Thanks very much to the folks at Social Media Club in Boston for allowing me to present the other night. Special thanks to IDG Network World for hosting the event, and to Todd Van Hoosier and the folks from Topaz Partners for organizing the event .

As part of the meeting Computerworld Senior Online Projects Editor Ian Lamont showed us Sharkbait, which is a user-generated content site (or a forum, depends on how you view it) where readers of ComputerWorld can submit items for discussion about “tech tidbits”, difficult situations, crazy bosses, and those zany users (you know, the ones who use the CDRom drive as a coffe cup holder). There are some interesting anecdotes there already, and the site just went live a few weeks ago.

Ian also noted, based on a question by John Kass, that Computerworld writers who blog are also responding to comments on non-IDG, non-Computerworld blogs, and are finding info from user blogs and highlighting them on their own site. In otherwords, they’ve joined the discussion. Good to know.
Several folks have blogged about the event. John Kass wondered first if Boston Companies have the zing for Social Media. He follows up his own piece with more data here.

David M. Scott reviews the discussion of the Social Media Release at his blog.

Boston organizer Todd Van Hoosier recorded the full audio of the meeting in these two blog posts - part1  & part2.

As promised, here is a link to a PDF of my slides from the other night.

Someone asked me if I would post my raw notes of Todd Defern’s talk on the Social Media Press Release. I’ve included them below. They are in draft form - done for my use, and errors are my own.  The good thing is, if you want to really hear this, you can listen to the meeting in the posts above from Todd Van Hoosier.

More info about the SM Release here.

Sm Release
Todd Defern, Shift Communications.
Everyone hates press releases. But 3k go out a day.
Of the thousands of articles a day published in the media, <3% come from press releases.

Die Press release blog post by Tom Foremski at Silicon Valley Watcher.

Basic Principles for the Press release SMR
-    to democratize access to them.  Most people who can get full content are credentialed journalists with access to Marketwire or PR Newswire.
-    But you may want bloggers, etc. to read your release, or hobbyists, or etc.
o    Remove the barriers to access
-    Ensure accuracy
o    Pfizer drug launch
-    Embrace Context
o    Anyone writing about you will search, digg, del.icio.us,
•    If you were a company you could put a delicious site out there and put your own opinion about this stuff
o    Tagging – word of mouth client, they bookmarked every one of the articles about w of m, and tagged them, and collected them.
•    PR people giving CONTEXT around the things they’re writing
-    Building community
o    If you release with tags for technorati search. They won’t just see news about your stuff, they’ll see the conversation AROUND THAT TAG
•    YOU’RE putting yourself out there and embracing community
-    Be find-able
o    Social media optimization
These releases end up as sort of mini-website, made accessible, given content that can be shared,

Novell did an SM release on a day with 10 releases – that release was the least newsworthy but got the most hits

Belkin, Symphony, Novell,
PR-squared.com

4 professors in schools are teaching SM Release

Other folks have put up similar but not same things, but almost exactly the same.

What’s the resistance to this? IR, Legal?
Todd: Most frequent question – should I put out both traditional release and an SM release?  2x cost
David scott – if you just want to reach media – do an old style one. If you want to reach buyers, be in search engines, etc – do an SM release.

Eventually will be called SM News Release or just ‘a news release.’

These new releases won’t go to many of the media company feeds, etc – in the current system.

Will this bypass trad. Media and bloggers and lose credibility –

Where will these releases live?
Client site, PR firm, wire services

Reaction –
Todd: overall positive from journalists, mixed from pr folks, bloggers and influencers – 250 posts about this, only 13 negative
Music and arts folks love this – they can put out clips of what they do as part of it