Effective Use Of The Social Media Press Release

The Social Media Press Release (SMPR) is not a new concept but it is still worth the attention of even the most conservative PR experts and firms.

Social press releases are particularly important for all the online public relations experts, firms and online marketers. We don’t call SMPR a trend but rather, a tool. It is not there to replace or kill the traditional press release but it is there to improve upon it. It’s not an process to a traditional press release layout, but includes parts of the traditional press release formatted in a more simpler,  comprehensive and ready-to-use manner.

SMPR includes the traditional press release format but also includes something beyond. The main difference is how it uses the burgeoning social media networks and applications. Compared to a “static” press release, a social media one offers:

• Video
• Audio
• Weblogs
• Comment areas
• Discussion Forums
• RSS feeds
• Uploaded multimedia files
• Embedded Links
• Direct interaction with social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Technorati and many more…

Because of these features, Social Media Press Releases offer a much easier way for news to be digested through online feeds. This mainly includes professional bloggers, who are becoming an ever more important source of “breaking” news.

Making use of Social Media News Releases Effectively

Here’s how you can make use of the the Social Media News Release effectively as discussed on Hubspot

1) Build a cool SMNR.

This news release can have as many features of the template as you want. Videos, links, images, sound, threaded discussions, voting, rating, throwing sheep, whatever you want. Bring it on.

2) Post on your website. Only.

Take that really cool version of the news release and post that version on your own company website.  After all, don’t you want the coolest stuff on the web to be on your website?  It’s also a good idea to use a blog software to post your news releases, it is simple and easy and produces an RSS feed automatically. Copy the URL where your cool SMNR lives, you’ll need it later.

3) Build a simple (text) version of the release.

Build another, simple version of the release for the wire service(s).  This version should be all text, maybe 250 words as a summary to get people’s interest, it should also have 2-4 optimized links, including a prominent link back to the full, original release on your company website.  The goal of this version is (a) to get people to click through to your website and interact there, and (b) build links for SEO purposes.

4) Use Press Release Grader.

Take that short version of the release you are going to send out over the wire and run it through the free press release analysis tool.  This will make sure you don’t use any Gobbeldygook and your links are set up correctly, as well as some other basic checks.  Fix all the big errors, and also check the word cloud to make sure the search engines will look at the release the way you want.

5) Use the wire service.

Send that simple, text based news release over the wire.  No pictures, no videos, just text and links (using keywords with anchor text).  Using only text will save you some money, and you will be sending people back to your own website to interact with each other to have a much richer experience.  They get to leave comments (and see all the other comments from everyone else), view multimedia (posted under your own account) and vote for and promote (in other forms of social media) the one main version of the news release.

Other important reads:

Tips to Writing a Successful Press Release for Google NEWS & Social Media Sites

10 of the Best Social Media Tools for PR Professionals and Journalists

[Image Courtesy: rushprnews.com]

7 Technologies Shaping The Future Of Social Media

Mike Laurie works as a Digital Planner at UK Integrated Agency JPMH where he helps brands get the most from digital media. You can follow Mike on Twitter.

This article was posted in Mashable on June 1, 2009.

In 2019, when you look back at the social media landscape ten years earlier, you might laugh at how hard you had to work. You had to type things into forms (ha! remember those?), type URLs in the address bar (how archaic!), and put up with irritating communications about irrelevant products. Social media in the future will be effortless and everywhere. Here’s a look at some of the new technologies in store for us over the next 10 years that will make our social (media) lives easier.

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1. The Arduino – One Tough Little Italian

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Arduino is a small circuit board commonly used to prototype electronics. Its low cost and ease of implementation has meant that this little device is now leading a hobbyist revolution in connecting real life objects to social networks, like Twitter (). It has allowed one man to create a device attached to a chair that tweets at the presence of noxious natural gasses (ahem), another uses Arduino to monitor when his cats are inside the house or out, and a small bakery and cafe in East London is now able to tweet what’s fresh from their oven. This may all seem like pretty pointless stuff, but the pointlessness is the point.

The revolution of objects notifying human beings of their state (e.g., The Internet of Things) isn’t happening in the R&D labs of large multinational conglomerates, it’s happening in the spare rooms, garages and bedrooms of developers. The printing press, possibly one of the first inventions to aid information sharing, was invented by Johannes Gutenberg with investment intended for an altogether different enterprise: polished metal mirrors intended to capture holy light from religious relics, presumably to sell to hapless tourists. In other words, what might seem like silly tinkering today, might be a key contributor to our future world.

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2. RFID Tags & Transponders

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While Arduino will help household items become involved in our social media world, transponders such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are truly breathing life into our objects.

