Just like your website, you need to optimize your press release to give it the best exposure in the search engines.

Meg Walker, PRWeb’s Director of Online Marketing, outlined 5 ways to optimize your press release to gain the best exposure, so I wanted to share these with you:

1. Meet audience demand

Prior to drafting a release, you need to understand what your audience is demanding. Meeting audience demand is integral to accomplishing your press release visibility objectives.

The steps to meet audience demand include:

• Knowing your audience – what is it potential prospects and media are interested in? In what tone should they be spoken to? Do they appreciate a certain angle over another? Understanding is key and should drive the strategy behind the release.
• Be relevant – more than just understanding your audience, give them content that is both relevant and timely. By doing this, you’ll create the highest propensity your news gets picked up, shared and passed on.
• Satisfy customer demand – to know what the demand is, first research popular trends in search engines and stay on the pulse of your industry. By creating content that is related to hot topics you can create far more visibility for your releases. Staying up to date, informed and on the pulse of your customers is vital to connect with them through press releases.

2. Stay focused
By keeping your keywords and topics focused, your release can rank better in search engines and resonate more with media. As you are writing releases, remember you are writing about one topic per release. By segmenting the message or trying to say too much at once, you dilute your key points and take a risk prospects and media will walk away without taking next steps or remembering the point. Keep it simple, focused and impactful.

3. Use images for search

Images can increase the click through rate on releases in both regular and news search by 15 – 25%. It’s a simple step, but can’t be stressed enough. Additionally, using images creates more traction in media – journalists and bloggers both love images as it helps them tell their story.

4. Use videos to engage visitors
By using video in news releases, we have seen up to a 500% increase in time on pages. As the web shifts to a rich media experience, bloggers, media and end users are becoming more accustomed to video. In the future, it may be common that video is included with releases. But since today it is not as frequently used, it’s a chance to make your news stand out.

5. Optimize your release

• Anchor text links – use 3

One to homepage – direct visitors directly to your company website.
One to product page – send media and consumers directly to the product they are reading about.
One to blog post – this presents an opportunity to speak to readers in a less formal fashion. With social web users and digital influencers continually expecting social content, a press release presents a great opportunity to spark interest in your social content.

• Alt-tag

An alt tag helps your images get discovered in search engines – all release images should be tagged appropriately.

• URL Keyword

Top keywords can be used as part of the URL string, so be sure and include those during the release selection process.

• Description Tag

Add a keyword rich and compelling description tag.

• Title of release

The title of the release will become the title tag of the page, which is a vital element of your on-page optimization. If you have a target phrase, ensure your phrase leads the title of release.

And there you have it, 5 very useful tips to ensure your next press release gets the attention it deserves.

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If you do have bloggers block, here are 10 topics to help you come up with an idea to blog about.

Frequently Asked Questions – FAQs

Every business gets asked the same questions over and over again. These could come from prospects or clients and are great topics for blog posts. Chances are, if they are a FAQ, they’re also searched on a lot too.

New Products and Services

What’s new with your company? What are you offering now that you didn’t previously? Maybe its brand new or maybe it’s version 2 of an existing product. Don’t be afraid to tell the world when you have something new to offer them.

Feature Spotlight

I’d be willing to bet that most people don’t know how to use half the features of the products they use every day. That’s why putting the spotlight on different features is such a good idea. People love to get more out of what they are already using.

Industry News

What’s happening in your industry? Are their new laws that will affect your company? How about a merger or another big company folding? What’s changing and how could that impact your customers?

Interview Someone

Interviews can be pretty easy. Come up with a list of questions and then interview someone. You could do it in person, on the phone or even via email. You could interview anyone from the marketing department to shipping and even your boss. Everyone’s point of view is different and it’s fun to see different sides of a company.

Review Something

Everyone is searching the internet to find out if a particular product or piece of software is worth the money. If you can, look at what your company uses and write a review. It’ll work best if it’s something unique to your industry, but it could be for anything that helps keep your business running.

Create a Top 10 list.

Lists are a great way to make easy to scan and quick to consume posts. You could write about 10 Ways To…, 7 Tips for.., 14 of the Best…, 6 Mistakes. Pretty much anything you want. Just make sure your list is interesting and provides value to you readers.

