The Pressitt social media news release team are always striving for ways to get PRs, brands, small businesses, and anybody else interested in the SMNR format, to share knowledge about this increasingly popular communications tool.

Today, we are pleased to announce a new social network: Pressitt SMNR Best Practice – that allows you to share best practice and helpful tips when creating your Pressitt SMNR. We hope Pressitt’s new social network will help to crowd source knowledge from those that create SMNR’s and feedback into the community with best practice, helpful tips, advice and any other thoughts. Of course the Pressitt team will be fully involved in the network, adding relevant links, new forums topics, user examples and generally answering your social media news release questions.

So, if you use Pressitt regularly, or want to find out how to create SMNRs, please get involved and share your thoughts, recommendations and ideas.

Pressitt Team

To get the latest Pressitt SMNR’s please follow us on http://twitter.com/Pressitt

Last Thursday (5th of November) The Pressitt SMNR team were asked to present at the CIPR Social media for PR practise workshop - focusing on the CIPR’s Education and skills group.

Also in attendance was my colleges from Liberate Media PR and social media consultancy Tim Greenhalgh, who was on the sharing best practise morning panel discussion with Simon Collister of We are Social and Nic Mitchell from Teesside University and led by Tracy Playle, Vice-Chair, CIPR Education and Skills sector group and Pickle Jar communications.

Lloyd Gofton and myself Andy Merchant led the afternoon session focused on building social media news releases.

The Pressitt SMNR session seemed to go well,  and we had a mixed group in terms of social media understanding. When asked for a show of hands of people that had published an SMNR we received No response. But preaching to the converted is easy, but helping PR professionals to understand the benefits of a social media news releases was much more rewarding.

We faced some tough questioning which we welcomed as this wasn’t an audience of converts, this was an audience of concerned professionals that wanted to embrace new tools, but needed to ‘get-it’ first of all, which made us re-think our approach and additionally gave us some good ideas for Pressitt 2.0, which we hope to launch in the new year.

After the event we had a great deal of positive feedback and promises from a number of people to give Pressitt a go, which at least one has already done, and after all that’s all we can ever ask.

I will leave you with this, a quote from the CIPR’s research into the use of online media in UK higher and Further Education institutions.

“Press releases are nearly useless. They typically start with a tremendous amount of top-spin; they contain pat-on-the-back phrases and meaningless quotes. Often they will contain quotes from C-level executives praising their customer focus.

“Press releases are created by committees, edited by lawyers, and then sent out at great expense through Businesswire or PRnewswire to reach the digital and physical trash bins of tens of thousands of journalists … this madness has to end!”

His proposal: “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.”

Now there’s a thought!

We’d like to share a nice piece of feedback with you that we had about Pressitt’s Social Media News Release creation and publishing service.

The feedback was given by a gentleman called Chris from the Commission for Rural Communities.

Chris was a novice in the area of SMNR creation and publishing, and here is what he had to say.

“We have been delighted with our first foray into the exciting world of SMNRs, and Pressitt has made life very easy for us. It’s straightforward and intuitive to use and help is at hand if it’s needed. We’re also really pleased with the feedback we’ve had on our first release, and again it’s thanks to Pressitt for starting the ball rolling via Twitter. I would have no hesitation in recommending Pressitt to anyone thinking about doing a SMNR, but allow plenty of time to assemble all the content first – that’s by far the hardest part!”

The CRC produced a really great first SMNR -Drive to push investment to heart of rural England - SMNR, which included a number of YouTube videos and images which made for a feature-rich Pressitt SMNR.

If anybody else would like to share their Presitt thoughts or feedback please get in touch. We look forward to hearing from you.

Pressitt has been in Private Beta for just under three weeks and we are now working hard to implement feedback and updates to the site. We’re not that far away from going into public beta!

First of all I would like to thank everyone who’s registered their interest in the Pressitt SMNR service, and we hope to allow more people to try the service really soon.

We have already received several positive pieces of coverage about Pressitt, beginning with a nice write-up in PR week, and we have also been featured in the web 2.0 directory Zappa, Brand Republic, Listio, Feed myapp and DIY start up news, along with bits and pieces of conversation within Twitter.

For anyone who has not seen what Pressitt’s Social Media News Releases look like, here are a few examples:

Adventure Ecology appoints Collective for website to showcase its next adventure, The Plastiki.

iBAHN conforms to EU Data Retention Directive

Kerb founder and games industry veteran join forces to launch next-generation games company

Keep an eye out for more features and updates coming soon!

Pressitt Beta launch coverage in PR week:

Liberate Media, the digital PR and social media firm, has collaborated with its web development partner Best Served Cold to create a social media news release service called Pressitt. A Pressitt release includes the core information in a traditional release, along with supporting audio, images, video clips and downloadable presentations.

It can also do a lot more!