Michael Sommermeyer over at wordy mouth posted about his experience with a social media release, Social Media Release Unwinds, and more specifically about the less than stellar reception that it received from some of the media.

As an example of an SMR, it looks pretty pretty much like the original template put forward by Todd Defren. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, as Michael says, one of the media he pitched it to didn’t necessarily appreciate it:

my implementation was too disjointed, didn’t help him understand the message, left him hunting for the story. In short, he didn’t like it.

As (public sector) communicators, we have to listen and, where necessary, adapt.

Michael’s experimental subject obviously has the tech skills, and is a journalist so pretty much constitutes the target demographic, but still found the SMR wanting. How can we fix this?

I posted here recently about the different requirements for government communicators and how the SMR, or more specifically hRelease, can support them.

Essentially, my argument is to focus on the (semantic) markup of the release, not the presentational format. The audience for government releases is not just tech-savvy media and bloggers, so it has to be discoverable and usable by all comers. For technical details, see this post on a NZ government SMR.

Michael’s release is actually a tremendous step forward in terms of its markup, and for that he should be applauded. It is not buried in nested tables, the elements are marked up semantically and it would be accessible to pretty much anyone, or anything. (A doctype and cleaning up some of the markup so that it validates would be my only quibble).

And as Michael notes in his post, there is no harm in using the more traditional format, at least as a transition strategy:

In any case, it may be more useful to sneak some of the elements of the SMNR into our usual inverted pyramid-styled press releases. A few links to relevant information mixed in with the text. A sidebar pointing to our Digg or del.icio.us tags…

That would make the release usable for the majority of the audience (including all non-media interested parties) and the improved markup would make it more discoverable, accessible and re-usable.

Technorati Tags: social media, SMR, hRelease, microformats, government, public servants.

Ian Ketcheson has written a detailed discussion of why government bodies should consider ditching expensive and poorly watched webcasts for a more accessible YouTube model.

“The webcast pitch is a tough one: “Please be at your computer on Tuesday at 11:00 Eastern time for 30 minutes to watch a broadcast about our program. We’ll be in front of an audience of 50 people in Sudbury, and webcasting to the rest of the country. You can ask questions through a moderator. We’ll take 10 questions. You need to test your browser ahead of time. You and your colleagues will need to crowd around a PC, or all sit at your own PC. We hope your connection is fast. Don’t spill your coffee. You can watch it in the archives after, but won’t be able to ask questions.”

The Youtube pitch is much easier: “This video is the first in a series of videos that will talk about our program. Just click the link to watch it. Got comments? Post them in the comments field. Embed the video in your blog and talk about it. Heck, do your own video response if you want. We are listening, and we will come back with another video addressing some of the issues we hear. We’ve saved so much money by not webcasting that we are actually going to do a whole series of videos. This is the first of ten videos we plan.”