Is SMNR the new PR?

For a while now over at GREEN we have been experimenting with out own social media news releases (SMNR) – which have been refined over a period of time to take in comments, Flickr, Digg, Technorati, Del.icio.us, You Tube and other rich content. It’s a rather laborious process but very compelling once we get them out there.
Most recently we have been using the services of the excellent Stephen Davies and his new company webitpr to pump out some SMNR on behalf of a techie client and the team have been pleasantly surprised by the results.

Stephen has now issued five SMNRs and has some views on the latest shtick. Here they are in precise:

Not everyone links, not everyone references
I guess, in hindsight, I’m stating the obvious but just because you think you’ve got an uber cool, bleeding edge news release it doesn’t mean bloggers do too.

People are comment shy
Well, they are on the SMNR that’s for sure. As of yet, no one’s left a comment on any of the five we’ve done.

A SMNR is not for all news
Again, stating the obvious but it is interesting to see which SMNRs pick up more traction than others.

PR people get the concept
I really don’t want to sound like we’ve been trying to teach our granny to suck eggs but the people we’ve spoke with get the SMNR concept straight away. (Yes we did – Ian)

The provision of multimedia is an issue
A few people we have spoke with say that collecting multimedia (mainly audio and video) is a problem.

For Stephen’s more considered view check out his thought here.