This is an excerpt from this week’s DishyMix interview with Andy Beal , founder of Trackur, blogger at Marketing Pilgrim and author of Radically Transparent.

Andy started as an SEO specialist, moved into social media and is now on the forefront of online reputation management. In this post, I’ve captured Andy’s advice for creating a social media press release. You can hear the whole interview by clicking below.

ANDY BEAL: Well, when you have a typical press release, you’ve got the headline, you’ve got the dateline, introduction, body and then you close it with the boiler plate. And it’s been the same format for about 100 years now. And so, the social media optimized press release is still somewhat theoretical because there’s not a lot of businesses that have adopted it completely. But the bottom line is this: there are a lot of social media tools out there, lots of different social networks that people participate in and why not take advantage of that — of those networks and those channels to get your press release circulated beyond the news desks of traditional journalists and potentially reach, not only social media journalists, like bloggers, but even actually reach the inbox or the social network of your actual target customer directly.

That’s the premise of the social media optimized press release — to provide the tools and the different options to help that message get a little bit further. And some of those things could be just high level..such as social bookmarking links so people can add it to del.icio.us or they can submit it to Digg or they can say “Hey, look at this new announcement from this company. I think it’s really cool.”

Other ideas as well include linking back to your RSS feed so that if a journalist wants to keep track of all your future announcements, you don’t want to risk that they rely upon just your press releases each time. Give them a link back to your RSS feed so they can see it.

You’re feeding your most appropriate content to the reader. So, instead of just a long monotonous kind of press release that drones on, it’s in smaller chunks and it has links to video content, podcast content, it’s got all the images they can download for logos right there, and it has RSS and they can add it do del.icio.us and they can post it on Digg and just really facilitate the spreading of that information.

ANDY BEAL: What I always try to do is try to give them a quote that is not just the normal sound bite that’s in a press release but is something that’s going to really appeal to their readers and that they can actually use. And likewise, when I’m talking about the features or I’m talking about a particular announcement I’m trying to think about who’s likely to write about this and writing it in a way so that really what I want them to do is cut and paste right out of the press release because that way they are using my terminology, my keywords, my buzz, and putting that into their article. So, if you can do that then that’s really going to help you get your message across.

SUSAN BRATTON: You can also tag your release with keywords.

ANDY BEAL: Yeah, absolutely. Go ahead and just let them know these are the tags that we think this press release is relevant to. And so, that certainly helps as well with, for example, Technorati tagging. It helps Technorati kind of figure out where the press release should be, and kind of just helps even just as a first glance, just helps someone that’s looking at the press release and deciding if it’s got..if it’s of interest to them or likewise if they submit it to de.licio.us and they’re trying to think, “Well, how should I tag this, what are the relevant key words.” If you’re providing that information to them they’re more likely to tag it with a keyword that is more relevant to you and is going to serve you better than some obscure keyword that they happen to think is relevant to your announcement.

SUSAN BRATTON: One of the things that I liked about the book, Radically Transparent, is that you show social media releases in here and you actually give examples about how to do all the tagging and the bookmarking. That is really helpful. I also want to ask what your opinion is about SEO PR because a lot of times if you actually try to write the press release that you are going to send out over the wire in a manner that creates reasonable keyword density then it doesn’t read very well. What I’ve been doing is I’ve been pushing out SEO PR optimized releases over the wire to increase my chances of it getting picked up by Google and Yahoo! News, but then the one that I send out to bloggers, to journalists, and post on my site is the one that’s written for humans. Is that the wrong way to do it? Is that a reasonable way? What do you recommend?

ANDY BEAL: I don’t think it’s necessarily the wrong way. I think that some traditionalists would argue that only ever send out one press release because if the same press release in different formats lands in the inbox of the same journalist then it may not present quite the best image that you’ve sent it out twice even though it’s slightly different. But I’m more of just a realist, and that is whatever works for you works for you. Certainly, I definitely do agree with you, you can have the risk of over optimizing the press release.

SUSAN BRATTON: It’s almost like you have to over optimize for it to be effective from an SEO PR perspective. You have to say your keyword or phrase, in my case something like “podcasting advertizing,” 63 times in the first hundred words.

ANDY BEAL: Right. And honestly here’s the thing with any kind of content writing, you’ve got those that are kind of stuck in the old way of ‘it’s got to be keyword density, and you have to mention it X number of times’, and really that’s not the case. What you really want to do is to get your message across. You want to get your marketing message across. And the thing with optimizing your press releases for the search engines is to not go overboard and mention your keyword five times in a hundred words. But it’s to just be aware of the fact of are there any opportunities to switch out where you say his or her or the product or the service and replace it with something that is a little bit more keyword rich, whether it’s the name of the CEO, so that it shows up in a Google search for his name as opposed to saying ‘the CEO’, or if it’s saying ‘reputation management services’ as opposed to ‘the services’. Just look for those opportunities. And then lastly, just read it out loud. Whenever I do any kind of optimization for content, the rule of thumb is read it out loud. And as long as if flows when you read it out loud, you’ll know that there’s not too many keywords in there.

For more on this thread or to hear Andy’s opinion on how to find top bloggers to target with your release, or 26 Do-it-Yourself Freebie Online Reputation Tracking Tools, listen here to DishyMix.

Andy Beal, author of “Radically Transparent” on Creating Your Personal Brand, 26 DIY Reputation Management Freebies and Twitter as Mentor