Insights for Leaders Navigating
Visibility, Credibility, and Growth.
From media strategy to reputation management, we explore the trends shaping public perception and share the approaches that drive measurable results for growing brands.
As online consumers spend more time online, content marketing is playing a more prominent role in the marketer’s tool box. According to some, content marketing is displacing other more traditional forms of marketing including search engine marketing and traditional advertising. So how do you go about creating content?
Recently, I came across an infographic which provides a very basic summary of the dos and don’ts of content marketing. According to the infographic, the four pillars of content marketing are: press releases, blogs, infographics and guest posts. While the infographic is a nice primer, noticeably missing was video and other forms of multimedia content, which, as we’re all aware, are huge drivers for raising awareness and increasing engagement with consumers.
Each of the four pillars mentioned in the infographic (plus multimedia) are deserving of their own how-to posts, but I thought I’d pass along a few additional tips for press releases to augment those mentioned in the infographic:
- Do think creatively and critically about the “news” you’ll be announcing.
- Do consider online press release distribution services for announcements that may not warrant the cost or breadth of distribution of a traditional wire service.
- Do keep in mind that the ideal length for a headline is 90-120 characters.
- Do incorporate keywords into your release, and ideally include your most important keyword at the beginning of a headline.
- Don’t use hyperbole.
Here at Communiqué PR, we’re always on the lookout for tools that make our work more efficient. Recently, we’ve been using one extra handy tool that we thought worth passing along—analytics provider Alexa.com.
Alexa.com offers free website analytics, including traffic data, national rankings, global rankings and more. These rankings give an idea of how a particular website compares to others. Although geared mainly to website owners looking to gauge their site’s popularity, Alexa also has value for PR professionals seeking more information about an online outlet.
Alexa’s service isn’t strictly about measuring statistics—it doesn’t offer a concrete number of monthly visitors, for example—but its rankings are still an excellent means for evaluating an online publication. Alexa allows you to understand which sites are more (or less) popular or engaging, and how a website’s audience compares with audiences at other publications. This material can help inform your messaging and outreach as you work to successfully reach an online outlet’s audience with a client’s story.
Specifically, in our practice we’ve found the following areas of Alexa’s analysis most helpful for PR purposes:
Website Popularity. Alexa combines the number of average daily visitors and number of daily page views of a site to estimate both global rank and U.S. rank, therefore allowing PR professionals to see how an online outlet matches up to its peers. Alexa also displays historical traffic trends that allow you to evaluate a site’s longevity or popularity stability. These longer-term trends include traffic rank, page views per user, the estimated percentage of global Internet users who visit the site and the estimated percentage of global page views on the site, among others.
Consumer Engagement. How influential is a website to users? How meaningful are consumers’ visits to the site? Alexa offers statistics about the daily page views of a site per visitor, daily time spent on the site per user and the bounce rate—the percentage of visits to the site that consist of a single page view. Ideally, the bounce rate will be relatively low and the daily page views and time spent relatively high—if you’re seeing otherwise, you’ll know that an outlet’s content is not effectively engaging viewers.
Audience Demographics. As a PR professional, understanding an outlet’s audience is crucial to creating relevant, compelling content. Alexa offers a breakdown of estimated audience demographics that reveal how similar a site’s audience is to the general Internet population. Statistics offered include age, education level, gender, children (yes or no), geographic location (country of origin) and browsing location (home, school or work). These stats will collectively help paint a picture of the typical viewer, and will therefore help you strategize how to create a message that resonates with an outlet’s audience.
As you may have deduced, one of the ways Alexa is most useful overall is for comparison: assessing how an online outlet matches up to others. In short, the best way to use Alexa is to combine all of the gathered information to determine which outlets are most relevant to clients’ interests, and therefore worth targeting. Once you’ve decided who to pitch, Alexa also helps you strategize how to pitch. Its statistics make it easy to assess an outlet in terms of multiple characteristics. As you craft content, consider using these insights to your advantage.
Have you used Alexa? What information do you find most helpful from the website? Let us know!
Every so often, I get the urge to create a product and have even approached my husband with a variety of ideas. Inevitably, we discuss them for a couple of days and then fail to take any further action. Given my tendency, I was intrigued when I learned that Smartsheet was sponsoring a Startup Weekend at its offices in Bellevue.
For those of you who are not familiar with Startup Weekend, let me explain. Startup Weekend is a nonprofit organization and global grassroots movement with a goal to empower entrepreneurs and help people be better prepared to create startup companies.
Smartsheet decided to host the first ever Startup Weekend in Bellevue because of its commitment to supporting the growing startup community and invited me to come by to see the event in action, which proved to be very inspiring.
The giant game of rock paper scissors.
After a fun icebreaker with everyone in the auditorium playing the giant hand game of rock-paper-scissors, John Creason, chief technology officer and co-founder of Smartsheet, kicked off the evening by sharing thoughts about entrepreneurship.
John’s point of view is that an entrepreneur’s success does not always revolve around skills; more often, success requires the right mindset. Often the entrepreneur who succeeds is the person willing to take risks to get results. Most importantly, successful entrepreneurs know what to do with an idea.
