PR is part of the product design: Ford's social media news release
(Credit:
Ford)
I know this blog is about product design and innovation but let's talk about PR for a minute. Why? Because the way you talk about your product should be part of your design process. The product design ought to incorporate the product story you want to tell. Sometimes, the story even becomes the product. Moreover, some may think PR is immune to innovation, but is in fact a field that is currently going through a series of pretty radical disruptions. The rise of social media has challenged the old way of promoting messages, and today's PR practitioners face the daunting challenge of doing effective public relations when it's more and more the public itself that does all of the relating for you.
Enter the social media news release (SMNR), originally conceived by SHIFT Communications, a viable new format to spark and cultivate online conversations about a product. Todd Defren, Shel Holtz, Chris Heuer, and other bloggers have been on the soapbox preaching about SMNRs for almost a year now. The list of companies that have used the SMNR includes Coca-Cola, BEA, SAP, Novell, and Belkin, among many other smaller companies.
And now--hat tip to Geoff Livingston--Ford has released an especially glowing example of a SMNR for its new 2008 Focus. It's quite a production and includes a vast array of social media elements. Flickr-sized Images, RSS feeds, suggested meta-tags, YouTube videos, PDF fact sheets, bulleted facts, and a variety of executive quotes make this release eye and conversation candy--lavish yet informative.
Livingston writes: "This new social media news release takes the emerging form to a new level, and demonstrates that companies can reinvigorate, static and boring parenthetical form with dynamic content. The result: a virtual work sheet that any blogger, journalist or analyst can use as starting point for a story."
It is definitely a step in the right direction even though the release is not yet fully social media-enabled: it lacks broader social bookmarking capabilities, and it also does not allow the recipients to comment on the release itself and pick up the conversation right there. I also doubt that Ford has put their release out over the traditional news wires, as they still seem to lack the ability to handle this kind of rich multimedia package.
Questions for the Social Media Group, the PR firm that crafted the release for Ford (and is probably tracking this conversation): How do you measure its effectiveness? What would make it a successful release for you?
Tim Leberecht is Frog Design's of vice president of marketing and communications. He has worked in the media, entertainment, and high-tech industries. Most recently, he was the head of corporate communications at Mindjet, a provider of mind-mapping software for the enterprise. Prior to Mindjet, he served as a press chief for the Athens 2004 International Olympic Torch Relay and in marketing communications for Deutsche Telekom in Germany. Tim runs the iPlot blog, and has published and spoken about branding, organizational communication, social media, and attention economics. Tim is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. 
Marketing and PR budgets for emtional products always baffeled me. If cut in half the products would be better and we wouldnt have to hear a million different methods of spinning something you can never touch......cheers and stay on your side of the innovation line... remember thats why you get the product after we are done....cheers
What's new is the way this narrative is delivered. If you think a social media release simply compiles "information on a product in all sorts of media formats all in one place at one time," you fail to see the difference between multimedia and social media. Traditional wire services such as PR Newswire (via their multivu service) support pushing (vs. pulling from the corporate web site) multimedia content to reporters. However, social media goes beyond that: it facilitates discovery through social search and enables "socializing" content through conversations on entirely different channels than the usual ones. Multimedia is a matter of format; social media is a matter of distribution.
I?m not saying Ford?s release is perfect in this regard. It's just the remarkable step of a big brand towards establishing social media releases as a standard PR tool. This is something that anyone involved in marketing AND making products should pay attention to. But, hey, cheers, stay on your side of the innovation line and keep dreaming of cutting marketing budgets in half. As Henry Ford said, ?Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.?
With this SMPR, we were seeking to provide tools and assets to enable bloggers and other content creators to discuss the 2008 Ford Focus. In other words, we weren?t trying to build a conversation, but rather join one that was already underway, and hopefully make it a little richer and better-informed with easy-to-access content. I know there's been some discussion about whether this is truly "social". Facilitating discussion seems pretty social to me, but I'll leave that up to the pundits to decide!
Finally, a quick note of clarification: SMG isn't actually a PR firm, we're a pure-play social media agency (one of less than a dozen in North America).
Thanks again for your kind words!
- The new Focus misses the mark.
- by geekbooks November 12, 2007 11:46 AM PST
- A fantastic media campaign or not, the new Ford Focus sadly misses the mark. Advertisements for the 2008 Focus push the snappy MP3 player and a whopping 35 miles per gallon. Why can't Ford bring the superior Focus that's sold in Europe to America? Why not give Americans 38 city/58 highway with a highly efficient diesel engine?
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