Social media release?

This is a media release that is tailored for a world where the environment in which media operate has changed significantly over the last couple of years. Tools like search engines, RSS and social media have together created an online space where news is syndicated and aggregated in ways that make it almost ambient.

The Social Media Release is intended to make it easier on people to identify and share the most important pieces of information with others around the globe while adding their own valuable perspective and/or editorial. It also takes full advantage of HTML, multimedia and the network effects enabled by the Internet by using structured data via the Microformat, which ultimately increases its findability by interested parties – which is ultimately the driving purpose of public relations and the press release specifically.
Chris Heuer

Microformats?

Microformats are simple, standard formats for semantically marking up information, making that information easier to discover and share. Perhaps the best known microformat is hCard, the format for contact information. Using an open data format for this information means that it is discoverable by people and by machines. hCard information can be downloaded and easily saved into your existing contact book, like Outlook or Thunderbird and – more importantly – it can be searched, indexed and syndicated by machines (browsers, web crawlers or custom scripts).

You can see microformatted information in action on Upcoming.org, a social events calendar that spiders and presents hCalendar information, or on Flickr, where all the personal profiles are stored in hCard.

The social media release group are proposing a microformat for media releases, hRelease.

So what?

For public sector communicators there are probably at least two salient points. One, the development of the template and the microformat are a good indication that we should be paying attention to the elements of the format, if not putting out releases this way ourselves: can you really see Ministry X putting out a release with a digg this! link at the bottom?

Two, microformats have tremendous potential. With the launch of the new search technology in 2007, we will have the power not just to index HTML pages, but elements of those pages. So, for example, we could index all the published hCard information in the .govt namespace and then republish/syndicate it any number of ways. Same with hCalendar, or hResume for www.jobs.govt.nz.

By using open data formats, we transform the way government information is published, discovered and shared. It is published once, from an authoritative source, and then can be syndicated and repackaged inside and outside government. It means we stop thinking of government websites as a single repository for agency specific information, and start seeing those sites as part of the publishing vehicle for all-of-government information. Another piece in the mosaic…

That is starting to sound like transformed government to me. Your thoughts?