DWPub Sporadic

Finding media contacts quickly

 

Our approach to product development with our FeaturesExec Media Database is one of incremental enhancement, we try to avoid 'big bang' revisions, instead we focus on smaller steps based on customer feedback.

This is the approach taken by big social media sites and I think it suits FeaturesExec too.

I'm particularly pleased with a recent development of the general search on FeaturesExec, which in itself is not a huge change but represents a big step forward in ease of access to the editorial contacts and forward features information in FeaturesExec.

You'll find searching is faster and the results presented cover individual staff journalists, freelance journalists, media outlets and forward features in an easy to absorb summary. You can then select the specific information you need.

This makes FeaturesExec useful as a 'quick reaction' tool, allowing you to look up a journalist or media outlet within seconds. We've tweaked the advanced search in a similar way so results are presented in a consistent way.

Predicting future media themes

Our Response Source Journalist Enquiries System is great for helping journalists and PR professionals connect. It's also a barometer of what's coming up in the media.

We've just started a new section in our DWPub JournAlert newsletter for journalists (the section will also appear soon in our FeaturesExec Media Bulletin newsletter for PR professionals) called Response Source Zeitgeist where we will reveal the most common phrases included in recent Response Source requests.

This is what we found when we dipped into the data last Friday:

It may be July, but while the media remains interested in camping, beaches, holidays and hotels, a surprising number have been asking about Christmas and winter already. Perennial favourites like fashion, food, drink and beauty have a strong showing, while in the B2B sector, marketing, government and outsourcing are hot topics. A number of requests, both business and consumer, concerned social media, with Twitter and Facebook inevitably heading the list. For business and trade journalists, top keywords this week included skills, technology, design, advertising, building and management, and the consumer press sought answers about homes, kids, music, hair and gadgets.

We'll be running the Response Source Zeitgeist regularly, it will be interesting to see what themes crop up.

PR and search - so close, yet so far?

There was an enthusiastic exchange at yesterday's gathering of PR, search and social media professionals at the CIPR, one of the Social Summer series of discussions set up by grass-roots CIPR members.

I won't attempt a full summary - Speed Communications' Stephen Waddington has already done that, but I will share some of the stuff I put forward at the event.

Prior to the gathering we investigated what proportion of press releases on our Response Source/SourceWire Press Release Wire come from search marketing agencies rather than PR. Looking at all releases through our system in June this year, this figure turns out to be 20 per cent. That's a significant minority, and roughly double what it was in 2007 when I wrote my whitepaper warning that search would encroach on PR activity.

When you take this figure in the context of the press release embedded links statistics I shared a few weeks ago, which found that 67 per cent of releases on our wire include embedded links, then you can extrapolate that 47 per cent of releases originating from a PR source include embedded links. This is assuming that all releases from an SEO source include links, which is reasonable.

Of course, as Will McInnes from social media marketing agency Nixon McInnes quite rightly pointed out, understanding search is a lot more than just including links in press releases, but it is an interesting barometer of SEO knowledge within the PR industry. If less than half of the PR world understands something as basic as including links in press releases than that does seem dissapointing.

One issue that cropped up during the discussion is internal client strutures and how this could be a factor in the lack of integration of PR and search. In many companies, PR is handled by a PR or communications manager and search is handled by a marketing function. The former looks after brand repuation and the other is responsible for driving sales leads. Many agree that when PR and search work together the results are very powerful, but does this need change in internal client structures for this collaboration to happen effectively?

I think it was we are social's managing director Robin Grant made the point that small to medium businesses (SMEs) are perhaps more likely to get understand the benefits of PR and search working in tandem, as the client structure in these businesses is often a single person - the marketing manager. So perhaps it will be SME sector where the innovation comes from.

PR vs search - the story continues

I'm pleased to have been invited to take part in a discussion this evening (1 July 2010) at the CIPR on whether or not PR has allowed itself to lose ground to search marketing. The event is part of the CIPR Social Summer series.

This is a topic very close to my heart as it is the crux of a whitepaper I wrote in April 2007 warning just that - that PR risked being sidelined by an increasingly imaginative search engine optimisation (SEO - now generally known as search marketing) industry. The radical predictions in that whitepaper appear to have come true, at least in part.