Case Study or Success Story

Every company has them. A success story that they want to tell the world. So do it. Write out the situation, the actions taken and the results. Even if you already have a formal case study, summarize it in a blog post and then link to the full case study. Customers like to know that you’ve had success and it can really help sell your services.

Solutions/How Tos

Nothings perfect, and people spend hours trying to troubleshoot products and services every day. Wouldn’t it be great if you could offer up the solution? You’d be their hero! It could be solutions for your own products or maybe someone else’s. Either way, people like solutions and providing them can help build confidence in your brand.

Company News

What’s happening with your company? Are you growing? Did you promote someone? No blogs want to be completely self-centered, but no one likes a blog that doesn’t seem personal either. Don’t be afraid to talk about what’s happening as it helps readers feel more connected to the company.

There you go. 10 topics that will hopefully spur ideas on what you can write on your blog. So what are you waiting for? Go create.

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As search becomes ever more interconnected, and websites begin to routinely change dynamically based on your search and browser history, your ability to create and optimize individualized pieces of content (blog post, photo, video, tweet, status update, podcast, PDF, presentation) reaches critical importance. If someone is looking for “chocolate ice cream” you need to have content pieces to show up on that radar. If someone is looking for “ice cream sandwiches” you have to cover that base – as well as possibly hundres of other keyword combinations.

There are two strategic ramifications for this new era of content marketing.

First, elaborate but narrow ideas and executions need to take a back seat to simpler but widespread initiatives. One podcast with very high production values is less important than ten podcasts (about different topics) with reduced production values. (There is of course a limit to this logic. Crap is still crap). Also, if you are a larger, well-known brand that relies less upon prospective customers finding you via search or discovering you via social chatter, this principle of breadth trumping depth is not as iron-clad. But, it’s still important. Sure, people probably know how to find Toyota online. But, shouldn’t they also be using content marketing to be in the debate around vehicle safety, reliability, ethics, and an array of other topics?

Second, if you’re going to commit to creating content to fit a large number of customer queries, you can’t waste bullets. You cannot just show up to the party and create your 10 podcasts, and not think about what keywords apply, what the psychology of the people using those keywords is, and how your company can fulfill those needs. Way too much content is being created today with a mindset that goes no deeper than “well, we’re creating and uploading content, so that’s a good thing.”

There’s a Method to the Content Madness

Content without strategy is a colossal waste of time and money. You can do better than that, and you need to, as we’re entering an era where low-hanging fruit is an anachronism. When every single one of your competitors has a content marketing program, the advantage will go to whomever has the best understanding of WHY certain content is successful.

For every piece of content you create, regardless of format, you should develop a Content Rationale Report that includes these pieces of information (as an example, I’ve included prospective answers for a social media metrics chart I’m developing)

• Format of Content: Downloadable chart and glossary (PDF). Companion blog post.
• Description of Content: This chart and glossary will show businesses how to select the most appropriate social media success metrics, based on their business goals and availability of specific data.
• Budget, Including Labor: $300 + 5 hours of Convince & Convert time
• Who Will Be Interested in This Content: Small and medium-sized businesses (with an emphasis on agencies) that need to figure out social media success on a regular basis. Targeted at marketing directors.
• What Questions Does This Content Answer for Them: What social media success metrics should I be paying attention to, and why?
• What Keywords Will Be Used to Find It: Social media ROI, social media statistics, measuring social media
• What Do We Want Them to Do After Consuming It (Call-to-Action): Subscribe to C&C blog, contact C&C about training their teams on this metrics selection process, share the chart with colleagues
• 3 Success Metrics: Social sharing, RSS subscriptions, inbound leads

Here’s the worksheet in downloadable form:

This is functionally similar to the Creative Brief that ad agencies have been using for decades to help copywriters and artists understand the psychology of the customer, and what needs to be included in the advertisement. It’s a tremendous tool for keeping your marketing strategically on target, and now the Content Rationale Report repurposes the creative brief for this new era of search-driven, socially-enabled communication.

You can’t just fire content bullets randomly into the air. You have to know why you’re making it, for whom you’re making it, how they’re going to find it, and how each and every piece of content will contribute to your business success.

That’s the future of content marketing. Are you ready for it?

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#EngageorDie

Why is sociology and anthropology so important to understand for social media?

I believe that at the top level, all of social media is driven by anthropology and sociology – it’s just the nature of the network. I never formally studied social sciences in college, but was inspired to become versed in them because it’s clear that human nature and culture define social networks and therefore require insight, research, observation, and forethought. On an even deeper level though, social marketing and service professionals should also explore psychology to create experience-driven connections, interest graphs and ultimately contextual networks that are linked through meaningful and mutually beneficial communications and engagement. All of these things help weave everything together.

These fields of study earn greater importance today as technology and innovation evolve at an increasingly blurring pace and with it, the adaptation of human behavior and culture. In Social Media and in the real world, in order to become relevant, you have to earn relevance.

Hutch Carpenter from Spigit recently wrote a post in which he describes a two year lag that companies experience when looking to adopt web 2.0 technologies. How can companies deal with this apparent lag time and what’s the best course of action for them?

There definitely is a lag time between the introduction of innovative tools and their rate of adoption across the Diffusion of Innovations by Everett Rogers (also known as the technology adoption bell curve). What we need to remember though, is that adoption is driven and necessitated by the tasks and the objectives at hand. As you pointed out (Jacob), culture and behavior can never adopt and change as quickly as technology so companies need to stay agile and limber; I agree with this. What makes social media so interesting, especially for the enterprise, is that it’s among the first platforms to affect a business from the outside in and from the bottom up. The brief (compared to other business processes) history of technology is introduced and managed from the top down. New media, services such as Twitter and Facebook, are at their very core, social operating systems (OS), and as such, are introduced into the corporate culture through the individual. The Social OS is unique to the individual as their experiences are defined by the applications they use, how and why. Essentially, instead of IT coming to teams with new technologies, they’re now forced to examine the use of social networks from inside the fire wall and also how they connect to outside networks and how the social OS impacts and possibly benefits or harms the corporate ecology.

As champions, it’s not only our job to demonstrate the potential of social networks and services, it is necessary to become the IT of social technologies to our internal decision makers to prove their value to workflow and productivity inside and outside the organization.

Social media is now forcing the company culture to change and adapt based on these social operating systems. Actions and reactions are now more tangible, direct, and immediate.

With any new and pervasive technology, we as decision makers within the organization, are now responsible for defining guidance and education in order to improve their applications for both business and personal use. Just because it’s introduced from the personal side of the workforce doesn’t mean that users have mastered the potential of these networks nor identified their risks.

In order to support this radical transformation, it has become clear that governance, responsibility, and accountability is needed – not restraint.

There has also been a lot of discussion around Social CRM as these services also represent new opportunities for businesses to improve the bond between customers, prospects, and brands. This isn’t just new technology, it’s forcing decision makers to change methodologies around what this all means. This in turn, creates a lot of change within the enterprise and that change needs support to make sure it happens for the right reasons. Social CRM, at the very least, is propelled by engagement with purpose. And, when you think about it, in order to do so, genuinely, everything needs to change to support an outward focus and an inward process for adaption – otherwise, this is all lip service.

In order for organizational transformation to take shape, social architects are required to blueprint the grand design, but also the incremental steps defined by realistic milestones that encourage progress rather than disruption. You have to allow your company and its team to breathe in the process. It’s like drinking wine. You have to pour it, swirl it around the glass, smell it, and then drink it, slowly.

In my experience everything has to start with a pilot program that is intentional, well executed, with metrics that show advancement. Success begets additional pilots until dedicated budget is earned and continually justified. Taking this approach also encourages analysis and development by exploring and attempting to answer the following questions:

What are we trying to accomplish?

What is the change we’re seeking to enliven?

What is the action we’re hoping to spark?

At what levels?

Why?

What resources would it take to support it?

What does success look like at the end of the pilot?

How do these results compare to other programs currently in place?

This is why I’m forever a student of new media. The answers and the path to these answers is different within each organization – governed by the prevailing corporate culture and hierarchy.

Remember, technology, before and after social, changes quickly and as such, I encourage businesses to consider the development of a department or team responsible for identifying, evaluating and testing innovation. Good friend Deb Schultz of the Altimeter Group is leading work in this field and helps companies, such as Proctor and Gamble, determine where technology can benefit specific areas of business units. And for those that perform well, examine rollout strategies for other business units to improve processes through the constant integration of proven innovation.

What’s the difference between social media and Social CRM vs. SRM?

Social Media equals any tool or service that is used the web to facilitate conversations and networks. Social CRM, as discussed, is the socialization of CRM methodologies and processes. SRM recognizes that all people, no matter what system they use, are equal. It represents a wider scope of active listening and participation across the full spectrum of influence mapped to specific department representatives within the organization using various lenses for which to identify individuals where and how they interact. What it does not represent however, is yet another acronym. It’s simply a social object, intended to broaden the discussion for evolving sCRM.

The social Web is distributing influence beyond the customer landscape, allocating authority among stakeholders, prospects, advocates, decision-makers, and peers. SRM recognizes that whether someone recommended a product, purchased a product, or simply recognized it publicly, in the end, each makes an impact on behavior at varying levels. Therefore customers are now merely part of a larger equation that also balances vendors, experts, partners, and other authorities. In the realm of SRM, influence is distributed and it is recognized wherever and however it takes shape.

The last thing I’m trying to do here is introduce a new acronym. People are very very literal, so you have to be careful with what you say and how you define things. New media affects the decision of a “social” customer at every level. Why just build an infrastructure around customers when you need to build it around the entire decision cycle? Infrastructure decisions are expensive and require a lot of support, I want companies to think about the investment they make because it’s much bigger than they know now.

Is a large part of social media common sense? You have a quote from Business Week in your book that ends with “don’t be stupid” why do you think companies are having trouble following this?

If you tell someone not to be stupid you are evoking common sense. What people need to do is be specific. Common sense is not enough. You have to define what common sense is and provide guidelines, rules, and training around it. Why? Because the definition of common sense is different to everyone and the greatest example of how common sense fails is the assumption that individuals employ common sense in all that they do. If you take a look at what happened to Nestle and Green Peace and the conversational carnage that ensued, social media pundits and consumers alike, called for the head of the community manager responsible for fueling the attacks in Facebook. But, regardless of the behavior, working, and the absence of “common sense,” I’m willing to bet that this individual didn’t actually break any of Nestle’s rules per se. The community manager was most likely doing the job as instructed or perhaps, as assumed. This demonstrates a real life example of how the personal compass that guides each one of us points differently and what appears as common sense to one, is absolutely “un”common sense to another. Creating a foundation on common sense is no different than erecting buildings on marshland. As leaders, it’s our job to create guidelines, training, and management systems for social media engagement similar to the processes that establish the quality and significance of service training programs that present employees with various real world situations and desired outcomes where they are expected to excel. For example, “if you are greeted by someone who is challenging and hostile towards your brand in a public forum, here is what you need to do…”

Without understanding the processes, culture, and the “how’s” and “why’s” of Nestle, it’s not really possible to advise them and tell them what to do. But one can guess where it needs to start, and that’s a much bigger discussion.

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The one thing that sticks out from ASW was at the Meetup202, er, meet up, was where Dr Ngo got on stage and talked about being focused. In his case he was refering to becoming a specialist in a couple of niches, rather than try to run hundreds of offers successfully.

Likewise, I’ve found that whether in online gaming or in my business, I get the best results from focusing on one or two tasks, rather than try to do many more than that.

In affiliate marketing terms, by all means test 5 to 7 offers at a time. But once you find one or two potential winners (profit or marginally in the red), you also need to focus on making them work. Else you could be locked in a permanent cycle of testing offers.

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I’ve spent the last couple of weeks focused on launching a major upgrade to one of my sites. If all goes well, you should see it by the end of the 1st week of June (if not, in the next couple of days). It’s the result of focus again. Just like it’s usually easier to make $1k/day consistently from one offer, rather than $500 each from 2 offers, I’m also placing most of my eggs in one basket with this new project.

