I am taking part in ByteNight 2009 on 2nd October. Byte Night is an annual event where hundreds of people from the IT and business community agree to sleep rough for one night to raise money for Action for Children who help the UK’s most vulnerable children.
I will be joining the Newcastle/Gateshead group who will be “sleeping” at the Baltic Centre. If anyone would like to sponsor me then please visit my Just Giving page. Any contributions gratefully received.
Well the silly season is pretty much over and at RealWire we have been using this quiet time to go on holidays, get married (congratulations Hollie!) and put the finishing touches to our new animation.
The video is called “Online PR is all about Community” and tries to provide a simple analogy for people to bear in mind when approaching online PR. Here it is:
Online PR is all about Community from RealWire on Vimeo.
There are lots of white papers, reports, posts, articles etc giving instructions, guidance, facts and knowledge around this subject of course. Commoncraft for instance do a brilliant job with their videos, but these focus more on the specifics of the elements of the online world themselves – e.g. RSS, Twitter, Social Bookmarking etc.
We hadn’t really seen someone attempt to produce something that tried to distil things into a simple story that gets at the fundamentals and then produce it in a (hopefully) entertaining way. The analogy we use in the video isn’t new, in fact its as old as the hills, but perhaps it will help to serve as a reminder of what sits at the heart of good “people” relations.
So far we have had a great response from people all over the world with the video already clocking up almost 4,000 views in its first week and over 100 tweets. Thank you to everyone who has watched the video to date and been kind enough to take the time to provide their feedback either directly or indirectly. We really appreciate it.
The production of the video, and in particular the script development, focussed our minds on confirming that the way that we at RealWire do things fits this approach. We have given an overview of how we think our approach to distribution strives to be consistent with the principles outlined here. We aren’t resting on our laurels though, we will make mistakes sometimes, but we will always be open to feedback and suggestions of how we can improve, so that we can play a valuable role in the online community.
Finally a big, big thank you to Owen and the team at Thumb Digital our partners in crime when it comes to making these videos. And a special thank you to Steve, the designer who has produced both of our videos, and has to put up with me in particular being very picky! 
A bit late getting round to this, but here’s a fantastic montage of John Hughes’ films who sadly passed away last week.
These films were some of the best loved from my teenage years and as others have pointed out included some seminal 80’s music.
Here’s an appropriate example – RIP John.
I was reviewing the stats relating to my last post about the performance of Social Media Releases earlier today. Apart from being very pleasantly surprised to have nearly reached 1000 unique views (making this easily my most visited post to date!) I also found that the number one source of traffic was “direct”.
This means traffic that has been referred to the urls directly and not from another online source. Now unless anyone is able to remember a url with 141 characters, which I am guessing is unlikely, then I assume all of these visits must have come from people visiting the post from emails that include a hyperlink.
The breakdown of unique visits and their sources is as follows:
| Source |
||
| Direct/mail | 481 | 49% |
| 284 | 29% | |
| Blogs | 83 | 8% |
| Search | 68 | 7% |
| 42 | 4% | |
| Other | 23 | 2% |
| 981 | 100% |
Twitter also counts for almost a third of the visits, which isn’t surprising given that the post has been tweeted 128 times to date (thank you to everyone who RT’d).
But the fact that almost half of all visits were direct demonstrates the power that email still has as a tool for sharing information with your community. Glad we didn’t forget to mention it in our video (2:25) on how news spreads online
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?