Speakers:
Robin Liss, Founder and President, Camcorderinfo.com
Lee Odden, President, TopRank Online Marketing
Greg Jarboe, President and co-founder, SEO-PR, seo-pr.com
David McInnis, Founder and CEO, PRWeb
Robin Liss, Founder and President, Camcorderinfo.com
They are a consumer electronics review site. They do a lot of PR outreach. She is going to talk specifically about how to do an interview. She is going to walk through her rules for doing an interview. Here they are:
1. Be Over Prepared. Get a sense of the topic and figure out what message you want to get across. Write out message points about your opinions and intertwine the subject with your company’s mission.
2. Practice. Especially important if its live (TV/Radio/etc). Write down a few prospective questions you think you will get. If it’s TV – practice in front of a mirror. Learn how to fill space without “ums” “ahs”, “you knows” and “likes”.
3. Develop a Relationship with the Reporter. Find a common subject that you can connect with them on.
4. Give Straight Answers. Try to keep answers to 30 seconds. If you don’t know the answer – feel free to tell them this. Feel free to correct yourself.
5. Message, Message, Message. You need to get your message points across. Working your message is an art form. Work your URL in very subtly – for example “One thing we do at domain.com is…”
6. Be Cautious. Be careful what information you want publicly available. Nothing is off the record, ever. Don’t ever say anything to a reporter that you wouldn’t be comfortable saying to your mother, boss, wife or a judge!
David McInnis, Founder and CEO, PRWeb
You can also see this at http://www.prweb.com/pubcon
New Opportunities for Press Releases
Direct to Consumer PR – SEO optimized distribution and social media penetration
Why direct to consumer? Bypass the MSM (mainstream media) filter / control your message / increased online visibility.
2 Components of SEO Press Release
PreDistribution – Keyword Optimization tools – newsforce.com and PRWeb SEO tools
Distribution Platform – constantly tuned for SEO
Why Social Media?
Tap new social networks. Constantly evolving media due to attitudes of people.
Blogs are human powered search engines (provide access to an audience / encourages online discussion)
Faster more complete response than MSM
Social Media Rules
1. Don’t seed you own content
2. Blogosphere provides transparency
3. Monitor and know your audience
4. Participate in the dialogue before you need something
5. Be respectful
Adhere to the WOMMA guidelines
SEO Your News Headline / your Abstract & Summary / Lead paragraph / News image
RSS your news releases
Lee Odden, President, TopRank Online Marketing
The Time is Right
Half of all US Internet visitors went to a Internet news service
Increasing use of social media (blog search engines, news search engines, social news, boomarks)
All tied together by RSS
Push & Pull PR
Push – sending out press releases, pitching (wire services / pitching journalists)
Pull – making it easy for the media & your intended audiance to find and pull themselves to your news (news search / RSS)
In the middle is the media coverage
Blogger Relations Tips – pitching bloggers
Be relevant
Personalize your pitch
Make it easy for them – summarize what you want them to say and provide a full link to what you are promoting
Schwag is good – let them try it out
Read more here: http://toprankblog.com/2006/10/blogger-relations-101
Social Media Release
Use of images / bookmarks / podcast / breaking up quotes into a seperate section (make it easy) / subcribe to the RSS feed and a link to a traditional press release
Use del.icio.us to archive previous coverage on this topic – tag it and link to it
Post release distribution – post the news release on company site or blog / bookmark it and any pickups / create a MS Word and PDF version and optimize it
Measure Success
Wire service reporting
RSS
Analytics
Greg Jarboe, President and co-founder, SEO-PR, seo-pr.com
Press & Public Relations Campaigns
Almost 75% of search marketers are now optimizing press releases
The NY Times is now training reporters to optimize their news.
Want coverage? Get visual, say 90% of journalists in media survey. Add an image to your story. Or go a step further and add multimedia to a news release (post video to YouTube and add to release).
89% of journalists prefer to receive majority of information via email. Make them feel important. Email them before you put it on the wire.
Pitch human editors of Yahoo! News. They are lonely people – most people don’t even know they exist.
Pitch the story outside of the US with a universal appeal.
Matt Cutts says main benefit is not PageRank of links in press release. From this blog post by Matt.
Yup, we agree on this randfish. I’m just making trying to make sure everybody understands too.
I’m not against doing press releases; press releases can be a useful part of getting traffic and building a brand. For ranking in Google, however, the main benefit of a press release is not direct links or PageRank from the press release directly; it’s primarily the people who decide to write an article and link because of that.
But links from bloggers DO count. Pitch the bloggers ahead of time. Offer them the story / offer them the images and video.
SEO and PR can generate publicity, traffic that click and links.
- Original & unique content
- Pages designed primarily for humans with SEs secondary
- Hyperlinks intended for people to find interesting, related content, when applicable
Q&A
Question: Good example of online press rooms?
Greg: AOL does. Check out ipressroom.com – that’s what they do.
Lee: Look at magnum-tech.com.
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