Yahoo! Canada recently launched The Kick, a social network for soccer fans in Canada. As part of their launch program, Yahoo! Canada used a Social Media News Release (SMNR) to share details with mainstream journalists and bloggers alike. One Degree recently sat down with Hessie Jones, marketing manager for The Kick, as well as David Jones, Julia Stein and Michelle Book from Fleishman-Hillard Canada, Yahoo! Canada’s PR firm, to discuss the use of the Social Media News Release.
One Degree: How did you decide to use a Social Media release for announcing The Kick?
A few months ago, we did a traditional press release for another Yahoo! Canada property. We received from commentary from bloggers that we could have done a better job. So, in planning the launch of The Kick, we wanted to make sure that the online channel was integrated into a comprehensive PR program. How and where you reach people largely depends on the specifics of your audience. For Canadian soccer fans, they are largely online; sports like soccer have a passionate fan base but is not well represented in the mainstream media.. We wanted to reach them and their advocates where they live – online.
From a content perspective, The Kick is an online community – so why wouldn’t we use a social media news release? Plus, Yahoo! has a number of social media tools – del.icio.us, Flickr – at our disposal and it made sense to take advantage of these tools in pulling together an announcement.
The rest of the interview is after the break …
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