New Media

The Press Release, Blogger Outreach And SEO

~ K. Quesenberry ~ Leave a comment

Digital media has not killed the press release. It is still a useful tool, but you need to know how they should be tailored to various audiences like wire services and social media contacts. Blogs have become an increasing  influence upon public opinion – top blogs can get up to 9000,000 hits a month. As a PR professional, it is important to know how to reach out to these bloggers.

Communicating with bloggers is not the same as communicating with traditional media. Most bloggers who sense you are pushing biased information will turn against you. The first step is to know the blogger you are targeting. Read them and get a sense of what they care about and instead of pushing news to them start a conversation. Establish a relationship first. Start with an interesting news item that may not directly relate to your company.

The main difference in a social media release is that it doesn’t mimic a news story like a traditional release. Instead it provides the components or raw ingredients to put together a story in any format. Shift Communications recommends a template that includes a series of bullets. The bullets are supplemented with a section of quotations from senior executives and provides multimedia elements like the company’s logo, a headshot of the principle and a PDF of key materials. You many also want to include links to podcasts, a downloadable annual report or a PowerPoint presentation. It will also have links to del.icio.us and RSS feeds and Technorati Tags.

Most releases link back to the organization’s main website. It is important to manage that content as well. Content is still king on the web and great content will attract traffic, yet managing web content is an area that tends to be overlooked in many. In your release provide direct links to your website and get noticed on social bookmarking sites.

Releases these days also need to be optimized for SEO. Tips include writing your release around three keywords or phrases that are important to your key audiences. Keywords should be included at the beginning of the headline, in the subhead below the headline and in subheads in the body of the release. These keyword subheads should be sprinkled throughout the release aiming for a keyword density of between 2 and 8 percent. You should also add hyperlinks to help people find related content.

PR writing is creative writing that requires a lot of effort to translate organizational goals into a compelling story for various key audiences. Now you have to sprinkling in specific words at various places? That is challenging but not unlike many of the limitations and challenges PR writers and advertising copywriters face with many of their projects. There is always mandatory information that must be included without sounding out of place or unnatural. When it comes to SEO the reward is optimized releases that help you get ranked in News search engines so the right target audience will find your release. Editors may contact you solely based on your press release being properly optimized and relevant (Cunningham, 2004).

Is the extra effort worth it?

Cable TV Decline: Media Planning Gets Tougher

~ K. Quesenberry ~ Leave a comment

Cable TV has been a growing media for most of its existence. Cable started out as a way for rural customers to get TV service because they couldn’t pick up TV signals over mountains and across long distances. But the real growth came when they were allowed to enter the city and suburbs attracting subscribers for new ad free movie stations and syndicated programming offered by super stations such as TBS. New subscribers were also attracted to 24 hour news, business and sports stations. As bandwidth increased, so did new stations offering specialized content to segmented audiences. This was very attractive to marketers who could now reach a more target audience with the impact of TV. Spot cable is also a lot cheaper than a network buy. Basic cable subscribers in the US grew from just above 20 percent in 1980 to just over 65 percent in 2005 (Media InforCenter website, 2010). But what is happening now? Will cable continue to grow?

In 2007 SNL Kagan released the report “Cable Futurecast: A 10-year Detailed Outlook For Cable TV Industry Revenue Streams” and predicted overall residential cable revenue to top $121 billion by 2017. This was a 77 percent increase from the 2006 levels of $68.6 billion. But that cable growth was depended on selling more services to existing customers because of anticipated declines in market share due to the increasingly competitive space. Advanced services on the digital video and IP platforms were expected to fuel growth along with video-on-demand, DVR, HD and other interactive services.

Three years later these predictions are starting to come true. SNL Kagan recently reported that for the first time in cable’s history they have seen a drop in total number of subscribers. In the second quarter of 2010, the number of cable subscribers dropped by 711,000 with six out of eight cable providers reporting their worst quarterly subscriber lost. Cable’s share of the pay-TV market also dropped from 63.6 percent to just 61 percent during the quarter. This is just a signal of an even more fragmented media space as more content comes from the Internet via Netflix, iTunes, Xbox Live and Amazon video on demand streaming movies and shows.

For media planners it will get even more complicated as media channels continue to fragment and the Web is brought to people’s TVs via cable and Internet enabled TVs. Streaming online video advertising that appears on sites like YouTube, Hulu and as Pre-roll on video news stories will be a remote click away from traditional :30 spots on Cable TV stations. Hulu Plus is expected to release soon as a subscription based service to bring their Internet content to mobile devices and TV. Content marketing will also increase as advertising step in to create original content for on-demand channels – this represents a entirely new pricing system and creative possibilities as people choose to engage in the ads.

Intermedia comparisons between traditional media are complicated and require sophisticated marketing-mix analyses. But as media continue to evolve and converge, choosing where to spend your marketing dollars will become an almost daunting task.