Social Media News Releases achieve double the coverage of “Traditional” Press Releases
Background
RealWire has been offering the Social Media News Release (SMNR) option to our clients for nearly two years now. In that time we have hosted and distributed over 200 SMNRs on behalf of a varied group of organisations including:
3i, Adobe, British Army, Cisco, Comic Relief, Cross Country Trains, Diageo, Durex, First Direct, Ford, HSBC, ITV, Macmillan Cancer Support, Nescafe, NSPCC, Peugeot, Sage, Skoda, Sony Ericsson, Symantec, Talk Talk, Toshiba, Twestival, Vauxhall and Volkswagen. Some are in a narrative style, some follow the original deconstructed format.
Our video about the SMNR (from our webitpr days) has had over 12,000 views and we are currently ranked top of google.co.uk for a search for “social media news release”. Even ahead of Mr Social Media Release himself, Todd Defren. (Of course we don’t manage to repeat the trick on Google.com, but the video doesn’t do badly 
)
So it is on this basis we feel fairly well qualified to provide some analysis on whether Social Media News Releases actually achieve better results than “traditional” press releases.
Analysis
We analysed 997 releases distributed by RealWire during the period December 2008 to May 2009 for which coverage tracking statistics had been gathered by our Proveit release evaluation service.
Of these 71 releases were Social Media News Releases.
The results are summarised below:
Total coverage includes coverage that is the republishing of the release in its entirety either by selective or non selective publishers.
It is worth noting that all of these results for both SMNRs and traditional releases compare favourably with analysis of competing distribution services suggesting that the combination of our clients, their releases and RealWire’s approach performs strongly for all types of release.
However the results above suggest that Social Media News Releases perform substantially better than traditional releases when it comes to generating editorial and blog coverage with, on average, all of the additional coverage being of this type.
So a big tick in the box for SMNRs then? All we have to do is produce all releases in this format and we will all achieve two or three times as much coverage?
Well not so fast. A simple regression analysis on the data suggests that a release just being an SMNR, as opposed to a traditional release, in itself only explains a small proportion of the variation in the performance of individual releases.
So the majority of the variation would seem to be due to other factors. There are any number of factors that could explain some degree of variation – the hook of the title, timing, number of interested parties etc. Significantly more detailed work would be needed to prove the impact of each.
But I would suggest that the most likely reason for the improvement in performance of SMNRs is that the additional investment needed to produce a SMNR means that clients are more likely to use them for the most interesting stories. It is this investment in quality that then pays dividends with the features of the SMNR allowing the user to enhance that storytelling and so produce the improved results.
Implications
Less stories. More creatively told. To the right people.
The first point may seem like a strange thing for a press release distribution company to say – “less stories”, doesn’t that mean less business? As I said earlier, the results of our own distribution actually indicate that releases we distribute for our clients are already of a relatively higher quality and/or are directed to more relevant people and hence our pickup stats compare very favourably to competing services.
However the analysis implies that the discipline of investing more in the telling of a story through a Social Media Release seems to lead senders to focus on the stories that generate the most interest editorially and from bloggers. Surely that is a good thing for all parties?
When 54% of press releases from the big wires apparently never get written about, wouldn’t focussing more on the half that are of interest be a better use of the PR industry’s resources?
Tags: online pr, online public relations, press release, press release distribution, public relations, social media news release
July 13th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
[...] makes them pretty motivated in getting to the bottom of whether something works or not. I love Social Media News Releases for example, which utilise lots of different elements of social and digital media in a very [...]
July 14th, 2009 at 12:04 am
[...] 0 Add your comment That's according to Adam Parker of RealWire (disclosure: I used to work at RealWire and now consult with the company) who, after [...]
July 14th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
I’d love to hear more about how you gathered these statistics.
Were the SMNRs for news announcements that did not also have traditional releases?
If the news was announced only via one channel, were the topics of the SMNRs and traditional releases similar?
If the news was distributed in both manners, how are you able to attribute coverage to one versus the other?
What sort of direct outreach was done to reporters for these announcements that you compared?
Was there equal personal outreach and support from PR staff or agencies for each?
Not trying to contest your results, just hoping to understand them better.
Thanks!
@LPT
July 14th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
Hi Laura thanks for stopping by and you ask some really great questions about the analysis.
Specific answers below but suffice to say that, no, the analysis is far from perfect as it would need to be “controlled” for a significant number of factors some of which are pretty much impossible or would take more resource than we had/have available to throw at it
I am effectively relying on the fact that the data population is sufficiently high that potential bias is minimised. This is a strong assumption, but IMHO not a completely unreasonable one. I intend to repeat the analysis in another 6 months time or when we have a similar amount of data, whichever is the sooner, and a comparison of these results will potentially shed more light – or confuse the issue!
1. Were the SMNRs for news announcements that did not also have traditional releases? For the vast majority this was the case, certainly where our own distribution was concerned. I cannot vouch however for whether any clients used other versions in any direct distribution/pitches of their own.
2.If the news was announced only via one channel, were the topics of the SMNRs and traditional releases similar? The topics were actually very varied across both the SMNRs and traditional releases. If it would be of interest I can probably pull together an analysis of releases by sector?
3. If the news was distributed in both manners, how are you able to attribute coverage to one versus the other? Because of the answer to 1 above we made no attempt to do this. I am not sure how viable an exercise it would be as to be sure you would need to contact the relevant parties who covered the stories and ask them and it would seem unlikely that they would actually remember unless asked pretty much immediately. Unless you have any suggestions?
4/5. What sort of direct outreach was done to reporters for these announcements that you compared? Was there equal personal outreach and support from PR staff or agencies for each? I think this/these are probably the $64,000 question/s. The answer/s is I don’t know, but almost certainly there was variations.
Obviously RealWire is not suggesting that all the coverage generated by releases we distribute – SMNR or traditional – is due to us. This is a team effort. However we do distribute releases on behalf of a variety of clients and organisations, some of them will have more resources to support their pitches and carry out their own outreach than others. It is possible for instance that a reason SMNRs performed better was due to the sender putting more effort into not only the content but the outreach as well. If that were the case however it would still fit my proposition that it is related to putting more investment into these stories, in this case “to the right people”. As with No.3 though this is a very difficult, if not impossible, thing to ascertain after the fact with any degree of accuracy and would certainly take a significant investment of time.
Thanks again for the questions and if you have anymore let me know.
Adam
@AdParker
July 14th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
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