In my talk this evening I will reveal what proportion of press releases on our Response Source/SourceWire Press Release Wire come from search marketing agencies rather than PR, a barometer of how much search marketing has crossed over into the PR role. I will also present the press release embedded links stats I blogged about recently.

There is also another reason why I am pleased to be going up to the CIPR - it seems that at last this very important organisation is embracing the revolutionary impact of digital media on PR. Something, as a CIPR member myself, I have been advocating since 2006.

Media news for everyone

Our media news service, the FeaturesExec Media Bulletin, is now available to all.

Previously, only subscribers to our FeaturesExec Media Database and Response Source Journalist Enquiries System have been able to view the news on FeaturesExec and receive our twice-weekly email updates.

We decided the FeaturesExec Media Bulletin would be a great thing to share with the world and is a great shop-window for our media database. So here it is - enjoy.

We cover media launches, closures, redesigns, editorial staff moves and other significant media events. It's great for keeping on top of what's happening across all media - newspapers, magazines, online and broadcast.

If you want to get the twice-weekly email updates just sign up here.

Revealing the trend for links in press releases - is it enough?

Following on from comments made by US-based technology and media commentator Tom Foremski, we've taken a look at the proportion of press releases on our wire that include embedded links.

Tom argues that including useful links in releases helps journalists do their job. He recently highlighted research by BusinessWire that showed only 13.5 per cent of releases on their wire include links.

BusinessWire's research does not indicate whether they were counting just 'raw' links - which could include the homepage web address of the client or PR agency at the end of the release, or just embedded links - text in the body of a release that links to a relevant page - or both. Either way the figure seemed very low so I decided to look at our own Response Source/SourceWire Press Release Wire.

We found that in May 2010 89 per cent of releases on the Response Source/SourceWire Press Release Wire included links of any kind. However, I think the best measure is embedded links, as it is these links that are likely to be of most use to a journalist (and of course help to drive traffic for the release submitter).

In May 2010 67 per cent of releases on our wire included embedded links. That shows an increase over previous years, up from 40 per cent in 2007.

What do these figures tell us? Well, to be honest I think 100 per cent of releases should include embedded links and I'm a little surprised the growth from 2007 isn't steeper. Including embedded links not only helps journalists but helps drive traffic. The latter alone is enough for many clued-up companies to insist all their releases are distributed online with embedded links so surely everyone should be doing it.

Small business public relations resource launched

I've said before that the evolution of digital and social media is giving smaller businesses a great opportunity to market themselves effectively on relatively small budgets.

But it's challenging for small businesses to access the skills and experience required to execute online PR campaigns without the expense of using agencies. From writing press releases and distributing them online to understanding social media there is a lot for owner managers and marketing managers of small businesses to get their heads around.

So we're doing our bit and have put together a small business marketing resource. This provides links to relevant whitepapers, surveys, case studies and a brand-new podcast series. (See the press release.)

The first podcast, 'Marketing on a Shoestring - an Introduction', features my thoughts on how small businesses can make a start in raising their brand awareness and generating leads, primarily through digital marketing.

To PR agencies out there who percieve this as encouraging SMEs to do their own PR as an alternative to using an agency, I would say this: encouraging SMEs to experiment with PR is a good thing for the agency world as many SMEs who grow will inevitably see the hiring of an agency as a logical next step, and have a better understanding of what to expect from the relationship.

Online PR test for PR agency bosses

This was inspired by a Twitter conversation I had with Andrew Smith from escherman and Steve Earl from Speed Communications and relates to warnings I made in an online PR whitepaper over three years ago that still appear to be relevant.

True to his usual style of taking a scientific perspective to online PR Andrew Smith found that 63 per cent of PR agencies in PRWeek's top 150 listing do not have the term 'PR' in their website homepage title, and 85 per cent do not have the term 'public relations' there.

