This past Tuesday, we co-hosted a webinar (along with the Society for New Communications Research) that had a first-rate panel that included Chris Heuer, Brian Solis, Thom Brodeur from Marketwire, and Monika Maeckle from Business Wire.

I felt like the discussion brought up some extremely important issues and am very satisfied with the job we did. I do however wish we had more time to address the hundreds of questions that were flooding in from participants. We are already talking about doing some sort of follow-up that would be more of a ‘how-to’ oriented webinar that would address many of the questions we received during the webinar.

If anyone is interested in a recap. of the webinar, Des Walsh’s blog does a very good job outlining the main points discussed.

One point of note is that Brian mentioned that the screen shot of the social media release we showed during the discussion may not have been the best example of an SMR, however I do want to mention that the screen shot was not representative of the actual release - it ended up cropping out most of the key elements and just showed the text. That was a mistake on our part however and the full social media release is available on PRWeb.

During the webinar we asked attendees to vote on which release they preferred - the traditional press release or the social media release. Our (very non-scientific) poll revealed that 64% of our attendees compared the social media version compared to 36% for the traditional version. Granted, all these guys were spending 1.5 hours on a Tuesday listening to people talk about the social media release so this probably wasn’t the most unbiased sample in the world but I still found it interesting.

Another metric that might interest some people: I went and looked at the Web analytics and found that the average time on page for the social media release was 3:17 compared to 1:27 for the traditional press release.

More Links:

• Gaukrodger’s review of the discussion