[globenewswire]

Holiday Press Releases: Don’t Procrastinate!

-- By Joe Oberkrieser, editorial supervisor

If you’re hanging holiday press releases by the chimney with care, in hopes that an avalanche of media coverage will be there, you need to make sure you’re sending your press release at the right time. Many companies send press releases to announce Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, as well as nice news about Holiday events and charitable endeavors. If you want the media – not to mention consumers – to see and act on your news, here are some tips for when to schedule your press release.

Best time to issue a Black Friday release

For many, the Holiday season begins on Black Friday (Nov. 29 this year). Leave the house at midnight, get in line at your favorite big-box store, and get ready to trample! (Or be trampled.)

But seriously, Black Friday is the biggest shopping day of the year, and we see many press releases about Black Friday sales. Any store or any website that sells consumer goods is probably doing something for Black Friday.

So when’s the best time to issue a Black Friday release? The key is not to wait until the last minute. Either the week before Thanksgiving or the Monday of Thanksgiving week would work well. If you wait until the last minute, there’s a good chance no one will see your release until it’s too late. Some folks hit the road as early as Tuesday to avoid the well documented and dreaded busiest travel day of the year – the day before Thanksgiving. And anyone crazy enough to be shopping at 2 a.m. isn’t going without a game plan. So make sure you get the word out early enough so that shoppers can plan ahead.

To see an example of a Black Friday press release, please click here. Notice it was sent a week before Black Friday – perfect!

Cyber Monday Press Release tips

In case you don’t spend enough money on Black Friday, there’s also Cyber Monday (Dec. 2) to contend with. While Cyber Monday releases weren’t all that common a few years ago, as the “holiday” picks up steam, we’re seeing more PR traffic involving it.

There are two strategies for Cyber Monday releases:

1.       Follow the “Black Friday” guidelines above. Remember, after Tuesday of Thanksgiving week, it’s going to be hard to get any eyeballs on your release. Everybody is traveling, eating, watching football, etc.

2.       Issue the release on Cyber Monday. This would be a great way to get some impulse buys. Ideally, people would see your release online, then bounce over to your site and buy something. If you elect this route, it’s best to send your release out early in the day. Even 6 or 7 a.m. ET might work well – waiting too long could cost you some impulse buys.

Please click here to check out a Cyber Monday release.

Holiday News

Let’s put aside consumerism for a minute and talk about other holiday news. Many companies issue press releases about nice things their employees are doing for the holidays, such as collecting toys, food or clothing. There are always Christmas-themed events and products that companies want to spread the word about, too.

When should you spread the holiday cheer in a press release? Generally, the earlier the better. The first two weeks in December would be perfect. The third week isn’t too bad, either. But sending anything out after that could make you feel as if you got coal in your stocking.

The main reason is that people take vacation over Christmas and New Year’s. Many media outlets operate with a skeletal staff over the holidays, and they’ll plan holiday coverage in advance. A lot of the nice holiday features you see in newspapers and on TV over the holidays aren’t deadline pieces – they were written or produced ahead of time. Wait too long to issue your press release, you’ll be left out in the cold.

[globenewswire]

Press Release Tips & Tricks: Create a Clear Attributed Headline

By Marissa Petrarca, editor

Your press release is often the starting point for a journalist looking for a news story.  Therefore, the headline and first few lines of your press release are critical. 

Have a clear headline

The headline should clearly state the reason the press release is being disseminated and should include your company’s name.  If either is omitted, a journalist may pass by your press release. 

Why?  Journalists work on tight deadlines and do not have time to read through all the press releases they receive daily.  Ensure your press release highlights and summarizes why your release may be worth reporting on.  It may be tempting to create a flowery headline to grab the attention of your reader with “The Walking Dead Slays the Ratings!”  However, that headline has the potential to read as spam and doesn’t give information about the news or the company putting out the news.  A more efficient headline would be “AMC's "The Walking Dead" Finale Delivers 12.4 Million Viewers and 8.1 Million Adults 18-49 Making it Largest Audience in Series History.”  With the amount of spam that circulates around the Internet today, it is more important than ever that your news release look like a news release and not spam.

Have your headline attributed to your company

In addition to helping with pickup of your press release, having your headline attributed to your company will help on the SEO side of things.  If someone searches your company name, a press release without your company name may not come up in the results. 

Once you have an informative and attributed headline, you should continue that pattern in your first paragraph.

