It seems like an easy question and one CNW is asked often: when is the best time to send a news release? The answer, however, is frustratingly vague and every newswire, journalist, editor, analyst, broker and public relations professional will offer their own interpretation of “best.”

In the past, a nine to five workday; a trading day that opened at 9:30 am and closed at 4:00 pm; rigid print production schedules and top-of-the-hour newscasts provided a good indication of when and whether your story would be noticed.

These days, the immediacy of the web and a never-ending communications lifecycle means the best time to send your news release is now. “Send it as soon as it’s ready. We really are up and running all day and night,” advised Kirk LaPointe, Managing Editor of the Vancouver Sun at CNW’s Breakfast with the Media this past April.

Scott Anderson, Editor-in-Chief, CanWest News Service, concurs:

Jeremy Porter, digital communications strategist and blogger at Journalistics, recently concluded that there is no single best time to send your news release. The trick to optimizing your potential for news coverage is finding the best time to send your news. He offers a list of helpful tips to determine when that time may be. Among them:

Figure out where you’d like your news to appear

Is it the 6:00 news or is the top-ranked blog in your industry? Your objectives for media coverage should guide when the release is distributed.

Make sure you really have ‘news’ in your news release

When drafting your news release, ask yourself “who cares.” If you can’t answer this, you probably don’t have news.

Web traffic is an okay outcome for a news release too

There was once a time when only media read news releases, but now anyone can find your release online. Drive traffic back to your website and social media properties by including links in your release.

Read the complete list at Journalistics.

When do you find is the best time to send your news release?

Since dna13 joined the CNW team in April, we’ve been working hard to deliver on our promise of a complete, end-to-end communications solution. We’ve integrated the dna13 platform (marketed in Canada as MediaVantage) with Access CNW, the secure web portal used by CNW clients to edit and distribute news releases.

This is big news for the CNW team – not just because it makes us the first newswire provider to integrate news release distribution and media monitoring, but it’s also the first major project we’ve completed post-acquisition. Anyone who has worked through an acquisition will agree that’s a milestone in itself!

Read more about how public relations, investor relations and marketing communications professionals can benefit from this industry breakthrough on CNW’s blog, Beyond the Wire.

Long the domain of the public relations team, reputation management and social media monitoring is becoming an essential part of the investor relations officer’s daily routine. With reputation capital making up to an estimated 63% of the average company’s market value, it’s safe to say your bottom line is showing online.

Check out CNW President and CEO Carolyn McGill-Davidson’s presentation from the 2010 CIRI Investor Relations Conference: Your Bottom Line is Showing – Why Reputation Management Matters to Investor Relations.

Since CNW launched our Social Media Release in 2008 we’ve put out our own fair share of SMRs.  I like to think I’ve got coordinating assets for an SMR down to an art, but I do know how overwhelming the task of putting together your first SMR can feel.

Here is a checklist that I devised to help me organize the elements of each SMR CNW puts out that may help you too.  While I have included video, audio and photos on the checklist you can distribute a Social Media Release with as many or as few assets as you desire. All you need is one photo to make it an SMR!

Basics:

News Release Perhaps obvious, but it’s a crucial element to your SMR and deserves the number one spot on your checklist.  Do you have English and French versions?  Are you also issuing a wire version of your release?

Contact Information Include daytime and after-hours telephone numbers, email address and websites for contacts that will be available and ready to respond to your release.

Boilerplate A boilerplate is a short paragraph summarizing an organization or company, included at the bottom of your news release.  Make sure your boilerplate is up-to-date and that you include this information for each organization issuing the news release.

Quotes You can highlight quotes embedded in your news release or craft separate quotes for this section.  If you would like to highlight different quotes, be sure to save them in a separate document and identify this when you submit your assets.

Biographies / Head shots You can include a profile of each executive or spokesperson quoted in your news release.  Be sure to include a short biography and current head shot for each.

Logo Do you have your organization or client’s logo for the release? If there is more than one organization issuing the release, include each one’s logo.

Multimedia:

Video Include a title for each video you are including in your release and the order you would like them to appear.

Audio Same thing for audio. Include a title for each audio clip; if you have more than one, specify the order you would like them to appear.

Photos Identify the title for each photo and include a cutline (a short description of the photo, with a credit to the photographer).  If you are including multiple photos, identify the order they should appear on your release.  Links can also be embedded into the body of your release.

Additional Links What else would a reporter or blogger need to write about your news release?  This is the place to include links to websites, background information, social media properties, additional documents, anything that may be of interest to or helpful for the reader of your release.

Tags Each SMR includes delicious and Technorati tags; this is what puts the “social” in Social Media Release.  Include as many tags as you can think of to make your SMR easily found.  As an example, here are the tags I included in our recent SMR announcing CNW’s acquisition of dna13:

cnw, cnw group, dna13, carolyn mcgill-davidson, kevin o’neil, kirk lapointe, scott anderson, mathew ingram, mediavantage, media, newswire, public relations, pr, media monitoring, news release, press release, communications, breakfast with the media, acquisition, software, startup, ottawa, Toronto

Everything else:

Launch date and time Self explanatory, but when you’re coordinating several files and documents at once it’s easy to forget something simple like the date you want your SMR to go live!

Multimedia distribution rights Make sure you have the distribution rights for your audio, video and photo assets.  YouTube will remove any videos that contain unauthorized use of copywritten material.  Even using a popular song as background music in your video may get flagged by YouTube.

If you’ve issued a Social Media Release how did you keep your assets organized?

Photo credit: xololounge from morguefile.com