We've talked before about the great strides press releases have made over the past few years. It's no surprise, for example, that the search engine optimized (SEO) release has become a big deal.

Today, we look at the social media press release.

The social media release is a specific format of press release designed to take advantage of social media bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us and a variety of other Web. 2.0 advances. It provides all the information an individual would need to fully understand the announcement -- including multimedia files and background materials -- whether for writing stories, posting to blogs or simply consuming the news.