Having a well attributed press release will also give journalists a sense of confidence that the news you want them to report on is accurate and from a trustworthy press release.  It is critical to include attribution whenever possible, especially in your headline.  In an article posted on the PRSA (Public Relations Society of America) web site, the author states “…the responsibility of the public relations professional not only to provide expert guidance and counsel but also to help foster a sense of trust and confidence in the organization that he or she represents.”

In short, when a GlobeNewswire Editor asks for more attribution in a press release it is for the benefit of the press release getting picked up and the reputation of your company.  It is a small addition that makes a large difference.

[globenewswire]

Earnings Press Releases: The Business Side of Public Relations

By Samantha Kinhan, editor

Earnings season. For some, the phrase is cringe-worthy. For others, it is a crucial opportunity to highlight a company’s achievement and acknowledge yearly potential. Earnings is one of the most important times that Investor Relations and Public Relations combine. From shareholders to the media to the SEC, there are many components that must be satisfied each quarter. However, by following a few simple guidelines, companies can enjoy a stress-free Earnings day.

Preparing for the big day

Manage Expectations: Plan a meeting with your account manager before the end of the fiscal quarter to discuss your needs with regards to press release distribution and costs. Most clients submit earnings with tables, so timing expectations should be discussed as well.

Send out an advisory release: Most companies announce their conference call 1-2 weeks prior to the earnings release date. This release does not need to be long but it should include the conference call date, time and dial-in information, the webcast URL, and the expected distribution time of the actual earnings.

Clean up your account: Who is going to be involved with your earnings release this quarter? Since GlobeNewswire can only discuss releases with authorized users, please take a few minutes to add any individuals who will require access to the preview, as well as anyone who will be submitting changes to the release. Remember, you can always delete extra users later!

When and where to send your release

Press release distribution circuits and timing are two important items to keep in mind when planning your earnings release. The timing of your earnings release is usually dependent on the timing of the conference call. Most releases are disseminated prior to market open or after market close. Additionally, most public companies will not only alert shareholders via wire service; they will also submit an 8-K to the SEC, post to their online site, and send out customized email blast lists. GlobeNewswire can distribute to all of the above with only one press release submission required from the client. A quick meeting with your account manager will ensure we have all of the correct options set up to meet your needs with the click of a button.

GlobeNewswire Distribution Options:

EDGAR/SEDAR — Our team is able to file the 8-K concurrently with the press release with no additional work required from the client.

Email/Fax — We can send releases to any number of customized email/fax lists to ensure that the appropriate stakeholders are notified.

Databases & Disclosure — Companies can meet disclosure by sending to any domestic circuit, including cities.

IR site posting — We can make sure the release posts automatically to your NASDAQ-hosted site.

How to write an earnings press release

Earnings will vary in length depending on the quarter and the company. However, the main goal is transparency and the following tips will keep you on track to reach your target audience.

Headline: Always include the source company name and note that this is a financial report.

Stock ticker: The last thing a company needs is to prepare a perfect earnings release that doesn’t index downstream. Always include the company ticker as well as the exchange it trades on in the first paragraph. Additional tickers/exchanges may also be included.Highlights: Earnings releases contain a lot of information, and bullets help to organize that information in an easy-to-read manner. Quarterly and yearly highlights are best suited for this section and are a great lead-in to the bulk of the financial content that will follow.

Executive comments: Although certainly not required, C-level commentary is a helpful addition to any earnings release. If the company performed poorly, the CEO can show some accountability or announce a plan for improvement. Conversely, this is also an opportunity to highlight a company’s strong performance or announce improved guidance.

Financial tables: Financials are the meat and potatoes of the earnings release. Clients are not limited to a certain number of tables; however, most companies at minimum will include a Balance Sheet and Statement of Operations. Tables take the most time to process, so it helps to know the requirements of the newswire service. GlobeNewswire requires Xcel or Word tables, and cannot convert PDFs.

Click here for an example of a quarterly earnings press release.

The future of financial reporting

There has been recent discussion of alternative financial reporting options, the most newsworthy being the SEC’s April decision to allow public companies to use social media outlets to announce material information. However, despite the ever-changing media landscape, most companies still rely on press release issuance as the status quo for financial reporting.

[globenewswire]

Multimedia Photo Releases: Picture Perfect Pickup

By Joe Oberkrieser, editorial supervisor

Including a photo with your press release can really help your release pack a punch. Not only can a multimedia photo release help increase pickup, it can also lead to more eyeballs on your release. One simple JPEG can make a huge difference to your press release.

