A Great Social Media Release Example: Overstock.com

[Jason Kintzler]

This post comes courtesy of Jason Little from the Q4 Web Systems Blog. As an investor, he brings unique insight into the social media release discussion.

A Great Social Media Release Example

When the SEC announced the new Reg. FD guidance, a flow of blog posts followed - many speculating on the net result of these new changes. More than one purported that the announcement would spell the death of the press release.

I’ve been following numerous bloggers and Social Media Release (SMR) folks on Twitter for several months now and I don’t think the new Reg. FD guidance will kill the press release. If anything, press releases will evolve and take advantage of new media technologies such as SMRs.

Reg. FD states that an issuer doesn’t need to release ‘paper friendly’ disclosure, which leaves the door wide open for video, audio and more interactive press releases. Anyway you slice it, at the end of the day a press release is all about marketing, plain and simple. What better way to market your company than through a concise press release that includes a 2-minute video or audio clip of the release?

This really hit home for me when I read Overstock.com’s latest press release in SMR format. Have a look at that link quickly, then come back, it’s ok, I’ll wait. Great, now that you’ve seen that release, take a look at the text version Overstock.com posted on their site.

Which do you think is more effective?

On the SMR version, you can:

* print it
* email it
* share it through any social network
* comment on it
* watch a short video overview
* get related links
* view press contacts
* see a quick overview of the release
* view images that augment the text

As an investor, this gave me a more favorable opinion of Overstock.com. Here we go again… praising the distribution power of Twitter, but my network on Twitter brought this to my attention. Otherwise I wouldn’t have known about it.

The rise of SMRs and the use of social media as an IR marketing tool is inevitable given the new Reg. FD guidance. When presented with a choice of viewing a quick summary and video clip over reading a press release, I would gladly watch the video and jot down notes, while still having the ability to view the full release if I wanted. SMRs allows both and it’s a much better marketing tool than plain text.

As a follow up to Jason Little's post, it's also important to give you an example of the kind of traction the Overstock.com release received. So far, since Monday afternoon, the release has been viewed 5,081 times and has been Dugg 239 times already. The releases creator said he did post the release on the wires, but held off on pitching it to better gauge the social media release. He tweeted yesterday saying he, "can't wait to do another!"

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