This week saw another incremental shift as I published the first of these social media releases (SMR) with commenting enabled. Most of you will no doubt be wondering why I have buried the lead (SSC has a blog?), but I figure that there are plenty of other capable people to spread the word.

In any event, IABC has now taken up the leadership of the Social Media Release and, as I will continue to contribute a public sector perspective to the process, I thought that it might be helpful to share some observations about the the impact for SSC of issuing semantic media releases over the past 12 months.

How effective is it?

Naturally, it depends upon where you draw the bottom line: media pick-up, comments, saves to social sites, there are any number of valid approaches to the issue. In most of these cases, however, these releases would have to be judged abject failures.

Another way of making the same point: at the launch I was chatting with a journalist, and I asked him if there was any value in the SMR for him. He stared blankly back. Figuring that I was talking passed him, I tried a more practical tack. Was he finding the del.icio.us links helpful? The reply? What’s delicious?.

Now that doesn’t mean that the del.icio.us links are a waste of time. There are currently six people who have at least a passing interest in what is being bookmarked, it just so happens that none of them work in the local media…

On the other hand, a couple of hours after the portal launch SMR went out, I issued this traditional release about changes to the ICT branch. The result? See for yourself.

Is it worth the candle?

Marking up your releases semantically does impose an overhead. Is that a justified use of resource? I would argue yes. Journalists here may be slow to pick up on the new format, but with every release, you are making an investment in the future capability of the namespace.

If all government news releases were marked up using this format, the newzealand.govt.nz search tool could return search results for all news items restricted to a certain geographic area, or about specific topics, within timeframes etc. These results could in turn be parsed into news feeds for local or topic specific sites (including those outside the .govt.nz domain), thus creating far more public value than an individual agency release buried on its site.

Another point that I have made in the past is that public sector communicators can’t afford to think of metrics solely in terms of media. They are a primary audience, but we have a responsibility to ensure that these news releases are discoverable and accessible by the widest possible constituency.

Conclusion

Whether or not hRelease makes it to a draft microformat stage is really an academic issue for me. I will continue to mark up the releases as semantically as possible and to argue for others to do the same. Yes, you should cover the basics and write sharp, factual and informative news releases. The question you should also be asking yourself is, why don’t I spend at least as much time ensuring that the release is as well crafted semantically as it is grammatically. That just is the reality of communicating in the age of the Internet.

The first thing that occurred to me as I began writing the post was that there isn’t much point trying to optimize your pages for search engine spiders unless they are also optimized for all the other User agents, ie., web browsers, handheld devices, screen readers, content aggregators and syndicators etc. In short, SEO is a subset of a wider field of optimization, and an understanding of web standards, particularly HTML, should precede that conversation.

This got me thinking about the level of understanding of HTML among public relations/affairs professionals. After all, it is our job to advise our employers or clients on how to best communicate using the various channels that use the Internet, so surely we should have at least a basic understanding of these media?

Maybe not. Two things happened this week that left me thinking that perhaps this is a naive or overly simplistic view…

First, I was in an agency presentation where a web development company were pitching to redevelop one of our websites. At one point, they showed us a slide where all the acronyms on the page were highlighted (this being a government site, they reasoned, you would want people to be able to understand the acronyms: fair point). However, when I asked how they intended to do this, they said with some javascript. I asked why they wouldn’t just use the acronym element? And, honestly, they just stared blankly at me. They had no idea what I was talking about.

Here is a hint. If you are presenting yourself as a subject matter expert, at least cover the basics.

Then a couple of days later, I saw that another social media release had been put out, and judging by the case study, it was a success. Which is great. However, if you view the source of the release, you will see that the quality of the HTML is, well, quite poor. Invalid, no doctype, full of deprecated markup and meaningless classes.

Why does this matter? The release looks fine in most browsers and none of the other bloggers of media seem to be complaining about the quality (or lack thereof) of the HTML.

It matters because if you are a practitioner of public affairs/relations and you are working in the online space, how can you claim to be a professional if you don’t understand the basic language of the medium? Would you employ a builder that couldn’t read the architect’s drawings?

It matters because valid, semantic markup is accessible to both people and machines. It is optimised for search engines, for browsers and for people, irrespective of how they choose to access or repurpose that information. That is presumably what the author of the case study was aiming for when he said:

So we opted to make the announcement as an SMR, optimizing it’s format for maximum success.
Geoff Livingstone

I don’t want to be overly critical, because I think that it is terrific that people are experimenting with the social media release. Indeed, compared to some of the earlier SMRs that I have looked at, this one is a marked improvement. What I do find amazing is that so much of what communicators are trying to achieve on the Internet is done without consideration of the standards that support this medium.

So, if we are going to have a microformatted social media release, hRelease, then we can start by issuing releases that are valid (x)HTML. Validation is not an end in itself, but it is a pretty good indicator of a disciplined approach, and if we want to be considered professionals, isn’t that something we should all aim for?

Conclusion

If you are going to specialize in online communications or public relations (in the public or private sectors), then you owe it to yourself, you agency and your clients to – as a minimum – be familiar with the HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 specifications. The HTML 4.01 spec was published eight years ago: have you read it? Do you think you should?

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?