Photo Source: Wikipedia Commons

How can a photo help your release? Here’s a snapshot (pun intended): 

Increase pickup in print: Newspapers, magazines, trade pubs, etc. receive zillions of releases every day. Adding a photo to your release is one way to make your news stand out. As a former newspaper editor, I know that editors don’t have a lot of time to peruse each news item. They quickly click from one item to the next, as DEADLINE is looming. A photo can make an editor stop dead in his/her tracks, though. If the editor checks out the photo, then gives your release a more extensive look, congratulations – you stand out from the pack and your release is more likely to be picked up.

Increased visibility in print: Editors may or may not decide to publish your photo in their publication. You can’t force them. (Not through legal means, anyway.) But if they do, you’ve hit the jackpot. Readers’ eyes are drawn to photos first. Thus, if your photo is published, that’s a lot more eyeballs on your release.

Yahoo! Finance: Half of the readers who see your release online will see it on Yahoo! Finance. If you order Photo Plus, your photo will be embedded in your release on Yahoo! Finance. Even an English major like me can do the math on that one – your photo is shared with half of the people who read your release online.

Increased visibility on Google: When readers search for something on Google, most of their attention will be drawn to the results at and near the top. (Pardon the uber-obvious point.) However, when a photo is introduced, all of that changes. When “Googlers” see a photo, their eyes are drawn to that item first – not what’s at the top of the page. Therefore, you can get more eyeballs on your release if you include a photo.

We need to mention that there’s no guarantee Google will publish your photo alongside your headline in search results; sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. And unfortunately that’s not something that can be controlled. My informal research indicates about a 75 percent photo success rate on Google News, though, so the odds may be in your favor should you decide to include a photo.

If you’re interested in including a photo with your press release, here are a plethora of picture-perfect photo opportunities:

New products or services: OK, so some products don’t lend themselves to photos. (If you’re in the pharmaceutical industry, what would you take a picture of … a pill?) But GlobeNewswire publishes releases every day for clients across a broad spectrum of industries: from automotive to real estate to electronics. Many of these releases announce a new product that readers would love to see, not just read about.

Management changes: This is the easiest kind of release to include a photo for. If you’re announcing a new CEO or board member, it’s quick and simple to include a photo of the person the release is discussing. Just avoid those Christmas party photos.

Events: These usually make for the best photos. Whenever your release is about people doing something, it’s a great opportunity to take a photo and include it with your release. Anything from a CEO receiving an award at a gala to employees collecting food for a holiday food drive can lend itself to a picture-perfect moment. Here’s an example of a photo press release that not only talks about people in action, but shows them as well: http://www.irconnect.com/noc/press/pages/news_releases.html?d=10016391

[globenewswire]

Content Marketing PR - Why (Smart) SEO Still Works

We have all been told, in no uncertain terms, that search engine optimization is dead. But it would be more accurate to say that spamming and keyword-stuffing are dead. Content marketing PR is flourishing. Google is sophisticated enough, now, to identify cheaters who load their copy with marginally-related keywords; when you read an article and the prose feels stilted to you, it’s more than likely that it’s stilted for Google as well.

But if Google can identify the bad guys, it still needs help from the good guys to point it in the right direction. Content without any keywords, where search terms have been pushed aside in favor of metaphors and euphemisms, simply will not be understood by Google for the brilliant piece of writing that it surely is.

In fact, the smarter Google we have seen in recent years is reaching something of a convergence with reader habits and preferences. In other words, both Google and your readers need keywords and clear, direct prose to understand what it is they’re reading. The end goal is to help your target audience find you with the language they use when searching, thinking, and sharing.

SEO copywriting is still a useful tool in your content marketing strategy, but it exists in a more complex digital media space than in the early days of internet marketing, when search engines were the only portals for users to find relevant content. A content marketing strategy must, from its inception, balance the demands of the user with the optimization demands of the various portals through which that user can be converted into a core member of your audience (and client base!). From keyword research to relationship-building to incorporating audience feedback, online content marketing demands a holistic approach, strategies for which and examples of which we lay out in our new white paper on the GlobeNewswire main site. Download our Content Marketing White Paper pdf free of charge.

[globenewswire]

Press Release SEO is a Comprehensive Strategy, Not a Gimmick

By Sally Falkow

Press release SEO is frequently represented as an after-the-fact spit shining, irrelevant to the overall content and of small lasting value. But a PR professional’s SEO strategy for press releases not only increases the size of a message’s audience, but also shapes online public perception in important ways. Sprinkling keywords in your copy will not only confuse your human readers and obscure your message, but can set off red flags in sophisticated search engines like Google. Good press release SEO demands a meaningful content strategy that makes your news as accessible as possible to search engines, bloggers and reporters, and social media.

