Over the next few weeks Pressitt will be offering you some tips and tricks blog posts to help you create your SMNR more effectively. The first in our series looks at the relevant links section of your release.

The relevant links section of the creation process gives you a great opportunity to show your viewers other parts of your brand. Ideas for relevant links could be a link back to your: Company Twitter account, YouTube page, Facebook group, blog, website, other coverage around your news and any supporting research. Here is a recent example of best practise from the ‘Women cyclists benefit from noseless saddle solution to riding-related health problems’ SMNR.

Here is another example: ‘Celebrate Asian music, dance and fashion at The Mela at The Mall 2009‘, notice here some of the social media profiles are highlighted with visual logos, which updates automatically when you add the link.

We hope this gives you a few more ideas when adding links to your SMNR in the creation process. Come back soon to see the next Pressitt SMNR tips and tricks post.

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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

As a big advocate of the Social Media News Release (SMNR), and someone who has spent many hours over the last few years researching the subject for my own benefit and that of Pressitt’s, it’s worth noting where we’re up to with the SMNR concept.

On the plus side we have great vocal and influential supporters such as Brian Solis, who every year creates a huge resource-focused blog post to invigorate the SMNR bandwagon (hats off to the guy), other SMNR stars such as Todd Defren who frequently blogs and comments about the release, and there have been a few nice examples of the SMNR in action such as my own personal favourites - the Standard Bank cricket efforts, and of course all the good work carried out by Digital Snippets for Ford.

Other services like the fantastically successful Pitch Engine have been quick to realise the potential of the SMNR and have done a good job of creating a place to stimulate online conversation - something that Pressitt, our UK-based SMNR and creation service hopes to achieve and emulate.

On the downside, ask many non-digital and even some digital journalists what a SMNR is, and they still won’t have a clue! It’s not just about the journalist though, as SMNRs are also aimed at bloggers hungry for news, microbloggers and social communities (the social masses). These people need to be educated and helped to understand the benefits of the SMNR format. PRs and marketers are slowly getting there but there is still a massive education job to do.

Two rather worrying points that I’ve also noticed are:

- The Social Media Release blog has not been updated since the 7th of March 2008.

- The IABC assumes a Social Media Release leadership role, but they don’t seem to have taken a very proactive approach.

To sum it all up, in the three years since Todd Defren’s ground breaking SMNR template, not as much has happened as could have been possible. At Pressitt we are optimistic that in 2009 the SMNR will reach its tipping point. It’s going to take a lot of hard work from all of the people mentioned in this post as well as ourselves and others, but I really hope we can help to prove that the SMNR is a great way of creating and sharing news socially. I’ll be shouting about the SMNR from the UK rooftops!

Here are some of the better SMNR links I have discovered over the last three years: