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Marketwire Brings Web 2.0 to Press Releases

It’s Big Bang day in PR departments around the world: Marketwire has released a new product format which finally brings Web 2.0, social networking, connectivity, and as many other buzzwords as you can shake a fist at to the humble press release.

Marketwire.com offers a platform for companies to publish press releases, which hitherto typically meant a breezy 500-word written descriptor rushed out and released, unassisted and blind, onto the web’s informational slag-heap.

But no longer. Marketwire Social Media 2.0 allows you to track various reader activities in real time, integrate the release with numerous Web 2.0 resources, embed audio and video, follow Diggs and Technorati reviews… and that’s not the half of it.

Features:

• Automatic news availability behind the walls of iTunes, Photobucket, YouTube, and Twitter;
  Social Media 2.0 also claims the largest Second Life news channel distribution of any newswire.
• Embed media from YouTube, Photobucket et al.
• Comment box and ‘online newsroom’
• SnapShots™: A keyword mouse-over pop-up that reveals dynamic information about the release and issuing organization such as current stock price.
• Live performance statistics on search engine cataloging
• Tagging galore (50 options), including Facebook
• Custom RSS feeds
• Trackbacks
• Email-to-a-friend, printer-friendly links
• Widgetized Digg, Technorati and Search engine results
• Embed a 500-character audio summary headline
• Distribution to more than 1200 in-network geographically targeted websites
• Keyword cloud navigation

Kevin Dill of Marketwire had this to say:

“The social media release takes news distribution beyond the traditional press release, reaching target audiences through the specific channels and formats in which they prefer to receive news.

Social Media 2.0 provides Marketwire clients with increased Internet visibility and greater search engine performance for their news, the most social bookmarking and tagging options available, and more social video and photo provider choices, reinforcing Marketwire’s position as a leader in social media innovation.”

It was probably inevitable that PR would meet social media somewhere along the way. But credit to Marketwire for eschewing the traditional sedate roll-out of features for a project like this. There’s very little here which hasn’t been done a million times in other settings, but there are an awful lot of such features which are coming out all at once. With Social Media 2.0 Marketwire has taken a leap ahead of rivals who are going to look rather quaint until they catch up.

For an illustrated example of what it all means, and for more specifics, have a look at Marketwire’s Social Media 2.0 rollover demo.