Good writing is key to the success of an online press release. Once your optimized press release has been found by a blogger, a reporter, or anybody else with a Twitter feed, you have only a few moments in which to convince them that your story is worth sharing with their readers or friends. Are you communicating the most important and interesting news first? Are you explaining why it is relevant to your reader? In the age of social media, it is also important to provide readers with visual media, such as photographs and videos, and to provide them with the means for easily sharing or embedding these on their own sites or newsfeeds.

The ability to write clear, timely, relevant content that is optimized for the search terms your target audience will be using is indispensable. Begin thinking about search terms not as boxes to check off during the editing stage of your release, but as a resource for market research. What is the public interested in that you have to offer? Perhaps your organization has a minor initiative whose accomplishments have gone unsung, because of an incorrectly perceived lack of public interest. Or perhaps there is a difference between the way that the public understands your organization’s area of work, and your own understanding. Good public relations allows organizations to bridge that gap; and in the online world much of that work is done through SEO.

Press release SEO has been updated for the social media age, but the old PR rules of relationship building and well-crafted messaging are as useful as they have ever been. Well-written press releases go hand-in-hand with search and social media optimization, and are a key part of any PR professional’s toolkit today.

Sally Falkow is an award-winning expert in digital PR and social media. You can read her further thought pieces at The Proactive Report.

[globenewswire]

Social Media IR - You're Already Doing It

The concept of a social media IR strategy holds both obvious appeal and obvious risk for investor relations. The potential upsides are the ease and rapidity with which they allow you to communicate your company’s value to a broad range of interested parties, and to participate in real time in conversations relevant to the public perception of that value. The downside risks are the rapidity with which a conversation can spin out of control, and the related issue of the broadening of the field of participants in your conversation. For any IR professional, then, the central concern in articulating an social media investor relations strategy is to peel these risks and rewards apart from one another, enough to figure out how to minimize the first while maximizing the second.

What makes these considerations considerably easier to act on is that, to the extent that your company and your team members have any social media profile, you are already doing social media IR. Let’s assume that you already have a policy regarding social media communications, given that employee tweets/posts/whatever can be considered company communications by the SEC (This Bloomberg Law piece does a great job with the intricacies of social media IR law). But however specific your prohibitions on certain types of communication, the broader lessons here are that your company already has a broad social media profile, your investors (actual and potential) are already paying close attention to that profile, and if you don’t take control of that profile it will take control of you.

There are great resources on the web for thinking about merging your traditional investor relations strategy with social media. A new industry of consultants is (predictably) springing up to walk you through the legal and communications dimensions. For those with a taste for envelope-pushing, radical ideas about social media IR are being developed by writers like Howard Lindzon. And earlier this year, we published a comprehensive white paper review of the field.

Social media certainly poses risks to any organization’s investor relations strategy. But this is true of any communications medium, and unfortunately you can only lose if you don’t play. The biggest lesson learned by communications strategists in the early days of online PR was that you are already being discussed online, whether you like it or not. The only thing that social media changes about this equation is that it speeds up the process by which narratives are shaped. Active social media participation in investor relations is indispensable to maintaining an accurate public perception of your company’s value today. Read our white paper to learn more about how you can productively integrate this new medium into your existing investor relations strategy.

[globenewswire]

Social Media Investor Relations: Old Lessons for a New Medium

Social media is defined by its speed, its bite-sized format, and its potential for cascade effects. These core attributes have changed the way we think about advertising, and have begun to open up new avenues for public relations. But the more specialized communications strategies of investor relations has until recently seemed a much poorer fit with social media; it is easier to imagine a “viral” investor relations campaign going terribly wrong, than it is to imagine it as a major success.

That said, It is becoming harder and harder to see how companies can communicate value to actual and potential shareholders, without engaging in social media. 67% of Americans use Facebook, and while usage drops off with age, the investing class is still represented in these media. Sites like Facebook and Twitter don’t work like traditional media channels, but a portion of your audience is on them all the time; social media is a game that you can lose by not playing.

Larger companies have started normalizing the use of social media for large announcements. The most common social media IR tactic is cross-platform earnings announcements, where Twitter and Facebook are marshalled to draw in the target audience and signify transparency to current shareholders. In 2011, Alcoa made its earnings announcements simultaneously on Twitter, Facebook, and its own website. Some companies have taken this perhaps a step too far: in 2010, Google chose to announce earnings only on social media and their own website.

