Sweating Bullets | Or two new Social Media News Releases

• New New Media News Release

As an avid footballer (I play about three times a week in the summer) and competitive so-and-so, I’m always looking for new ways to gain an unfair advantage.

As a result, I was pumped to be involved in the development of this new/social media news release on behalf of Gatorade and the Gatorade Sports Science Institute.

Here’s the gist of the release:

In advance of the 2006/07 NHL hockey season, Anaheim Ducks goalie Jean Sebastien Giguere was in search of a solution to combat the dizziness, cramping and fatigue he felt following games. After seeing a television commercial about triathlete, Chris Legh who collapsed due to dehydration 50 metres before the finish line, Giguere’s search led him to the Chicago-based Gatorade Sports Science Institute (GSSI). At the GSSI, Giguere participated in rigorous sweat test and hydration analysis, helping him overcome dehydration and perform a Stanley Cup winning season.

For the full release:

• Stanley Cup Winner JS Giguere Tackles Hydration Issue with Sweat Test
• Le test sur la sueur du GSSI aide J.-S. Giguère, gagnant de la Coupe Stanley, à vaincre la déshydratation

Basically: remember to replace your fluids lost when playing sport in the summer’s 30 degree plus weather, but also remember to replace the nutrients lost in your sweat.

• Social Media News Release development at iStudio

At iStudio, one of the biggest obstacles we’ve been having with the SMNR has been the enabling of comments and trackbacks – more specifically, how to provide a database to store this data in a way that is cheap and easy to install on a client’s server.

This time round, instead of building them ourselves, we decided to use some third party software and a cheeky little work-around.

For comments, we signed-up for a premium Haloscan account; for video, we used YouTube‘s fabulous “embedd” functionality and for trackbacks we set up a Technorati account for the page and linked to the “blog reactions” portion of the account.

Check out how we did for FH client, Yahoo! Canada, for The Kick, their football (or soccer for the uncivilized) Web site –

Yahoo! Canada and Canadian Soccer Association launch The Kick, Canada’s first comprehensive online soccer community

• More on the Social Media News Release

iStudio VP, Brandy Fleming, has more on the iStudio Blog: Ideas and Insights.

As an aside, I know that some people are pumped to have the major newswires on-board with enabling multimedia releases such as this, but surely one of the points of the Social Media News Release is to attract both the conversation and an amount of Google juice to the client’s site?

Technorati Tags: gatorade, client work, social media news release

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