The lowly press release. Public relations students have been learning basically the same press release writing technique since the 1950s. Dissemination of the release has changed a little—from hand delivery and postal service delivery to fax and electronic delivery. The past 15 years has taken delivery of the information from an all “push” dissemination system to a combination of push and pull dissemination with the advent of PR Newswire and other wire services. And it has worked. The symbiotic, if strained, relationship between traditional journalists and PR professionals has worked.

These days as news media adapt to the sea-change the Internet continues to bring, the PR industry is taking some steps to embrace social media too. Web 2.0 technologies bring even more possibilities to disseminating an organization’s information in a usable way. Now PR pros have even more ways to tell their stories, while the information expectations of the consumer-creators online continue to grow. Now a whole new team of bloggers and podcasters have a news hole to fill, and they do not have the patience to wade through a traditional press release.

One such blogger Tom Foremski wrote a scathing indictment of traditional press releases along with some suggestions for creating a 21st Century press release. Enter Todd Defren, a principal at SHIFT Communications, a midsize PR agency with offices in San Francisco and Boston. He created the first Social Media Release template and through the evangelism of several in the PR field, the idea has gathered steam. The template is designed to format and tag the elements of information so they are easily digested by aggregators and thus more accessible to certain audiences.

The proponents of SMRs are quick to point out that they are not the magic bullet that will solve all an organzation’s communications problems. Rather SMRs are another tool in the PR pro’s toolbox, one that reaches a different audience than a traditional press release might. At the same time SMRs have created a little bit of confusion. We know that Web 2.0 separates content from structure, so in that way even a multimedia press release is using Web 2.0 technologies. But SMRs want more than multimedia; SMRs are designed to be social. They are meant to host the give and take about bits of information. Conversation about products, events, people, services taking place on an organization’s very own Web space and elsewhere. All trackable. All connected.

Brian Solis, principal at FutureWorks a Silicon Valley PR agency, wrote “New media releases represent the opportunity to share news in way that reaches people with the information that matters to them, in the ways that they use to digest and in turn share with others …while also giving them the ability interact with you directly or indirectly…Social media releases are designed to get the conversation going, providing readers with the ability to disseminate information and multimedia, bookmark and share the content, and in turn, spark threads.”

As this new way of relating to publics matures, professors in mass communication, journalism, communication, public relations and marketing must take note. Good writing remains at the heart of all of the links, multimedia formats, tags and threads. Teachers must continue to teach solid communication techniques, whether textual, visual or personal, and they must teach the value of using Microformatting and aggregators to communicate a message to an audience. And professors should join the conversation. Blogs and wikis like Social Media Release , PR 2.0 and Social Media Club are great resources and collaboration spots.