It’s hard to believe SHIFT’s Social Media Press Release Template is already a year old.  There’s still so much work to be done, but I thought I’d take a few minutes to put down some thoughts for posterity as I remember back to the start of it all.

It was January of 2006.  Shel Holtz mentioned one of my RSS projects on his blog.  I noticed the post and started reading his work.  I became an instant fan and continue to be a regular subscriber.

 In May, Todd Defren released the Social Media Press Release Template on PR Squared and Shel blogged about it.  I’d never heard of Todd, but Shel’s post sparked my imagination.  I’d been creating press releases for my software products and had found the process, oh, less than perfect.  I could see that a change was needed and Todd’s template appeared to be a great place to start. 

I dug through Shel’s archives to pull out my original comment from May 24, 2006:

I’m a tech guy, not a PR expert, so forgive me if this already exists, but I’d propose an additional step.  Let’s convert this template into an xml document.  We could write the press release once, and then electronically distribute it via the wires and RSS in a common xml format.  We’d save a lot on distribution costs.

Posted by Shannon Whitley  on  05/24  at  07:02 AM

The basic vision hasn’t changed much.  I developed PRX as a way to incorporate the elements of the Social Media Press Release into an RSS extension.  For me, it was always about the distribution format, but XML is boring and hard for non-techies to visualize.  So I created PRX Builder, a tool that generates social media releases and does it all using XML behind the scenes.

A lot has happened in a year.  There’s so much more to the story, but I’m not one for long blog posts.  I’ve continued to experiment, trying new approaches and technologies to see what works and what doesn’t.  Meanwhile, people like Brian Solis and Chris Heuer have been promoting the social media news release concept; sometimes taking shots as they man the frontline.

I’m still working toward my dream of a new way to distribute news.  My vision is simple:  “Write once.  Distribute anywhere.”  Whether it be email, blog, wire service, news portal, wiki, or anything else that comes along, I should only need to create my news release one time.  With a standard XML format, my news can be massaged into multiple templates for any type of news distribution channel.

I hope it doesn’t take another year to see some changes on the distribution side.  My guess is that we are still on the uphill side of this slope.  We’ll keep moving forward, though.  I think I see the peak approaching.

Technorati Tags: social media press release, social media news release, new media release, pr, press release, marketing, public relations, shift communications, todd defren, shel holtz, brian solis, chris heuer, prx, prx builder, xml, rss