OK, we are all guilty of it. Hyperbole. Puffery. Exaggeration. Public relations is full of it–in more ways than one. In our defense, public relations and marketing professionals are often pressured to make the next newsy bit of information about our company or our clients sound like the most exciting thing ever. But we are really doing ourselves–and our clients–a disservice by employing overused terms like “unique” “best” “luxurious” “special” and other similar adjectives on such a regular basis instead of putting more thought and creativity into how we convey our messages.

A) Those words don’t really mean anything; they are so ubiquitous people have learned to ignore them.

B) When something really IS unique, special or ultra-luxurious, it ends up sounding like hyperbole anyway!

Solution? Public relations practitioners–whether engaging in social media, online marketing or just good ole fashioned media relations–have to focus on conveying an experience rather than promoting a product through lazy adjectives. Traditional press releases are just no good at conveying experience–unless we begin to think about them in a more interactive, experiential way.

I am far from the first person in the online public relations world to tout the idea of a “social media press release”; the form and concept has been around a couple of years and has even inspired a (now defunct) social media press release blog. So why is it that so few of us are using the social media press release? A couple of thoughts:

A) We’re confused about how to distribute them

B) Clients are uncomfortable with approving them, because they don’t fit the traditional press release format

C) They are more time consuming!

At McCue Marketing Communications, we tackle social media press releases by distributing through both online wire services and email. Check out these free press release distribution services if you just want to generate inbound links to your website and increase online visibility. To actually reach the media, you will have to upgrade to a paid service like PR Newswire and send email. Emails should also incorporate social media components, like small images embedded with links to video or audio clips that you’ve uploaded to YouTube or MyPodCast. If you can, use an email client that allows you to distribute both html and text emails, so your release won’t be rejected or garbled when someone reads it on Blackberry.