The goal, of course, is to meet one’s legal obligations in communicating with relevant parties, while making the most of new communications media in order to reach as broad an audience as possible. In our new white paper on social media investor relations, we lay out strategies for managing information flow, specifics on the advantages and disadvantages of various platforms, and explain why social media is not a two-way street. You can download our social media IR white paper on our main site, where we unpack difficult questions for communications professionals in a changing media landscape.

[globenewswire]

How to Quantify Social Media Relationships

Katie Paine

Measuring What Matters

I have never been involved in a strategic planning process for which a quantitative measurement of outcomes was impossible. Today, we will talk about setting intelligent, measurable goals for your company’s social media strategy, and introduce two ways of approaching the question of measurement.

The measurability of social media outcomes has been driving some people to distraction. But you don’t need an expensive, enterprise-level solution to get most of the answers you’ll need to determine whether your project was a success. Google analytics and other free tools are fine for most projects, and they will give you good answers, as long as you are asking good questions.

So about those questions:

1. Ask broad questions about your organization’s long-term goals, but only accept specific answers.

What does it matter that people are “liking” your Facebook page, if you can’t articulate what it is they are supposed to like? For example, I was meeting with a manufacturing company recently and the first stated objective was to “drive customer engagement.” When I asked them to what end, they responded that they wanted “better relationships with prospects.” That’s important, but again I asked, “Why?” The response was that the people they had engaged with in social media bought product sooner and thus shortened the sales cycle. Voila! A bottom-line impact--and the key to measuring exactly what matters to the company’s business.

Starting with generalities is fine, as long as you keep digging to find firm foundations. And as it turns out, goals that matter be directly tied to ultimately quantifiable outcomes. Which leads us to ...

2. What would make suitable proxies for those goals?

Once you know what you’re trying to measure, you can start calibrating your yardsticks. For instance, in the example above, the sales team had shown that “engaged” social media users converted to consumers faster. We have decided to use engagement as a proxy for success. But now we have to be sure we’re appropriately measuring “engagement.”

Without getting into a philosophical debate about what “engagement” means (and it does mean something important), we can establish empirical connections between actions on social media, and ultimate sales. Get an intern to compile two lists: the names of customers who engaged with you on Facebook, and the names of Facebook users who took actions X, Y, and/or Z on Facebook (e.g., liking your page, sharing a post, etc.). You won’t be able to match these sets of names up with complete reliability, but the relative proportions of actions converting to sales will give you a notion of what actually constitutes sales-driving “engagement” for your business.

You’ll want to periodically recalibrate, of course, but once you know what kinds of social media relationships have been valuable in the past, you can use these as working proxies for success in interim performance reports.

Conclusion

In the past three posts (post #1, Post #2), I have described why relationships matter in social media, what they are, and how we should think about quantifying them. I hope the principles and examples laid out provide a good starting point for starting a discussion in your marketing department. Specifically, I want to enable PR and other marketing professionals, who have had to learn about social media the hard way over the last decade, to share their lessons and to communicate their new media mindset to their entire organizations.

These are some of the principles I lay out in Measure What Matters: Online Tools For Understanding Customers, Social Media, Engagement, and Key Relationships. To read more about bringing the art of relationship-building into the era of social media communications, consider reading my book or subscribing to my blog.

[globenewswire]

What is a Social Media Relationship?

By Katie Paine

One of the reasons people have a hard time thinking about relationships in social media is their apparent flatness. We all make jokes about “liking” someone’s wedding photos, or about having many “friends.” But what digital social networks lack in depth they make up for in raw numbers; and dissatisfied customers have never had to be close pals in order to cause corporations trouble. When customers can give instantaneous feedback and spontaneously form robust discussion groups, your relationship to them becomes more like that you have with your shareholders. Social media has made everyone into a stakeholder in a variety of personally-relevant discussions.

A relationship between a corporation and an individual, or a loosely-knit group, is defined by the issues that are important to both. On the most basic level, if lots of vocal customers have a problem with their experience of your product, you have a problem, too. But any existing organization will have more positive relationships than bad, and so we should speak about relationships more positively: on the consumer side, their relationship to you is defined by their emotional attachment to your brand. Social media allows people to see your brand in a personalized news channel, and to decide whether, on a personal level, your brand is something they want to identify themselves with.

