Association Marketing Springboard

The blogs are all a twitter (Twitter's twittering, too) with the release of Digital Snippets, a new web service designed to take the work out of creating the ultimate Social Media Release (SMR). Digital Snippets comes from the group that did this SMR for Ford. The tool itself is among a new generation of PR services trying to perfect the template for the SMR.

An SMR is a dynamic storyboard that contains portable content. Unlike a press release that locks down the story and presents the "company line" on a topic, the SMR is designed as building blocks for other content creators--bloggers and reporters who might like to tell their own story using your photos, graphs, videos and news updates. This is very exciting stuff--and a whole new way of thinking about working with the content creators of your industry. Check out these two templates to see what we're talking about here...

• Social Media Group's Digital Snippets Template
• An earlier version from SHIFT Communications

So with this shiney new toy comes much responsibility. What are the strategies that this supports? How does it fit into an organization's overall social media strategy? Overall PR strategy? Are associations ready to make the plunge? Who has already taken the plunge? These are the questions that will be on my radar in the next few months as I do even more research into this new communication standard.

Check out these jumping off posts about SMRs...

• Chris Heuer video post about the difference between a press release and an SMR
• Geoff Livingston SMR Criticism: Nine Points to Consider