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.

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.

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.

DWPubHub brings PR networking evening to Birmingham

Following the success of the first DWPubHub networking event in Leeds last month, we've revealed the next one will be in Birmingham on 13 May.

We got some tremendous feedback last time from agency and in-house public relations people - they liked the informal nature of the event. No presentations, no selling - just drinks, canapes and the chance to chat with other PR professionals. At the last event somebody asked me why we do it. It's just our chance to reach out and meet the substantial and influential PR community outside of London. Check out the Twitter stream.

Check out the DWPubHub page for full details or go straight to the registration form.

DWPub and Twitter

We've been mucking about on Twitter for quite a while, I've been on it personally since June 2007 (pretty quiet in the early days though) and we have a number of product-specific feeds.

Anyway, the reason for this post is to introduce @dwpub.

While I often tweet about what's going on at Daryl Willcox Publishing (DWPub) I don't do a comprehensive job of it. Most of our other company feeds are 'automatic', which are fine but a bit off-putting if the information in the feed is not of interest all of the time. So welcome @dwpub, the human voice of DWPub.

For reference, here's a full list of all our Twitter feeds. You can view and follow easily using the TweepML DWPub-people-and-feeds page:

@darylwillcox - that's me
@dwpub - the (human) voice of DWPub
@DWPubVanessa - Vanessa oversees communications with the journalist community
@DWPub_France - human updates of what we're doing in the French market
@journalert - feed of media news for journalists
@responsesource - feed of journalist enquiries (beta)
@releasewire - feed of press releases from our wires
@mediabulletin - feed of news for PR professionals
@featuresexec - feed of latest updated media forward features

@sourcethatjob - feed of media job ads from our sister site

To help people find journalists on Twitter, our FeaturesExec media database includes both journalist and media outlet Twitter IDs and our Freelance Journalist Directory includes Twitter IDs (and links to journalists' other social media profiles). On FeaturesExec we also have a special Twitter Index which allows you to quickly find media outlets and journalists on Twitter and see how many followers they have.

Leeds proves great venue for first DWPubHub PR networking event

Last week's inaugural DWPubHub public relations networking event was a great success, so much so that we kept the event going an extra hour and a half.

Sandrine Powell from Ptarmigan Bell Pottinger won the business card draw and took home a lovely Flip Video UltraHD video camera. There were some suggestions she'd attempted to influence her odds of winning but I just call it initiative!

It was great to chat to a wide range of media people at the event, including PR agency people, in-house PR professionals, PR academics and masters students. Many thanks to all who came, and hat's off to the Hatch Communications crew who hit the town afterwards and still managed to be at their desks the next morning.

Here are the tweets about DWPubHub.

The next event will be in Birmingam in mid-May.

DWPubHub - the informal networking series for PR professionals

We've launched our new series of networking events for public relations professionals - the DWPubHub.

The first event will be in Leeds on 18 March 2010 and all local PR professionals and marketing people with an interest in PR are invited.

We used to run short seminars in London some years ago, but our business is very much a national one (well, international in fact) so we felt simple networking events around the country would be a better way for us to meet and greet the PR community.

So, if you're based in or around Leeds on the 18th or happen to be in the area, come along between 6pm and 9pm at the Malmaison Hotel - please register first though so we get a good idea of numbers. Drinks and canapes will be provided. No presentations, no selling. Just a chance to talk to others in the industry. But we will be on hand to answer any questions you have about what we do at DWPub, if that takes your fancy.

Why Leeds? Well, we have strong links with the PR degree course at Leeds Metropolitan University and Leeds is an important centre for digital marketing too, so it seemed a good place to kick off the DWPubHub.

If you'd like a DWPubHub event in your area, let me know.

The Jackenhacks - the fallout

Last's week's Jackenhacks event, a light-hearted networking evening for technology PR professionals, was yet another cheeky success.

Some may have made comments about the limited capacity at the venue (a symptom of the success of the event really) and the poor sound system (always tricky in venues normally geared for music only), but that misses the point a bit - it's a bit of informal fun and being rough around the edges is all part of it.

During the evening I discovered that some people had taken my last post rather literally. It was, of course, a spoof. I suspect everyone who read to the final paragraph would have realised as much. But as I know from my journalism days, people don't often read all the way to the end of a story! It was good for the blog though - most hits I've ever had in a day. Comedy can be very effective in social media - but you have to get the tone right.

On the subject of tone, you may or may not find the video below by Andrew Smith from escherman of a suitable tone for office or familiy viewing, but it shows what can be done with a very cheap pocket video camera and some quick editing. (By the way, I don't know who that Tim Hoang is talking to.)

Clarification on DWPub and the 'Jackenhacks'

It has come to my attention that the organisers of a dubious event have been using the Daryl Willcox Publishing name in some sort of attempt to gain credibility.

The 'Jackenhacks' event for the technology PR community, occuring this Wednesday in an insalubrious part of London, has been giving the impression that Daryl Willcox Publishing is an official sponsor.

I'd like to place it on record that Daryl Willcox Publishing has no connections whatsoever with the Jackenhacks and wouldn't for one minute consider tarnishing our brand by association with such a clearly tasteless event. I am considering our next steps with the assistance of a firm of well-known libel lawyers.

I've been here before, only last year we were hoodwinked into sponsoring something called the 'Flackenhacks' which seemed to have the gloss of a professionally run networking event but turned out to be a wilful abandon of booze and cheap jokes, not to mention the rubbish PA system.

Anyway, quite how the very respectable Mr Waddington and Mr Earl from Speed Communications got mixed up with this latest 'Jackenhacks' malarkey is beyond me, though they suggest their involvement was an attempt at protection - which of course backfired.

If you take the questionable decision to attend this shady event and by chance notice my presence then I just want to make it clear my attendance will be purely for research purposes and does not imply any kind of endorsement.

Do our branding survey - and win prizes!

I've put together a very quick - just three questions - survey about DWPub's branding, partly as an experiment in surveying our community and partly as a genuine examination of our brand recognition.
Anyway, having just mentioned it on my Twitter feed (@darylwillcox) we've already had quite a few people complete it and initial results are fascinating.
So, if you've not done so already, please take our branding survey before it closes on 25 September. If you give your email address at the end you'll be in for a chance to win a case of wine and I'm adding two runners-up prizes worth £19.99 each of the new revised edition of Online Public Relations by David Phillips and Philip Young, supplied by our sister site The Media Bookshop.
I'll share the results here after the survey closes, at least the stuff I think would be interesting to our community.