In other words, relationships between organizations and individuals are the places where brand equity gets made; and social media greatly increases the number of opportunities for that relationship to flourish or turn sour. Your reputation is the aggregated outcome of all your relationships with your actual and potential customers. The difference between social media and traditional media is sociability: just as you can’t control a conversation at a cocktail party, your attempts to dominate a conversation in social media will be met with scorn and derision, and people will soon block such attempts. In order to effectively communicate in the social media world, you must speak in your audience’s language, and address their concerns as directly as possible.

A relationship in the social media world, then, has all the hallmarks of a relationship in the world of traditional media; it just happens faster and is less easy to control. But relationships are all about areas of mutual interest, even when we disagree about the relative desirability of different outcomes. Once you effectively communicate that you care about what your various stakeholders care about, these stakeholders will feel invested in your organization’s broader goals, and will become a reliable resource for feedback and directed action, whether that means signing a petition or buying a widget.

In my next post, I will talk about measuring relationships in social media: how do you test whether you are building connections with your online community?

[globenewswire]

Relationships are What Matters - Especially in Social Media

By Katie Paine

In the last decade, social media has fundamentally altered the ways that organizations relate to the general public, and not always for the best. Communication is unmediated: a consumer is just as likely to learn about a product on your website, or your Facebook page, or a friend’s Twitter feed, as from a New York Times story or advertisement. Deadlines are dead: there is no such thing as “early” or “on time” anymore, but only less late, because you are working on a time-frame collectively defined by millions of busy eyeballs in every timezone. Someone, somewhere, is talking about your organization right now (and if that isn’t true, you are in real trouble).

This reality has hit public relations professionals hardest, as they find their rolodexes rapidly outdated with the proliferation of new-media “influencers.” But PR is just a leading indicator of our changed media environment; every department in every organization will have to go through these growing pains, sooner or later. Because PR has been changed by social media, public relations professionals are in the perfect position to lead organizations’ efforts to adapt to the changed social media world.

Today, I’ll be publishing two more posts on what PR can teach to the rest of the marketing department. I’m going to kick this argument off today with some common-sense PR wisdom: relationships are what matters. With good relationships, prospects become customers become loyal advocates for your company. Your employees feel more committed to your organization’s success, and work harder and stick around longer. Relationships are what hold organizations together from within and without, and this has only become more true with the advent of social media.

You can refuse to hire, and you can even fire employees for what they’ve written on Twitter. But you can’t control what they say once you have fired them, and you certainly can’t fire a customer for complaining about your products online. Social media makes it impossible for organizations of any size to truly control a conversation. While you can’t be paranoid about criticism (treating every negative mention online like a three-alarm fire), you shouldn’t ignore your customers when they have something to say collectively; and the barriers to entry have been lowered for forming group identities. In the world of Facebook, Pinterest, and dedicated micro-news community outlets, market share can’t be bought. Instead, it has to be earned by building strong relationships based on trust with your customers.

In the next two posts, I will address how one goes about fostering these relationships, and turning them into profits as well as long-term earning potential. Next, we will address identification: What is a social media relationship, and do we know it when we see it? And in the third post, we will talk about quantification: How do we measure online relationships?

[globenewswire]

New Feature: Guest posts from digital PR thought leaders

In addition to providing copywriting tips, industry news, and GlobeNewswire product updates, this blog will be presenting an ongoing series of thought pieces, written by thought leaders in the digital PR space. These pieces will help you formulate new ways of looking at old problems in PR, and many innovative approaches to tackling the new problems presented by the web in general and social media in particular. Our guest writers will present useful frames for understanding the latest developments in investor relations, press releases, social media engagement, and content marketing.

Our first author in this series is Katie Paine, CEO of KDPaine and Partners. Katie is the co-author of two books, Measuring the Networked Nonprofit, Measuring Public Relationships: Using Data to Change the World, and the author of the recently-printed Measure What Matters: Online Tools for Understanding Customers, Social Media, Engagement, and Key Relationships. In the next three posts, Katie will cover how to measure progress in social media, and how the structure of audience-institution relationships have changed (and how they have not) in the social media era.

[globenewswire]

Social Media Engagement is an Activity, not an Artifact

Engagement is an extremely slippery term, and its recent usage, to pin down an essential dimension of user behavior in the slippery domain of social media, has been less than helpful. Definitions of the term quickly become circular, as we see in one firm’s recent advertising materials: “You have to inspire social media engagement. Strengthen your customer and community relationships by engaging more personally on behalf of your brands.” So what are we to do with this term of art, which Avinash Kaushik has called “an excuse not a metric”?

