Shape SHIFTers
29th May 2006 by Rich Barger, ABC, APR
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.
May 30th, 2006 at 9:28 am
I’m not sure the press release needs such a radical overhaul. And I am pretty convinced this format will satisfy very few people. The problem with the release has been one of content, not presentation. The release as it stands has not been that unsuccessful in breaking into new areas. The whole idea of the search-engine release came about entirely organically without anyone sprinkling any kind of new-media fairy dust on it. All they had to do was make it HTML friendly – the search engines did the rest.
By rendering the release down into a kit of parts, anyone producing one of these releases throws away the chance of an automated pickup from a search engine. That sounds a bit daft for people trying to get additional exposure. And it’s not as if a hack can’t ‘remix’ a release today. It all goes into the same word processor if you are going to do little more than gut a release.
For journalists, the primary issues are those of relevance and content. A new format does not make a lot of difference there. There is something to be said for having links to other collateral material, such as photos and audio recordings. But that’s just as possible with a regular release as with this new version. It only involves a hyperlink here or there.
Frankly, the idea of a canned audio interview to back up a release doesn’t make a lot of sense. If you’re just gutting a release to get a quick story online, listening to ten minutes of audio is going to take too long and is unlikely to provide anything extra. If you’re going to do that, provide a transcript. Bunging it into a podcast will just sound fake. And, if you’ve got time to do a proper story, you’ll do your own interview.
The way that Shift has organised the tags in the example release, however, makes no sense whatsoever. It’s just some random stuff about the company – you can’t stop other people using the same del.icio.us tags either accidentally or deliberately. A conventional set of hyperlinks to conventional documents or web pages would have done the job better.
Tagging in a release may make sense not so much from a social media sense but simply to allow a feed-reading client sort releases into different subject areas or types. For example, all advisories go into one folder; quarterly results into another. But that involves PRs agreeing to a common set of tags rather than just making them up on the fly, and the journalists also getting their companies to build tools to make use of the extra metadata. Remember XPRL? It was the wrong data for the wrong people and ultimately nobody cared.
I know from experience that getting reliable metadata out of people is an uphill struggle, so I am reluctant to say: “This is what you need to do.” I believe that, by the time everybody has agreed on a set of usable tags, search technology will have evolved to the point that tagging will be mostly unnecessary. The best tag, after all, is the natural language in the document itself. Furthermore, before that, the releases themselves will be going mainly to automated systems – journalists will be concentrating on material that comes from other places. Within a few years it will be that case that, if you’re waiting for a press release to come your way before you start a story, you’re already too late.
May 30th, 2006 at 10:06 am
Chris is a working journalist who specializes in technology.
I like your thinking, Chris.
For more good stuff on SHIFT Communications’ Web 2.0-style media release, check out “New-format press release. It’s…er…lovely” on his blog, Hacking Cough.
As a colleague (who declined to post) said to me, “I am trying to imagine a ‘a chartreuse and puce Fair Isle sweater with three sleeves.’”
Yeah. Me, too.
You may want to check out Hacking Cough from time to time. Same colleague: “Chris takes on the most interesting topics and colours his commentary with his inimitable perspective.”
He surely does. Thanks, Chris.
August 1st, 2006 at 1:54 pm
From the sounds of it, the new format is probably better left on the home page, where journalists may be looking for additional text, info and images. My personal take on the news release is that too much time is spent crafting too many arcane messages only of importance to the organization, not the media. My thought is that we should restrict the news release to the lead explaining what the news is, a quote (gotta quote the big guy), and a link to the home page with all the info easily identifiable.
April 13th, 2007 at 6:14 am
This format seems hand-tailored for the blogging and podcasting community, which recycles and reuses data (YouTube, other blog posts, Flickr) as a matter of course.