Jennifer Mattern of Naked PR has a great post up about social media news releases. She raises a number of excellent questions about SMRs that in my opinion could also be asked of releases in general. I guess the one that struck me most was about engaging the consumer directly with the brand through the SMR, and her question really hits the nail on the head: "Do you think that most consumers really care about all of the social media goodness attached to your press releases? In most cases, I'd bet they don't."

I agree with her, and go one step further: not only do they not care, but it's likely the vast majority never will. Consumers want products that work, companies that are reliable and honest, and a quick response when they want (or need) to complain. That's it. Get any portion of this wrong, and it doesn't matter if you "engage" or "interact" with them on a news release.

I think that a lot of companies' reluctance to adopt two-way communications/web 2.0/whatever one wants to call it has to do with an understanding that doing so opens them up in large part to criticism, and in very small part to positive or constructive feedback. It's the online version of telling ten or more people about a negative experience and five or fewer about a positive one. For the most part, engagement in this way is high risk, low opportunity. Most people are going to use the venue to complain, a few might have constructive feedback. A handful will tell the company they are doing great. Even those who have benefited from engaging their audiences have done so primarily in a PR/reputation management way--which is important, but probably does more to stem the tide of losing sales rather than increasing/adding new customers.

I guess I also think it's just odd to have customers be the target audience for a news release, whether it's a social media release or a standard one. I do think it is useful (depending on the news the company is releasing) to have social media elements available for journalists, but then I still tend to think of journalists (or bloggers, etc.) as the logical audience for a news release.

And next...

What is the sweet spot for marketing? We all have those moments where we see either an advertisement or marketing tool and think "that's cool, I don't mind being marketed to in this way." There are far more times when we see something and think "someone got paid to come up with that?" Or the more extreme variation: "someone should be fired for coming up with that."  

I started thinking about this while reviewing the posts over at Brand Flakes For Breakfast, and came across Darryl Ohrt's piece on the NikePlus program that he's been a part of, and having reached 500 miles, they provided him with a coupon for free shipping on a $28 tee shirt. It was, as he points out, the wrong place to market to him. Further, elsewhere on the site a restaurant invoking "in memory of" 9/11 on a pizza flyer (ugh).

So where's the sweet spot? Is it too individual to apply to marketing to any more than a small niche, if that? Or does it need to combine such a unique set of variables, in just the right amounts, that only a very few marketing campaigns will ever be able to hit all of the right notes? I think a large part of it is originality, which is why almost none of the "me-too" types of ad campaigns or marketing campaigns work. If you see something really clever and think "hey we can do that too" it's probably not a good sign for the idea.