Dave/Parker
Of course, I agree with you all in the strategy/tactic point. If your business objective is to get a message out and your identified demographic participates and consumes content in social media, the SMPR is a tactic that may work well for you.

“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” Sun Tzu.

For me, the strategy comes in when deciding how to blend it into the communications mix to meet your objectives. There seems to be no end to the debate over what functions are turned on and off, and what insights are to be gained. If the strategy is sound, these details fall into place one by one.

This process is nothing new to experienced digital developers. Part of this process is a healthy debate over these details that can effect the communication objectives considerably.

I agree completely with David Jones in that the SMR should be seen as a tool, not a strategy. Just as a traditional press release was a tool designed to give information (in this case, plain text) to the newspaper journalists of yesterday, the SMR should be seen as a tool to provide content to the multimedia journalists (ahem, bloggers) of today.
A PR campaign shouldn’t stop at simply issuing an SMR.

The Avon version is the fourth one I’ve been involved with and I’m really liking the features and the ease of updating we’ve built into the template. Let’s keep evolving, but not forget this is a tool, not a strategy.