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]

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.

1. The Arduino – One Tough Little Italian

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.

2. RFID Tags & Transponders

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.

3. Geomagnetic Sensors in Mobile Devices

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.

4. Optical Pattern Recognition & Augmented Reality

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.

5. OpenID, OAuth, and the Identity Graph

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.

6. Mind Reading

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.

7. Natural Language Processing

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.

The Future

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.

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.

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

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.

“Of course I want a website,” is the response that you’d expect from more than half of the people you’d ask the question. The fact remains that there is no right answer to this question. I think its more need-based than what’s ‘in’, because one of the primary reasons why a business may choose a website is to sell its products. Stats show that 55.8% of all websites have something or the other to sell. But why do people think that blogs are becoming synonymous with websites, perhaps overtaking them? I see five major reasons:

Ease of use You don’t have to be a techie to put up a blog. You don’t need to know any programming languages to start a professional blog, and with blogging platforms becoming increasingly user-friendly, anyone with access to an internet can get a presence on the internet. Most blogging platforms are offered in the SaaS model (Software as a service), which means that they do everything from give you a domain name to hosting your blog to give you a lot of gigs of free upload space. Which brings me to my next point.

Economical Blogs are way cheaper to put up than a professional website. Most blogging platforms are free to use and the only investment a business has to do is perhaps buy a domain name. And domain names are as cheap as $7 a year. On the other hand, putting up a website involves starting from scratch – the templates, the content, the design, the encoding, search engine optimization, maintenance, hosting, and just about anything else. There are SaaS models available that promise to put up, design and host your website for you, but they’re expensive. The cheapest one I could find costs $5 a month. Compare that to the investment in a blog, and you’ll see the difference.

Interactive Almost everyone who blogs will tell you that one of the coolest things about blogging is the discussion threads and comment forms. Its an instant feedback to whatever content goes up online, and its a great networking tool. With the right message and the right optimization procedures, you can reach out to a global audience who will be your end consumer for whatever services you’re offering. They have a chance to interact with you directly and more importantly, you have a chance to speak to your consumers in real time, with appropriate plug-ins.

Classroom Example, outlining the advantages of a blog

Widgets and Plug-ins Compared to a blog’s flexibility in terms of customization, a website is disappointingly static. There are plug-ins for almost anything – right from basics like a ‘Calendar’ and an ‘Archives’ widget to an ‘All-in-one SEO Pack’ to frills that make the blog look that much more beautiful. And none of these require an extensive knowledge of any programming languages. Anyone can do it. Perhaps the most useful widget for a business is the live-chat widget. Enabling this would help anyone who visits the blog to chat with someone from the company in real time, right there on the blog, with no logins and passwords required.

Content Management Blogs have the advantage of giving you complete freedom when it comes to your content. You can manage it anyway you want, make changes to the way they appear, the order in which they are listed, the ease of access and anything else. Its like being able to play with a bunch of building blocks without the fear of going wrong anywhere. Websites, on the other hand, are cumbersome and not very receptive to such flexibilities. They just exist.