new Social Media Press Release template in “The shape of press releases to come.”

SHIFT presents what it calls a “radically different format [that] is more à la carte menu than standard press release. In a non-linear fashion,” they continue, “it ties together narrative, quotes and various multimedia (RSS, social bookmarking, photos, etc.) on one page. Journalists & bloggers can ‘re-mix’ the elements into the story THEY want to write.”

Is this the next big thing?

Well, maybe. SHIFT’s approach certainly contains some good ideas, presenting media release information in a variety of state-of-the-art multimedia formats that any techno-twit would love.

Are we “there” yet?

No.

A few journalists and a handful of savvy early adopters will experiment with the format and refine it and twist it and tweak it and play with it. We’ll see what is basically a good idea tortured into unrecognizable forms and stretched and crushed and reworked and mushed-about into incomprehensibility. Scholarly papers will be written about it, along with many words in many blogs.

And then, after tumultuous, tiresome tweaking, the industry will adapt, and some of SHIFT’s good ideas will bubble up through all this turmoil, and, after a time, they will contribute to changing the way more and more practitioners construct releases.

Personally, I’m more intrigued with the formatting of the SHIFT template than with its social interaction/multimedia content features. Those will develop through time. Over the next few years, we’ll have so much new technology that we’ll look back on their Template, Version 1.0 as a cute, quaint first step.

But the format ideas hold some real possibilities.

That said, there’s only one test: Whether journalists like it.

If we’re smart, we’re all about providing information in the way that best meets the needs of the user. As I’ve said elsewhere in the IABC Media Relations Commons, It’s about them, not about you.

Or me.

Or even about the slippery slopes of SHIFTing Shapes.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Natalie Lavigne, who won an IABC Gold Quill Award of Excellence for a media relations teaser campaign that helped launch the board game Brin de jasette (the English translation of which is “chit-chat”) in the Quebec market.

Natalie will be presenting a case study on the campaign at IABC’s international conference next week.

The campaign was interesting, innovative and targeted. For those who have been following the threads here, you might be interested to know that she did not use a news release to get the attention of francophone reporters, nor would a news release have worked (whether “traditional” or “Web 2.0″). Instead, she sent teaser samples of the game to specifically targeted journalists for a week, captured their interest, and turned that interest into success.

Like any excellent communicator, she established time-bound and measurable objectives up front and then found ways to measure whether those objectives were actually achieved.

She set objectives in three areas — output, outgrowth and outcome — to create buzz in the Quebec market about the game. She didn’t limit herself to thinking of advertising equivalencies as the indicator for success. There were business outcomes that needed to be achieved, or the press coverage would be wasted because, as she told me, “we knew we had one kick at the can” in the highly competitive board game market.

So how successful was the campaign?

The output goals were achieved with stories, reviews and recommendations in francopphone print and broadcast media.

From an outgrowth perspective, the stories on the game were extremely positive and the messages she hoped would make it into the stories did (and the game even became somewhat of a favorite topic of bloggers, even though bloggers were not specifically targeted).

The outcome objectives of finding a distributor for the game (four distributors came knocking) and selling out the inventory of 2,000 games was achieved (in three months instead of 15 months).

The moral of the story?

Media relations success means “thinking beyond the fold.” Too many times, I’ve chatted with media relations practitioners who think that their success is measured in impressions and whether the story they pitched appeared above or below the fold. Even more importantly, they have convinced their (internal or external) clients that impressions and some form of multiplier are the primary indicator for success.

In today’s world, that’s not good enough. I’m not suggesting that we should ignore impressions, but true success lies in opinions and behaviors of the end audiences for which the campaign is targeted. Did the impressions you generated influence either, neither or both?

True success lies with both. And thank you, Natalie, for providing such a wonderful example of how such success can be achieved.

Listen to the podcast.

Over on my regular blog, I’ve posted several items defending the beseiged press release. The poor press release is being assaulted from a number of quarters, all of which proclaim that social media and other better alternatives spell its doom. I can’t disagree with the litany of problems the media have with press releases. In far too many cases they contain no news but are instead sloppy excuses for getting a little brand awareness into the papers. They are poorly written. They are sent to reporters who cover something completely unrelated to the focus of the release.

But the idea that blogs and other social media tools can replace press releases always struck me as too much of an “either-or” argument that made no sense. There are plenty of tales — many recent — of press releases producing phenomenal results. Then there are regulatory material disclosure requirements. While press releases aren’t mandated per se, they are still the best way to comply with the requirement for simultaneous disclosure to recognized financial markets. I never subscribed to the idea that new media kill old media. Old media frequently shrink. More often, they adapt. So why can’t the press release adapt to the age of social computing instead of meet with extinction?

In fact, that’s just what’s happening. PR Newswire press releases now include the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed and to save the release to a del.icio.us account. BusinessWire has a slew of RSS feeds, letting visitors get the latest press releases dealing with such finely-defined topics as Philanthropy News or Construction and Property News. PRWeb is even producing podcasts associated with releases.

But SHIFT Communications took a huge step today toward pushing the press release into the era of social computing with the release of a template for the social media press release. You can even download a template; SHIFT is throwing its concept out to the world for implementation and improvement.

The Social Media Press Release had its origins in a rant by Silicon Valley journalist-blogger Tom Foremski, who begged PR practitioners to…

Deconstruct the press release into special sections and tag the information so that as a publisher, I can pre-assemble some of the news story and make the information useful.

That’s just what SHIFT has done, creating a press release template that divides the release into clear sections that are easily put to use by busy reporters and editors. First is contact information, followed by a headline and core news facts, preferably in bullet-list format. Then come a link and RSS feed for a “purpose-built” del.icio.us page. This page offers links to “relevant historical, trend, market, product & competitive content sources, providing context as-needed, and, on-going updates.”

Images and multimedia links are next, followed by pre-approved quotes, then links to relevant coverage to-date, boilerplate statements, an RSS feed to the company’s releases, an “add to del.icio.us” link, a Digg This link, and Technorati tags.

SHIFT’s Todd Defren has even gone so far as to create a unique del.icio.us tag to maintain an archive of how the concept evolves. And finally, of course, SHIFT has issued a press release about the template that uses the template, the first-ever such release.

Meanwhile, Edelman has announced that it, too, is releasing a new-media press release template, probably in June.

Take a look at SHIFT’s template and then post your comments here. Is this the way to go? Will media take to this new format? And can a Social Media Press Release give the press release a new lease on life?