For a number of years RFID tags have been used in passports, ID cards, travel cards and credit cards as a means to identify us when scanned, and they are used commercially for inventory tracking. Brands including Abercrombie & Fitch, Levis and Kleenex have experimented with RFID tags to track their inventory at an item-level. Transponders can be made as small as a grain of sand and can be produced very cheaply. So it is widely thought that they may one day be installed in everything from a packet of biscuits to a pair of underpants.

But RFID tags have potentially valuable real-world applications. It may be possible, for example, to create a very cheap device which sits in your trash can or recycling box and monitors the contents by scanning RFID tags as stuff is thrown in. You might ask why anyone would want to do this with their garbage, but there is a lot of valuable data to be had in what is, in essence, scrobbling for your trash. Your trash is a goldmine of consumption data in the same way that your search data or browsing history is, and could be used to track brand loyalty and consumption habits.

And mobile phone manufacturers, particularly Nokia, are currently experimenting with consumer devices that act as readers and scanners, meaning that your mobile device might be able to do things like exchange information with other phones by bringing them near to one another, or gather information directly from products and find out instantly if anyone in your network has purchased the item in the past. Within the context of mobile phones, this technology is generally referred to as NFC (Near-Field Communication).

Of course, just because we could do this, doesn’t necessarily mean we would, or should. There are clear privacy implications involved that might make the idea of monitoring consumption via your trash or tracking your underpants dead on arrival. Privacy advocates such as CASPIAN are highly motivated to prevent this from happening — the notion that RFIDs could be on our person without us knowing is akin to web sites sharing knowledge about us without our consent. The anti-RFID site spychips.org has more information about the privacy concerns of the technology.

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3. Geomagnetic Sensors in Mobile Devices

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The compass is hardly new — it’s been around for thousands of years — but Yamaha has created a tiny 2mm x 2mm chip intended for use in mobile phones as a compass. When used in conjunction with GPS, AGPS or Wi-Fi triangulation and an accelerometer a compass heading could be extremely useful to give more granular positioning data to mobile applications.

Some older phones used to come equipped with these compasses, and though they have been phased out in recent years, they’re starting to make a comeback. Apple Insider suggests that the next generation of iPhone hardware will contain a “Magnetometer,” the feature already exists in the HTC Dream (the T-Mobile G1), though it is currently used for very little.

But the real world applications are many. For example, let’s say that you’ve just come out of a subway at a roundabout, and the first thing you do is take out your GPS-enabled phone’s mapping application to see where you need to walk to get to your friends waiting for you at a bar. In order to orientate yourself correctly, you’ll need to find street names. But if you happen to be in London, where I live, you know that street names are rarely in convenient places, they’re usually hidden behind trees and other signs (where’s the fun otherwise?). So a compass heading is a perfect way to let you know which direction you roughly need to walk in. Likewise, if you want to scan an area at a certain location for a great place to eat, your device is going to need a heading in order to overlay information over the top of your screen.

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4. Optical Pattern Recognition & Augmented Reality

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Imagine you’re on your way to a conference and you have a couple of hours to kill so you park yourself in the corner of a local bar to catch up on Mashable (). You’ve barely begun reading when an attractive girl or guy catches your eye. You’re transfixed, your heart starts to race — you’re in love. But being the shy type you can’t just go over and introduce yourself, so instead you do a quick scan of the room with your cell phone to pick up any latent metadata. Unfortunately, a social network profile pops up informing you that the object of your affection is in a relationship. Your initial excitement rapidly dissipates and you get on with your reading.

That scenario is pretty far-fetched, but it’s one potential promise of Biometric Face Recognition technology that is already used by police and security services to help identify known criminals. 3 years ago Google acquired Neven Vision, a company that provides such technology. Google reported that it is using this technology in its Picasa product to help keep your personal photos organized without you needing to do any of the actual organizing. I have literally thousands of pictures of my children and family on my computer at home. It would take me days to go through and tag each one so that I could search them more easily in the future. But at some point, Picasa might be able to tag everything for me automatically by recognizing faces and objects in my photos.

That’s still not quite to the level of our hypothetical, but Tochindot’s Sekai Camera and Wikitude are making in-roads into rich and immersive ambient metadata, too. Their current goals revolve around tagging inanimate objects, but someday biometric face recognition could be used to attach metadata to real people.

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5. OpenID, OAuth, and the Identity Graph

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Having to remember passwords for multiple accounts can be frustrating, and answering the same questions over and over on registration forms becomes tedious. Ten years from now, filling out our information once and then easily transferring it from place to place might be commonplace.