If engagement means anything more than “all that hard-to-quantify stuff on Facebook,” it has to be a bridging concept, built to connect intangibles, like relationships, with tangibles, like sales or email list opt-ins. Engagements, then, are structured encounters between brands and potential customers, in a context designed to focus the user’s attention and change his or her behavior (however incrementally).

Users encounter your brand in any number of media, but the interactivity of social media is a blessing and a curse in terms of your ability to control the terms of that encounter. Social media is notoriously bite-sized and impermanent (the average tweet’s half-life is 2.8 hours). However, it is also immediate, highly-structured by its user interfaces, and subject to runaway successes or outliers. The mastery of a particular social media channel (is Facebook embedding your graphics? Are your hashtags visually appealing as well as optimized?) is time-consuming, but because of its highly-structured interfaces, there are identifiable upper limits to your time investments, and it allows consumer and brand to meet in a highly-mediated space where each understands the terms of the encounter.

In our white paper on engagement in the social media space, we explore how to incorporate narrative structure into social media. Narrative is highly-compressible and adds a layer of actionable structure to the interactive platforms that social media sites force to you conform to. Read our Social Media Engagement white paper to learn about examples and principles for creating engaging content in this space.

[globenewswire]

About the GlobeNewswire Blog

Welcome to GlobeNewswire’s blog for public relations professionals. 

The industry leader thought-pieces and copywriting tips and tricks we provide on this blog will help you to navigate the challenges of integrating newer forms of social media with web-era news release distribution and content marketing strategies. This blog will catch you up and help to set you apart from your colleagues, with new but tried means for promoting your brand and its messaging in the digital media space.

Copywriting Advice from the GlobeNewswire Team

In a weekly column, we go back to copywriting basics to hone your press release-writing skills. From common grammatical mistakes to more structural questions about how to make your copy short, sweet, and medium-appropriate, we review the basics and point to how standards are and aren’t changing in our bite-sized social media world.

Guest Columns by Public Relations Innovators

On a regular basis, we invite thought leaders in the online PR space to share their developing ideas on press releases, social media engagement, content marketing, investor relations (IR) and more. Nearly all our guest columnists are published authors, and the insights they provide on our blog provide our readers with new framings for old marketing questions, as well as entirely new questions and ideas for making the most of our changing media environment.

GlobeNewswire Product Updates

Because the online PR landscape is still very much in flux, GlobeNewswire is constantly rolling out new functionality and product offerings to help you reach the greatest possible audience with the greatest possible precision. Watch this space for brief announcements on our latest updates, and links back to our major announcements.

[globenewswire]

Customers enjoy one team, superior service, a complete suite of products and expertise

“Accuracy, proactive reps, great care, price.”

In late 2012, we conducted our annual client satisfaction survey for NASDAQ OMX Corporate Solutions. For each product offering, we asked our existing client base of thousands of public and private companies the following question – “What do you like most about your relationship with NASDAQ OMX?” Here’s a taste of the responses from GlobeNewswire clients…

 “I like the responsiveness and timeliness of the customer service team at GlobeNewswire. I believe these are two characteristics that are essential in your business and you do a good job here.”

SERVICE

At NASDAQ, we support our technology platforms with world-class customer service. From enterprise to small business to professional organizations and agencies, today’s PR pros rely on us to ensure their most critical market-moving news reaches the right people at the right time. We make sure our dedicated professionals are responsive, reliable and consistently servicing our clients’ needs – and, for our clients, having a dedicated customer relationship management team at your fingertips seems to be invaluable.

“The outstanding professionalism of your editorial team.”

EXPERTISE

The context and accuracy of your release counts when you want to maximize the impact and reach of your message. Our editorial team, available 24-hours, 7 days a week, has the combined industry and professional experience that allow us to position your news to resonate with your audience. GlobeNewswire brings experts to the table who equip you with industry best when showcasing your brand.

We distribute your news throughout 80 countries in 23 languages or target hyper local markets with defined geographic regions, selected topics of interest or specific media types including CNBC, The Street and The New York Times.

GlobeNewswire makes it simple for thousands of companies in the US and Europe to comply with regulations while still maintaining open and transparent communication by delivering messages directly to the disclosure media as described by the SEC and Regulation Fair Disclosure.

“They don't try to sell me products and services that I don't need.”

“I have great confidence in the NASDAQ team and their response time to our requests is quite remarkable.”