Here’s one of my recent game changing moment: Track your time…ruthlessly.

For those of you who might have been or still are lawyers, accountants, consultants, you would be familiar with time sheets, especially if you’re charging clients on a per-hour basis. I’ve heard of stories where lawyers have sat on the toilet, doing their daily business, thought about a case and charged that time.

But, no, I’m not talking about charging THAT kind of time.

I’m refering to brutally counting how much time you spend on your business each day, doing something that will get you towards achieving your goal (you have a goal, right?).

So time spent reading email, AIMing, checking stats doesn’t count. Setting up new campaigns, optimizing an existing campaign, rotating creatives, whatever that makes your business more successful counts.

Since my experiment started, I’ve been updating my time usage on a Google Doc spreadsheet and the results weren’t pretty early on in the experiment. I was averaging 30mins of productive work on some days, and about 2 hours on other days.

Note: You have to be extremely brutal about whether you’re doing something “productive” to make this experiment work.

A research study shows that the average American exec probably clocks about 30mins of productive work for each workday (8-hour block). In efficiency, this is 30mins / 8×60mins = 6.25%. Terrible.

Upping how you use your time might make the difference between success and failure, especially if you’re slogging at a day job.

The way I see it, you can either become “educated” and aware about every offer out there, every new network, read a lot of blogs and forums to “know everything”. Or you can become really focused and bank.

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The mistake many people make when going up competition is to simply fight them head-on. If a competing site is already larger than you, than a direct conflict will more than likely leave you with losses or take an extremely long time before improvement is made. Instead, think creatively and develop strategies which give you a niche or foothold your competition hasn’t discovered yet.

A good example of creative thinking can be found with keyword development. If your competition has a lockdown on a set of keywords, then a good strategy would be to develop a set of keywords which differ slightly. Don’t deviate too far from the path as you want your keywords to keep in line with the topic. However, use longer tail keywords and discover terms your competition hasn’t thought of to use yet. A small bit of research can get your going in the right direction.

Be patient. I can’t make it anymore simple than that. Even thinking creatively and sidestepping your competition won’t net you results over night. More people end up failing due to lack of patience than just about any factor out there. Giving up will always equate to failure, but if you tough it out, many times you’ll start to see improvement.

Sometimes, being the little guy gives you a tactical advantage against competition. Being on top many times can lead to complacency, leaving you with the desire to succeed. Just keep at it, and whittle away with different strategies before discovering something which can breed results. Be creative, be patient, and adapt, and you’ll be making strides.

“There’s millions and billions of pieces of information flooding out of the vehicle [at all times] into this dumb telematics device,”
“Now you have to mine it,” Levis said.

Absolutely. Now you have to mine it. There is too much data, arriving too fast to put this on a dashboard or in a report and get real value from it. Instead you need to mine it for insight and operationalize this insight so it is actionable. Add the rules that make it actionable and then make the decisions, take the actions, that will add value to your business.

While not every company has telemetry data, many have high volume data streams that seem to offer the potential for better business operations. But you have to mine it.

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The rise of social media sites has given customers a new avenue to talk about your company and in turn a new way for you to reach your customers quickly.

The general practice when a crisis hits your company, affecting your customers, is to deal with it quickly. Social media sites now give you an outlet to explain the crisis and your response almost instantly.

A tip from the experts at the recent Media140 conference was to not sugar-coat your response to customers in a crisis.

Here is how media training expert, Gemma Tognini explained it:

Authenticity is the only currency acceptable when in a crisis.

So don’t lie to your customers, tell it to them straight and they will appreciate it. If you don’t tell them the truth then they will simply go looking for the truth online.

Dena Vassallo from public relations firm, PPR, explained it as the “surprise and delight factor”. If you fix any problems quickly & openly in these forums through conversation with the customer, then not only will they be surprised at how open you have been but they will also be delighted by the fast response. By resolving these problems so publicly any other followers will appreciate this also and it will likely build more trust in your brand.

Being able to respond quickly to any issues that arise comes back to the 3 principles I outlined last week – monitor, listen & respond. Monitor what is being said online about your company, listen to what these people are saying and respond in a truthful and timely manner.

