In February 2006 Tom Foremski published a post on Silicon Valley Watcher entitled “Die! Press release! Die! Die! Die!” that literally set the wheels in motion for the radical changes that the traditional press release has undergone over the last year.

In his rant Tom stated that, “Press releases are nearly useless. They typically start with a tremendous amount of top-spin, they contain pat-on-the-back phrases and meaningless quotes. Often they will contain quotes from C-level executives praising their customer focus. They often contain praise from analysts, (who are almost always paid or have a customer relationship.) And so on...”.

And the world rejoiced – finally someone was waking up to the antiquated nature of PR. In his post Tom gave a host of fantastic suggestions on how to deconstruct the traditional press release into sections of useful, unbiased information that journalists could use to reconstruct a news story.

The Social Media Press Release Template
In May of the same year, inspired by Tom’s fantastic ideas, SHIFT Communications launched the Social Media Press Release Template (SMPRT). Intended to facilitate journalist’s research the template was made freely available to journalists and bloggers across the globe. The SMPRT facilitates research by giving journalists access to contact information, the core news facts, a link and feed to a purpose built del.icio.us page, multi media, quotes and tags. Journalists rejoiced and PR effortlessly jumped from traditional to 2.0.

The Social Media Newsroom Template
SHIFT have gone one step further in 2007 and released their Social Media Newsroom Template (SMNT)! Traditional communication channels are falling away and bloggers, journalists and the public in general are going to companies newsrooms to find the information they need. The age of social media is exploding and companies need to adapt traditional online newsrooms to meet its requirements. The SMNT provides companies with a template enabling them to communicate better to broader audiences and allows them to access and subscribe to official content.

Some of the features include:

• Media Coverage Section – Summaries and links to the companies coverage in the media
• News Releases – Company news releases
• Tag Clouds
• Search Function
• Del.icio.us Accounts
• PR Contact Information
• Tag Clouds
• Schedule of upcoming events
• RSS Feeds (OPML)
• A Multimedia Gallery
• Executive Corner – Executive bio’s, latest achievements and events where he/she will be speaking.

The RSS/email option on almost every single feature allows the audience to receive an update any time something changes. As you can tell – everything needed by blogger, a journalist or a member of the general public who has an interest in a company is here. This awesome template if freely available and no copyright protections apply… so what are you waiting for?

Congrats to Todd Defren and the team at SHIFT for once again putting their PR2.0 thinking caps on and producing this amazing tool. View a live example of the Social Media Newsroom Template on SHIFT’s website.