The concept of knowing what to do with an idea struck a chord with me. Clearly, having a good idea is important when forming a startup. However, an idea alone is not enough – one must have a sense of how to take action.
This is where an event like Startup Weekend can help, because individuals get to pitch and receive feedback on their startup ideas. This feedback can often motivate and inspire action, and enables entrepreneurs to bounce ideas off other attendees as well as coaches (e.g., experienced entrepreneurs, industry experts, investors or attorneys). Attendees vote on the ideas and form teams around the most viable ones. Then, everyone goes to work on things like creating business models, coding, research to validate ideas and product planning. On Sunday night, the teams make their final presentations and the judges select winners.
Consider Julian Hurst’s experience at Startup Weekend. Julian had been mulling over an idea for creating a new type of storage business. His vision is to match people looking to store their physical belongings with people who have extra space in their homes or businesses. Specifically, he wanted to create an online marketplace for people to find or list storage at the prices they deemed appropriate. It would provide an easy way for people to monetize their extra space and give those in need of storage a new less-expensive option than corporate storage (e.g., Public Storage).
As an attorney with no experience developing a product or company, Julian was encouraged to participate in Startup Weekend to validate the idea and get help figuring out next steps. He signed up for the event not sure of what to expect.
Working late into the night at Smartsheet during Startup Weekend.
When Julian pitched his idea to the approximately 80 people in the audience, it received the most votes. This led to the formation of his team, which was highly motivated and productive. In the course of the weekend, the team did market research by conducting more than 40 man-on-the-street interviews in three different neighborhoods. Julian came up with a brand positioning and a name – Squirl Storage. The team also developed part of a working website, secured a real paying customer and connected him to someone willing to share space.
On Sunday evening after Julian made his final presentation, the judges voted and Squirl Storage won the competition. Julian’s experience was highly rewarding and he is grateful to Smartsheet for stepping up to sponsor the event. “If they had not hosted the event,” explained Julian, “I would not have been able to validate my idea or demonstrate proof of concept. My teammates suggested we do the market research and were instrumental in the process of securing a customer. The coaches were also really valuable in the process as many of them are experienced entrepreneurs.”
I found Julian’s experience exciting and motivating. It also demonstrates the importance of these events in helping people know what to do with a good idea. So the next time you have an idea for a new product or service, don’t just think about it. Take action. If you’re not sure how exactly to do so, sign up for a Startup Weekend to learn from others in your community. Maybe one of these days, I’ll follow Friday’s innovators and do it too!
With shrinking editorial rosters at publications across the country and an explosion of online publications eager to populate their sites with relevant content, an old-school PR tool stands at the ready to help fill the gap – the classic mat release (also known as a matte release.)
About Mat Releases
A mat release is a consumer-oriented feature story that is written and produced in camera-ready format, including art, and then distributed to publications across the country by a vendor, such as North American Precis Syndicate (NAPS). Publications that are looking for content to fill empty column inches can search the NAPS database of articles, make a selection, then drop the camera-ready features into their layout and run them as-is with no need for editing or formatting.
A mat release can be a good use of PR dollars for any company that has a story to tell with broad consumer appeal and reasonably evergreen content. The company maintains ultimate control over the content, so key messages will always shine through. Tips, advice and seasonal stories are good examples of content styles that work well for this format.
Jennifer Gehrt, founding partner of Communiqué Public Relations, has used mat releases with great success over the years for various clients. “When I worked with Waggener Edstrom on the MasterCard account team, we developed and distributed two very successful mat releases,” said Gehrt. “The first mat release aimed to educate consumers about the benefits of paying bills online while the second story focused on motivating people to use debit cards. Our campaign results were impressive, with the placement of hundreds of articles in more than 24 different states.”
More recently the Communiqué PR team developed a mat release about a new online shopping guide for NASCAR fans. This release generated 204 newspaper articles in 15 different states with a readership of more than 8 million.
Guaranteed Exposure
NAPS, which formed a partnership with Business Wire in 2009, distributes its mat releases to 10,000 newspapers across the country, including 1,600 daily newspapers and 8,400 weekly and community newspapers, according to its website. The combined circulation of its potential reach is more than 200 million.
A typical mat release distributed by NAPS will result in 100-400 print placements and 400-plus online placements, according to the NAPS website. NAPS provides a detailed, graphical report following the distribution of each mat release as well as a clipping service, so companies will have tangible evidence of the ultimate reach achieved for their investment.
NAPS can also provide similar services for companies interested in reaching target audiences through radio and TV.
The Process
NAPS provides free writing services to turn a company’s story into a ready-to-run feature, following specific style and formatting guidelines that have proven successful. The company simply needs to supply raw information (a press release, fact sheet, web page, etc.) and NAPS will come up with a recommendation for a feature story. The company maintains control of the content, providing direction and edits until they are satisfied with the end result.
So if reaching a broad consumer audience is one of your PR goals, think about whether a mat release would be a good tool for telling your story. For the dollars invested, the pay-off is guaranteed. And everyone is happy when money has been well spent.
We’ve seen a lot of change in the field of media in the last few years. Traditional print publications have reduced circulation, blogs have boomed in popularity, and social media engagement has become a metric by which to measure popularity for publications.