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You run over to check your Twitter account. Then you dash to Facebook to see what’s going on there. Then Linkedin. Maybe your blog. All the while you’re feeling like you’re playing catch-up, that something awesome may have happened, and you missed it because you weren’t online. Sound familiar?

Sure, you can centralize some of your social media chores (great post by Chris Brogan), by using Tweetdeck or Seesmic. But that only helps if you’re online and “in the flow.”

For normal humans that check social media a couple times a day, NutshellMail may become your new favorite social companion. And it’s free.

Like RSS for your relationships

NutshellMail sends you a highly customizable email digest (from 1 to 24 times per day) of what’s happening in your social media spheres, so you can browse and get up to speed quickly, without having to visit several different destinations or fire up your iPhone’s social apps.

Twitter Without the Hassle

Want to know who has signed up to follow you on Twitter today? Who unfollowed you today? All the DMs and @ replies you received in the last three hours? NutshellMail batches it all up and sends it to you in a tidy email at the exact time of your choosing. You can even include Twitter searches in your feed, enabling you to use NutshellMail the same way you’d use TweetBeep, or an RSS feed of Twitter search results.

Handy Facebook Reminders

It’s pretty tough to find a credible excuse for missing people’s birthdays on Facebook. NutshellMail saves you from being labeled an ingrate by reminding you of all the birthdays of your Facebook friends this week. The email also can be configured to show you all new friend requests, status updates from pages that you’re a fan of, as well as photos, videos and links from your friends. Plus, event invites, and photos in which you’re tagged.

And More…

Although I’m not using it presently, you can also configure your NutshellMail to include Linkedin and MySpace content, as well as updates from the Ning groups of which you are a member.

Also, if you have several different email accounts, you can use NutshellMail to automatically combine the emails sent to your secondary and tertiary accounts and forward them together to your primary account.

All the content shown in each email is clickable. So, if you want to see more about a new Twitter follower, you can simply click the name or photo in the email, and instantly visit their bio. You can also manage your customization preferences by clicking links in the email, so visiting the NutshellMail Web site isn’t needed after initial sign-up.

Social Integration in an Instant

One of the outstanding new add-on features of NutshellMail is their Facebook app, which enables Facebook fan page managers to easily add an email newsletter tab to the page. Subscribers then receive a digest of all the content posted to the fan page. I’ve been talking a lot about the integration of email and social media, and this is another example of using cross-functional technology to build content creation and deployment synergies. Note that NutshellMail is funded in part by FBFund, Facebook’s venture capital arm.

Here’s a nice video demonstration of NutshellMail and how it can save you time and social media aggravation.

I’ve been using NutshellMail for a few weeks now, and find it indispensible. (Thanks to my friend Will Smith – the world’s second most popular Will Smith – for turning me on to it).

How can you make use of NutshellMail to simplify your social media chores?

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Rex offers an excellent video from Dan Pink that argues that while rewarding people for many simple work tasks from the 20th century and before might increase performance, doing it for the cognitive tasks of the 21^st century does not work. The reason is that it narrows the focus and does not promote the exploration of options that can occur with other motivations. I have also found that it undercuts the team sprit and sharing that collaborative organizations need.Our recent economic downturn also shows that it puts too much weight on individual achievement even if it is counter to the success of the whole organization.

I think this makes sense.If you try to use performance incentives to promote enterprise 2.0 adoption, you need to be very careful that it does not reward the wrong behavior.It certainly needs to be aimed at overall team success if used at all.

So what does Rex offer instead? He writes, why not fun.Here I am completely onboard. I have often been involved in knowledge management implementations where we introduced fun as part of the awareness campaign.I will work even more if it makes the work more fun, such as meeting new interesting people to collaborate with and finding out more about your colleagues. In a minor way this is why I like to work with music as I get caught up in the rhythms of the sounds and works seems more fun.

Rex closes with a great video from Volkswagen that seals the deal. It shows how if you make one channel more fun it will trump the easier, formerly more popular, one.We should add the spirit of this approach to our enterprise 2.0 implementations. It should only help. 

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