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!

— Andy Merchant