OpenID is an open authentication protocol that lets users use a single set of login credentials for every site they visit. It’s already in use at hundreds of smaller websites and large sites like Facebook () are starting to accept OpenID accounts. Once you’ve authenticated, a second open protocol called OAuth will help you share data about yourself with other sites you use. OAuth lets your grant authorization to sites to collect data from other places you participate online, which ultimately could eliminate the need to fill in redundant information about your profile and who your friends are at each new site you use. And companies like Cliqset and DandyID are creating platforms that will allow you to share your entire identity graph information from your profile to your contacts to your lifestream.

Together, these technologies could essentially eliminate the need to fill out forms and register for sites all together.

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6. Mind Reading

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My favorite scene from Back to The Future 2 is one in which Marty visits a 1980s-theme cafe where he sees some kids looking at his old favorite arcade game. Marty tells them he’s a “crack shot” but when he demonstrates the interface, the kids complain, “You have to use your hands!? That’s like a baby’s toy.” Classic.

But the idea of being able to control an interface without the use of your fine motor skills has massive implications for human computer interaction. Consider the ability to tweet what you’re thinking without having to pull your phone out of your pocket, type your message and hit send. Imagine being able to think ‘Facebook’ and your screen presents you with an overview of your friend’s activity stream. This method of interaction is at a very experimental stage but there are proofs-of-concept that exist. Most of this kind of innovation is currently intended to help people with limited motor skills, and not lazy social media addicts, however.

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7. Natural Language Processing

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Like Optical Pattern Recognition, Natural Language Processing (NLP) seeks to automatically categorize and understand that which humans understand with ease. By doing so, computers will be able to understand the requests and needs of their human users far better. Of course, talented programmers can already tell their computer to do things with ease, but the rest of us would benefit from applications that understand our curious ways of speaking.

Firefox’s Ubiquity is one project that’s attempting to change the way we interact with the web by allowing people to use natural language commands. Further, in the future, applications might exist that could analyze your tweets or comments with NLP, and suggest people or brands for you to follow.

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The Future

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Many of the technologies explored in this post are in their infancy, but they could have a profound effect on how we use the Internet and social media in the future. If you know of any other technologies that you feel might advance the future social media landscape please mention them in the comments.

Mike Laurie works as a Digital Planner at UK Integrated Agency JPMH where he helps brands such as BlackBerry, Nestlé, Johnson & Johnson, and Hasbro get the most from digital media. You can follow Mike on Twitter.

Build Your Brand The Credible Way

According to Al Reis, author of The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR, PR creates brands.  Advertising defends brands.  The data from leading brands supports this position.

Ask a thousand people on the streets what they think is a bigger name – Google or General Motors. I bet my life almost everyone will say Google. Yet, would you believe it, GM spends close to 3 billion dollars a year on advertising? I choked on my morning coffee when I read this, and I don’t think I see the point. Public Relations has evolved from being a glorified courier service organizing press conferences to a mainstream brand-building tool.

There have been scores of experts talking about how advertising is a must-have for businesses and frankly, that kind of talk is outdated. No one wants to spend a million dollars and put up hoardings all over the city and not get the RoI they want.

Businesses nowadays should take heed, particularly when weighing an ad push versus a targeted PR campaign.  There are three simple reasons why.

1.  Credibility - Advertising, no matter how clever, funny, dramatic, or aesthetically pleasing, is self-serving.  It is a pitch, and, no matter how cleverly disguised, we all recognize advertising as a pitch.  PR, on the other hand, has gone through a filtering process.  That is, an editor or reporter has deemed the information credible and newsworthy.  While we may not love the media, we recognize that they do filter pap from news in most instances.  What PR lacks in control, it gains in credibility.

2.  Clarity – Advertising uses subtleties, claims, and comparisons and borrows from the arts and psychology to try to influence decisions.  PR usually translates into simple messages.  A problem has been solved. New conclusions have been reached.  Someone or something has created a new approach.  The more straightforward and relevant the information, the greater the possibility of it becoming news.  PR is based on information, not seduction.

3.  Cost - There is no company on the planet spending a billion dollars a year on PR.  In advertising, there are more than twenty-five.  There is no comparison in costs.  Or, many would argue, in effectiveness.

PR is better than any marketing tool at your disposal, including advertising – something the stewards of the best brands in the world already know.

At Darkwater Digital, we take the whole concept of PR to a new level and guarantee your brand’s presence online. We build and maintain the brand’s online reputation and try our best to make sure that the most common mistakes that businesses make are not repeated for your brand.

We don’t want you to spend a million dollars. We don’t want your message to be lost in a bottle, out at sea.

Parts of this article have been sourced from the Camino Media website.