CHOICE

Self-publishing, full-service publishing, sentiment analysis, media monitoring, award-winning newsrooms, contact management, custom IR websites… needless to say, NASDAQ OMX gives you the power of choice. Our Communications Suite which includes GlobeNewswire, Media Intelligence, Media Manager and Newsroom brings the communications lifecycle full circle -- with one team, one account representative, all under one roof. For PR and IR pros, you have the choice to decide which products are best for you, but it just so happens that we might have everything you need!

COMING SOON… GLOBENEWSWIRE REPORTING

We look forward to introducing our new GlobeNewswire Reporting – a new reporting tool that includes placement data, ability to build your audience, specific distribution metrics, at-a-glance view count, social media reporting, live twitter stream, user engagement, link performance and the ability to produce custom reports.

Visit our website to see how GlobeNewswire can help you thrive in a media driven world.

[globenewswire]

Comms round-up: corporate reputations, social media mistakes, and the value of video

Harris Interactive has this week published its 14th annual Reputation Quotient® survey, highlighting the level to which the most visible companies in the US are trusted by consumers. Six dimensions are analyzed, vision and leadership, social responsibility, emotional appeal, products and services, workplace environment, and financial performance, to give an overall reputation score. The top three scoring companies this year are Amazon, Apple, and the Walt Disney Company, with the top three sectors as technology, travel and tourism, and retail.   PR Daily has written about how to be successful in PR, suggesting firstly to be curious and read a lot, as “the more you read—and the more you read a lot of different things—the better writer you become.” Other tips include writing more, as “content is taking over the world”, and networking and getting involved. Social Media Explorer has asked 10 social media strategists what they see as the biggest mistakes to avoid making. From the beginning, not having a social media plan or a content strategy in place are highlighted, as well as not fully realizing the hard work involved. Other things to avoid are not investing in ‘owned assets’ (channels and media belonging to a company itself, such as a blog, or photos and videos), using social media as a broadcasting, rather than conversation channel, and ‘forgetting the human element’. To avoid drowning in data, and using expensive mixed media modeling, Mashable has published its ‘five dead simple ways to track social media ROI’. Top tips include using coupons on Facebook so companies can track their origin with accuracy, conversion measurement to track the behaviour of users who click on your ad, and using Google Analytics to track where your traffic is coming from. MarketingProfs has written about the value of online video in 2013, stressing that “online retailers to major news outlets have seen the light” and even the New York Times has appointed a managing editor just for video. The article highlights the SEO benefits of using video, the advantages of videos on small mobile devices, and that people trust user-generated videos by other customers more than from companies themselves.   The power of video is evidenced in YouTube’s eighth birthday yesterday. The site has come a long way in eight years, and now over a decade’s worth of content is uploaded every day, and, after Google, YouTube is now the world’s number two search engine.  

[globenewswire]

Comms round-up: Oreo Super Bowl, social media strategies, and CMOs in 2013.

In spite of the huge amounts spent on Super Bowl advertising, Oreo took the limelight this week with its fast (and free) ‘dunk in the dark’ ad published on Twitter and Facebook during the black-out, which very quickly went viral. The agency behind the ad explained they had a ‘mission control’ center set up at their office, with the whole team in place, ready to act and have approvals on content within minutes, creating ‘magic’. PR Week UK has analyzed the FTSE 100 from a social media perspective to see which companies manage their reputation best. Since last year’s study, there has been a 50% increase in corporate blogs, a 36% increase in YouTube channels and a 27% increase in companies with pages on Facebook. The top three performing FTSE 100 companies were Burberry, Unilever, and Marks and Spencer, and you can view the full results here. Media Week has declared unfocused social media strategies a waste of money - social media is not one-size-fits-all, and not all brands need to be on all social networks. The author recommends Twitter for companies with customer service elements, Pinterest for retail brands, Facebook for FMCG and food and drink brands, and Instagram for ‘visual’ brands like airlines and travel operators. Brands need to decide which combination works best from a strategic and resourcing perspective, and if there’s no content strategy in place, they should think about cutting back. Forbes has written about how CMOs can stay relevant in 2013, stressing that today’s marketing initiatives must be ‘data-driven, customer-centric and omnichannel’. The full study (‘Outside looking in - The CMO struggles to get in sync with the C-suite’) from the Economist Intelligence Unit can be downloaded here, with Forbes stressing the importance of data, IT, and technology for CMOs. Finally, Social Media Examiner has written about its ‘7 tips for making your [company] blog a content marketing magnet’. Advice includes preparing an editorial calendar reflecting internal and external events, optimizing the content for effectiveness (to be on brand, to facilitate consumption, and for SEO), and, as ever, tracking the results of your content marketing around planned metrics.