Journalists and PR professionals alike have found themselves in uncharted territory. While PR professionals now have a wide array of publications to pitch, easily contactable via email, this same phenomenon can be troubling for journalists, who are now inundated with irrelevant pitches.
HARO (Help A Reporter Out) and other similar services have addressed this growing relationship by providing platforms through which PR representatives can better find pitch targets and journalists can more effectively request sources. As this kind of service continues to evolve, we’ve been particularly impressed in recent months by Jeff Vance, a freelance writer covering IT news for publications like CIO, Network World and Forbes. Jeff has developed his own query request Listserv, “Jeff Vance’s Story Source Newsletter.” Essentially, Jeff has created his own HARO service, sent only to subscribers.
After receiving Jeff’s e-newsletter regularly for the past few months, we’ve determined several advantages this type of system can have for journalists:
- Specified queries. When Jeff gets a story request from an editor, he can send out a query to his Listserv asking for ideas, pitches – you name it. We’ve seen queries from Jeff on every topic, from ideas for Big Data stories to nominations for “best startup” lists. Jeff is able to format his query however he pleases, with no restrictions on length or formatting – and he doesn’t have to compete with other queries, as one does when their query is listed in a mass email (like in HARO).
- Targeted subscribers. If you’ve subscribed to Jeff’s Listserv, you’re probably interested in pitching him – after all, it serves as an update about what he’s working on. Rather than reaching the wide audience that Listservs like HARO reach, Jeff is able to reach a targeted audience that’s already familiar with his beat, publications and interests. As journalists continue to be inundated with pitches, this helps Jeff focus his source requests to a targeted audience, ideally saving time sifting through extraneous emails.
- A platform for feedback. Jeff recently took to his Listserv to provide feedback to people who had offered up pitches in response to a recent query around Big Data. Thanking everyone for submissions, Jeff gave tips on what he’s looking for (a story to go along with a source, not just a briefing). Jeff’s advice was to focus on the “why” not just on the “who” or the “what,” emphasizing that for him, this is what makes a story interesting. This feedback is incredibly helpful for those working to improve their pitching style, and helps Jeff’s subscribers customize outreach to fit his preferences, which is beneficial for both parties.
Jeff Vance is clearly at the forefront of a new journalistic methodology, and we’re fascinated to watch as this space continues to develop. In the meantime, we applaud Jeff for his proactive system. The relationship between PR professionals and media should be mutually beneficial– we’re pleased to see journalists and resources like HARO proactively work toward making this ideal a reality.
Blogging has become a key way for businesses and individuals to communicate in today’s online world. Blogs can cover a range of subject matter, from business to fashion, and are an excellent tool to give your brand a voice as well as keep people updated on events or important changes.
In order to harness the communications power of blogging, you’ll first need to draft content. This can be a dilemma for many people – blogging requires a succinct and colloquial style of writing with which many people are not comfortable or familiar.
If you’re having trouble crafting posts for your own (or your company’s) blog, Mark Schaefer and Stanford Smith, co-authors of the book “Born to Blog,” recently offered insights into writing effective blog posts that you might find beneficial. I’ve compiled the tips I find most helpful for getting a blog post started below, but I encourage you to read through the entire post here for additional insight.
Start writing
The easiest way to get a blog post underway is just that: Get started. Even if you aren’t sure of the structure you’re going for, start to put words on paper (or screen). Don’t be intimidated if you’ve never blogged before. Like any skill, blog writing is something that you can improve on with time and practice. Also, don’t let the task at hand become daunting – even if you’re not happy with your first draft, getting something down on paper gives you a lot more to work with than staring at a blank page will. Furthermore, the more you write, the easier it will become to find your voice and develop a style of writing that suits you.
Request others’ opinions
Once you’ve started to write, don’t be afraid to solicit the opinions of others about your subject matter or main point. Hearing other points of view and the simple practice of discussing your blog post can help you determine how to effectively get your point across. It never hurts to run a post by a co-worker and adapt his or her insight. This process can also help get your creative juices flowing – a quick brainstorm can do wonders.
Read out loud
Blog posts should flow as easily as a conversation would. Once you have something drafted, the easiest way to check your blog post’s flow is to read it aloud. Through a simple read-through, you will be able to detect awkward phrases or wording that you may not have noticed in the writing process. Reading aloud also may help you think of additional ideas or points you’d like to make within your post, or of subject matter for a future blog.
Remember: There’s no strict structure
From a young age, we are taught to write with a specific structure: introduction, body, conclusion. While you certainly want your blog to contain clarity of thought, blogs are often read quickly, and people do not always have the patience to read a lengthy introduction. To this end, the most important part of your blog post will be communicating your point clearly – don’t get too caught up in or frustrated by trying to maintain a perfectly structured essay format.
If you’re daunted by the task of creating a blog post, try applying the above tips. Hopefully you will find the process easier, and will be more satisfied with your post and with the writing process in the long run. Good luck!
For more on blogging visit the CPR blog:
- Digital’s Role on Public Relations
- Corporate Blogging Best Practices from PRNewswire
- The Power of Blogs