Now, page titles are quite important - one of the many little things you need to get  right to ensure your website can be found when people are searching. Many of the top 150 PR agencies tout their digital or online PR credentials, so they ought to be getting little things right like relevant keywords in their own homepage title tag. Thus my response on Twitter: "The gulf between PR and search is still wide - some PRs saying 'we do digital' but actually lack basic SEO knowledge."

Steve Earl responded by suggesting PRWeek should do a 'short test in digital for agency MDs'. What a great idea, I thought. There is clearly more to online PR than this, but here's a go at ten questions every digital-savvy PR agency boss should be able to answer in the right way:

1. Can you describe to a client the full benefits of an inbound link to their website?

2. Are you familiar with Google Page Rank and its use as a rough measure of a site's influence?

3. Do you have access to your clients' website analytics?

4. Are you aware of which of your clients have search marketing (SEO) agencies?

5. Of your clients that have search marketing agencies, do you have direct lines of communication with any of those agencies?

6. Can you be certain your team have set up at least basic online monitoring for all of your clients?

7. Do you have a separate team handling online PR or is it deliverable by everyone in your organisation?

8. Are you able to explain to a client the advantages of online coverage by a 'small' but influential blogger over that of traditional media coverage?

9. Are you personally active on social media, including your own blog?

10. Are you worried your team are wasting time on Twitter or are you proud of their online networking prowess?

How did you score?

Boosting SEO for PR agencies

We've launched our new PR directory, enabling PR agencies to boost their profile and help drive traffic to their own sites.

The PR directory appears on both the Response Source and SourceWire websites. Both sites have been around for over 12 years and are scanned regularly by all the major search engines. This means that entries in the PR directory appear in search results and are effective for search engine optimisation (SEO).

By taking a Listing or Branded Listing on our PR directory this will not only help raise your agency's profile, but it also helps bring your own website higher up search engine results. This is because your entry will include an 'inbound link' to your site which search engines interpret as a kind of endorsement of your site.

A Listing includes:
Screenshot of your website
Link to your site
Company name and address
Contact name and email
Short free text summary

A Branded Listing includes the above plus:
Company logo (or screenshot of your site)
Unlimited text to position your company
Links to recent press releases
Optional: your client logos and brands
Optional: embedded content, for example YouTube videos, images or a SlideShare presentation.

Listings cost £70 a year and Branded Listings £250, plus VAT. Or click here for more info on our PR directory.

The value of inbound links and quality content and how this relates to SEO and PR is something I covered in my whitepaper 'PR vs Search'. Working on ways to boost the SEO of your own site is a great way to examine the close relationship between PR and SEO and gives useful insights that can be used to benefit client campaigns.

Why we went daily with the DWPub JournAlert

Since 2006 we've been sending an email newsletter to journalists called the DWPub JournAlert. It proved popular and in 2009 it even got its own website.

Initially the JournAlert was weekly, then it became twice-weekly and today we've upped it to daily.

Why did we do this? For a while we've been getting requests from journalists to increase the frequency as sending it just twice a week meant the emails were very long and difficult to read. It also meant some people who submitted items of media news did not see their stories go out straight away. For example, if we heard about a new launch on Friday afternoon we could not put it in the JournAlert email until the following Wednesday.

So, we went ahead and made it daily, and at the same time went for a complete redesign of the emails to make them easier to read and navigate. The amount of content per week is pretty much the same, we've just broken it up into smaller chunks. And we're now able to be more responsive to breaking news.

The response so far has been good, with lots of people commenting positively on the new design. But of course it hasn't worked for everyone - someone quite rightly asked: "Why would journalists want *more* emails?"

We're looking into doing a weekly digest as an alternative to the daily emails. And nothing is ever set in stone, so if the daily emails really don't work out for most people then we'll reduce the frequency.

There are already two alternatives to the email version of the JournAlert which will give you most of the content that appears in the emails. For the increasing number of people who, like myself, use Twitter regularly then you can follow @journalert. And there is a JournAlert RSS feed if you like to get your news in an RSS reader.

Whichever your preference, we love to hear your thoughts so please comment on this post if you feel the daily JournAlert emails are too much. I'd also love to know if a weekly digest would be as good as the old twice-weekly emails. Let me know!