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Blogging, Twitter

Old Hat press releases will no longer cut it

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Part II: My notes on PRWeb Social News Release show

Images are now expected: photo by my friend Susan Ambrosini
Images are now expected: photo by my friend Susan Ambrosini

For a long time I’ve been telling my students the “dirty little secret” that the term PRESS RELEASE is passè — and people-in-the-know have been referring to these outreach communiquès as NEWS RELEASES.

However in the New Media World, we now have the SOCIAL NEWS RELEASE with entirely new rules and capabilities. Naturally I was excited by the prospect of sharing the tips for online news releases offered in the PRWeb/Vocus webinar.

SNR’s — VITAL SEO TOOL

Here are three of the broad-based benefits of Social News Releases:

  • Their incorporated “links” build Google juice
  • They provide content for both news aggregators and bloggers
  • They can create viral exposure through social networks

The Webinar listed five steps for a Great Online News Release:

  1. Focus on two or three relevant key phrases — and get one of those in the headline and the other in the first sentence.
  2. Content is Key: Make certain that your story has news value and is not just a veiled sales pitch.
  3. Distribute the release to all social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
  4. Optimize with key words and videos or images.
  5. Use targeted anchor tags [URLs with recognizable labels].

It’s All About BACKLINKS

Go to slide #26++ on Optimized Press Releases for examples of  SEO-enhanced social news releases. Notice the embedded video, social bookmarking, live search tracking, and embedded hyperlinks. Multimedia has become an expectation.

Here are two organizational points from the webinar transcript:

  • The Process has changed: new way of working, new approval procedures, new metrics
  • Leadership must discuss and adopt a new way of defining success for Public Relations

You can use this template for a Social News Release provided on the Web by Todd Defren, widely respected PR/Social Media expert whose blog PR-Squared debuted the recommended format. For more information check out this Fact Sheet on Todd and the relevance of Social News Releases.

Next post: SFSU alum John Gumas was one of the SF marketing pro’s “responsible” for sparking my passion for All Things Social Media