Edelman release the Social Media Press Release tool ‘Storycrafter’ (I don’t get it)

Categories: Social Media, Word of MouthPosted on December 22nd, 2006

Steve Rubel, respected PR Blogger and Social Media expert shares on video Edelman’s new product, Storycrafter.

Steve says it breaks it down and makes it ’social’. Sorry, but no tool can ‘make’ it social. There’s other news using this exact Storycrafter tool, See the Storycraft on Storycraft, it simply collects all the metadata around the event and centralizes it.

Maybe I’m too dense, but I don’t get the whole organized social media press release.

Why are we formalizing the word of mouth network into these clean nice buckets? Isn’t the point of conversations to have them flow nice and easily? Is this a way for Marketers to infiltrate “Social Media” communities from a few clicks and graphics? Where’s the relatinoship building? Where’s the humanity? (insert dramatic pose)

This is not a new stance of mine, just a few weeks ago, I even said I didn’t understand the social media press release either.

I can’t tell for certain, but I suspect Edelman’s version and Social Media Club’s version are different although Chris Heuer welcomes Storycrafter.

I consider all of the people mentioned above as respected friends and peers, I simply am a bit slow on this route, sorry.

Questions for the community:
1) What need is this meeting? What pain is this solving? what is broken?
2) Why we need organized social media press releases?
3) Is the current Word of Mouth Network broken?
4) Why can’t Marketers join the conversation like the rest of us?

(Steve, Oh man, great office by the way of Times Square, at PodTech we’re a humble startup with a decent man made waterfall and some great trees to gaze at…)

Update: A few hours later Steve Rubel Responds to me…see how fast the WOM network is?

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 22nd, 2006 at 10:07 am and is filed under Social Media, Word of Mouth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Jeremiah,
I watched the video and read the articles, and my first impression is that Storycrafter is for the mass-production vs. artisan approach to social media.

You and others have been thinking of social media deployment/measurement on a case by case basis, at least that is my feeling from following blogs for a while.

In answer to #3, is current the WOM network broken, I don’t think it has evolved yet.

For #1, what is broken is large-scale PR. Storycrafter (from what little I saw/read) allows standardization of social media measurement/deployment. It matters less that Richard Edelman understands what is going on- it matters more that he can communicate that vision to a worldwide organization.

Does that make sense, or just raise more questions?

Posted by Brian Keith on December 22nd, 2006 at 10:52 am

Good points. Yes it raises more questions, and that’s not a bad thing.

I wonder if this is a PR response (who is used to organizing and crafting messages for corporations) in order to track and ‘control’ social media.

Yes, to me this is a case by case basis, this is about people right?

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on December 22nd, 2006 at 11:01 am

I’m listening to Brian Oberkirch’s podcast, he interviews Chris Heuer on the Social Media Press Release

http://www.brianoberkirch.com/?p=764

Here’s two benefits I learned of

1) It strips down the essence of the message to avoid the fluff

2) It’s good for helping to track where the message has gone. Partly by using syndication.

3) Chris references the hRelease (microformats) which creates structured information out of unstructured information.

Can’t we do number 1 with blogs and other conversational media? Number 2 can be accomplished when Social Media Measurement evolves.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on December 22nd, 2006 at 11:15 am

I have answered your questions on my blog.

Posted by Steve Rubel on December 22nd, 2006 at 11:33 am

[...] Jeremiah Owyang has these questions: [...]

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[...] This weekend the definition of “social media” and the relevancy of the “social news release” had the blogosphere all a twitter. Everyone and their uncle appears to have weighed in, and it seems like it’s the PR folks vs. the web strategy folks, with a few journos thrown into the mix. Which makes me ask - whither the marketers? [...]

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[...] Jeremiah [...]

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