Blog Archives
Tips to Make Your Online Newsroom Matter
Let’s call like it is. The current media landscape is a constrained space.
Fact - there are fewer reporters and traditional media outlets to pitch.
Fact – media outlets are still inundated daily with an excessive amount of press releases from PR pros on topics across the board.
Fact – the Web now affords us all more channels and opportunities than ever before to disseminate news to target audiences.
If your company, organization or clients are not currently taking advantage of an online newsroom, now is the time to step back and think about how to put one in place. Small businesses and companies will argue that they simply don’t release news frequently enough to warrant having an online newsroom. To that end, I would encourage everyone to think about using online tools and channels to Be The Media.
As you’ll see in the PowerPoint below, Lee Odden differentiates between “pull” and “push” tactics that can be used to distribute news. These pull tactics are largely based on proactively centralizing key content within an online newsroom to help create a searchable resource for journalists to discover your news.
As opposed to just thinking about an online newsroom in terms of static news releases and a couple executive bios, you should envision the page as a central resource for housing key content. Why not use your newsroom to house weekly videos with an expert at your company speaking about a specific niche topic? Using consistent keyword titles and tags and filing all of these videos into one playlist, you’ll be creating a solid content package that will track well on the search engine front, where a journalist is most likely to conduct their initial research around a topic. All analytics around the videos, including search referral terms, can of course be tracked through YouTube Insight.
If you’re uncertain as to where to start and how to structure an online newsroom, I’d encourage you to check out the posts below:
How to Create an Online Newsroom - I like the reminder here about integrating social media into your page.
Quick Tips for Building Online Newsrooms - Nice bullet points to keep in mind, particularly about tracking and measuring to see what type of content draws attention.
How to Build A Better Online Newsroom – Jeremy Porter does a great job with this post, showing comparisons between existing newsrooms used by Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
In addition, I’d HIGHLY encourage you to check out this presentation below. It’s one of the most resourceful PowerPoints I’ve come across on Slideshare in some time. Lee Odden does a great job of breaking down the importance of using an online newsroom to drive search.
Feel free to add your own tips below!
-Scott
Excellent Free Social Media Resource Guides
As we all continue to barrel down the social media discovery path, more and more case studies and best practices are surfacing to help guide our learning curve. Over the past few months, some excellent comprehensive guides have been created to help us all along. These guides are emerging at a crucial time especially as platforms such as Twitter struggle to retain new users due to a lack of upfront user guidance.
Here are a few resource guides that I would highly recommend checking out:
I realize I’ve already mentioned both these guides, but it’s worth another mention. Key for any marketers looking to figure out the baseline purpose and intent of utilizing Facebook as an effective marketing tool.
About Face – A free white paper on Facebook pages (By Advance Guard)
Free ebook – How to Use Facebook for Business (By HubSpot)
The Journalist’s Guide to Facebook (On Mashable) – good idea for PR folks to check out what’s being presented to the the journalist side.
Very timely move by Twitter to launch their own guide and the Mashable guide is equally as stellar, linking to past posts on the site with plenty of great graphics – love you for this Mashable!
Twitter 101 for Business (By Twitter)
The Twitter Guide Book – How To, Tips and Instructions (By Mashable)
YouTube already does a great job of laying out their own internal guide, but here’s a great resource for maximizing the new channel layout.
How To: Customize Your YouTube Channel (On Mashable)
Blogging
This is tough to list resources for because the fact of the matter is that your best solution to learning how to blog is to immediately subscribe to Copyblogger, Remarkablogger and Problogger and read every post each of them have ever written. Time consuming? Yes. Worth it? Absolutely.
SEO
Yes, a bit older guide (published Nov. 13, 2008) but stands the test of the time and is definitely the most user-friendly SEO guide I’ve come across.
Search Engine Optimization Guide (By Google)
I realize I’m just hitting on the main platforms here so feel free to add your suggestions with links to additional guides below!
-Scott
The Science Behind the Click
$21 billion. Billion.
That’s the amount of revenue that Google Ads generated last year. If you’re like me and 60% of all Internet surfers, you rely on Google everyday as your search engine of choice. Google has become such a reliable knowledge portal that it’s hard to recall what served as “home base” on the Web prior to their existence.
As critical as the Web is to my job, I’ve never thoroughly understood Google’s advertising structure beyond my basic involvement and research of pay-per-click (PPC) ads. Organic search and search engine optimization are of course crucial to understanding the Web, but the advertising aspect has always seemed a bit foreign to me.
I’ve never been one to give much thought to clicking on the sponsored links listed at the top and on the right sidebar of Google’s search results. Maybe it’s been my instinctual fear of viruses or phishing scams, but I’ve always viewed organic results as the “safe” play when determining where to navigate next on my search path.
Steven Levy’s Secret of Googlenomics article in the latest issue of Wired magazine opened my eyes up to a whole new understanding of how Google’s sponsored ads end up where they do. Aside from bidding on select keywords that connect ads to specific dates, time and geographic locations, Google also assesses the quality of an ad, examining how well the ad matches a search query, the load time and quality of content on an ad’s landing page, the ad’s past clickthrough rate and other key criteria. An ad’s rank on a search result page is then determined through a formula that multiplies the bid by the assigned quality score (1-10).
Aside from gaining some additional technical knowledge about PPC, Steven’s article speaks to the larger economic trend and overall impact of how Google’s auction-based marketplace creates a new “auction” each time a new search is processed.
It’s mindblowing to think about the wealth of data Google and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter (obviously on smaller scales and with Twitter having yet to capitalize on this data in a monetary fashion) are capturing on any given day. If you’re on Facebook, you’ve likely seen tailored “social ads” for products or activity on facebook that reflects your friends’ activity. The friend endorsement is a huge step forward and I’ll admit that it makes me far more likely to check out a particular link on Facebook.
Where does search and social network advertising go from here?
I’d love to hear any SEO/PPC or other online ad experts’ thoughts and insight on where they see search and social network advertising going next.
-Scott