SEO Your Website

The key required to reach and maintain top rankings in internet searches and also to ensure to have an enhanced and effective positioning of your website is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In the present days, the online environment is one that is not constant or in other words, it is in a constant change with new techniques and policies emerging out almost every day. And this is why it has become very difficult for a web-business owner to build a successful business of their own. There could be countless number of ways, black and white, to increase your websites potential and traffic but the only best solution an entrepreneur may find is to outsource essential Internet marketing and SEO.

What is SEO according to Google?

Search Engine Optimization is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results. Focusing too hard on specific tweaks to gain ranking in the organic results of search engines may not deliver the desired results. Search engine optimization is about putting your site’s best foot forward when it comes to visibility in search engines.

Why SEO?

Ah! That’s a brilliant question. I like that The benefits of SEO are endless. The best things one could achieve form SEO are:

1.    Reach out to millions of visitors coming through search engines.

2.    Capture a focused and targeted audience efficiently.

3.    Maximize your Return of Investment – ROI.

4.    Rank high on Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) and get maximum benefit.

And I bet you, these are way better and more powerful than that of the other techniques of gaining raking.Another aspect of the SEO is the web design. The team member who handles the design of your site will have to make sure to properly streamline your site’s design for maximum visibility and usability so as to when visitors visit your site, they must be able to quickly and easily find what they are looking for and have a quick access to all your data and information.

So I need SEO too! What do I do?

A good and professional Search Engine Optimizer will first talk to about your business goals and discuss ways to advertise and optimize your site for organic ranking and this is very much necessary. Later on the SEO professional starts on the process by identifying with the keywords or key-phrases that users will enter into the search engines to find the intended web site so as to later on use those to make a better Search Engine Optimized Website!And that is what we do. The things above written are in precise on how SEO is being done at Darkwater Digital. Few of our services provided within SEO at Darkwater Digital are:

1.    Base Ranking

2.    Identification of Keywords

3.    Meta Tag Creation

4.    Page and Site Navigation Structure Optimization

5.    Linking Recommendations

6.    Inbound Links Optimization

7.    Directory Submissions

8.    Search Engine Submissions

9.    Status Reports

You could probably get in touch with us if you liked our SEO services

The ‘SaaS’y Life!

Most people hate new technology. So, product development should be totally based on the needs of the customer. Technology has become a necessary evil in most cases. You cannot live without it. Everyone is looking for integrated experiences in whatever they use in life. For example, the iPhone – a phone with music, games, internet – is a device that does everything. Services like Flickr, YouTube, GoogleVideos (Picasa), Twitter are taking over.

There have been numerous articles on how Twitter and the likes have been better at providing news than news channels. No one can deny the convenience of having services like GPS integrated with one’s car.Software developers are one of the few species of people who believe that they can change the world – sometimes they really can!

In this age of the internet time, which is faster than fast – practically instantaneous (considering one is still not on dial-up), companies must adapt quickly. Traditional strategies would fail in these days of internet time no matter what the business is. They must keep up with every whim of the customers they cater to.

So, what does internet enable us to do? Primarily, it helps companies cope with competition by allowing them to manage huge databases of employees, products and customers. Through virtual marketing, the technology helps businesses cut traditional business costs and provides 24×7 communication tools like email and web chat to name a few.

All this said, what would the cost be for getting the best software product out there with all the support required?

The answer to that question is SaaS or Software as a Service model. Herein, the developer licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand. The application could be hosted on the developer’s own web servers or could be downloaded to the consumer device, disabling it after use or after the on-demand contract expires.

On-demand licensing and use alleviates the customer’s burden of equipping a device with every conceivable application. It enables software to become a variable expense, rather than a fixed cost at the time of purchase. It also enables licensing only the amount of software needed versus traditional licenses per device. SaaS also enables the buyer to share licenses across their organization and between organizations.

Using SaaS can also conceivably reduce the up-front expense of software purchases, through less costly, on-demand pricing from hosting service providers. SaaS lets software vendors control and limit use, prohibits copies and distribution, and facilitates the control of all derivative versions of their software.

The sharing of end-user licenses and on-demand use may also reduce investment in server hardware. SaaS is generally associated by software professionals and business associates with business software and is typically thought of as a low-cost way for businesses to obtain rights to use software as needed versus licensing all devices with all applications.

Having listed the advantages of SaaS, a mention of certain drawbacks – Data transfers happen at Internet speeds (so advisable to subscribe to better speeds) Widespread implementation of SaaS requires well defined services as well. Availability of open source applications, inexpensive hardware, low-cost bandwidth push customers to operate their own software.

In conclusion, one can say that communication is key between the software developers and the business personnel. The motto must be “We are listening!” and we definitely are.