NewsCactus Blog

I appreciate this commentary by Jeremiah Owyang regarding activity on Twitter following the 2008 presidential election happenings yesterday.

He links to some valuable tools for measuring activity and keywords used in Twitter posts.

For those of you unfamiliar with Twitter, it’s a microblogging site similar to a blog, but each post is limited to 140 characters. It makes posting mobile in that you can use text messaging to publish online. You can also use a computer that’s online. Check out what Wikipedia has to say about Twitter.

I recently found a fascinating article featuring Bob Pearson of Dell at this month’s Word of Mouth Marketing Association conference.

He’s uniquely qualified from his vantage point to talk about the influence of technology on our planet, and especially upon those who claim to be professional business communicators.

Consider this observation: a company’s home page is the Google search results page. So true! And precisely why utilizing every tool you can, so you can control as much of the search results page content as possible, is so important.

The NewsCactus online newsroom solution provides unlimited opportunities for companies to claim that first page of search results through consistent publishing of keyword-rich announcements about products or services.

NewsCactus news releases utilize RSS, carry associated multimedia content and related links, and continue to position companies at the top of pertinent search results.

Several months ago we talked our friends at star7 into using the NewsCactus online newsroom. They routinely publish newsletters and news releases in their newsroom. Now, they enjoy the top Yahoo! organic search listing for ‘las vegas ad agency.’

That means, instead of paying per click, they’re benefiting from the top position in search results only on the merits of their online newsroom, which actually shows up a couple of times in the first page of search listings even though their website doesn’t.

This is yet another example of the power of the NewsCactus online newsroom solution.

If you’re writing for the Web, you’re familiar with the importance of incorporating appropriate keywords in your prose.

If you’re a business communicator and you’re writing press releases without much thought as to who would search for your release, and what words they’d use to find it, it’s time to change.

With the digitization of information, companies who provide search mechanisms have become huge conglomerates (i.e., Google). Most of us no longer pull a printed directory to search for information, we go online and do a search. We Google it.

Thus, as communicators, it behooves us to write so that our information can be found, quickly and easily in online searches.

Here are a couple of handy tools to help you know what keywords people are searching for and what keywords you could incorporate into your news releases to help secure higher search placement:

Google Trends

Keywords at Wordtracker

For those of you familiar with Web-based applications, TinyMCE and other tools that allow you to format text for the Web, you may have noticed frustrating abnormalities in text created in Word and pasted into Web applications.

It’s true — Microsoft Word is evil when it comes to being transferred to the World Wide Web. Word encodes the text, which messes with the way it’s published on the Web.

The best solution we’ve found is to take your Word document, copy the text, paste it into Notepad or some other type of plain text program, then copy the text from Notepad and paste it into your browser window.

In version 1.1 of NewsCactus we created a new tool button to provide for copying from Word and pasting directly into the NewsCactus administrative page. This omits the step originally required of going from Word to Notepad to your NewsCactus admin site.

But a word to the wise: when your document is in Word, always go through a plain text editor (like Notepad) before pasting the text onto the Web. Chances are you’ll need to follow this procedure for WordPress and other types of blogs, unless you elect to compose inside those programs.

In our experience, corporate executives and their business communication cohorts are familiar with the concept of posting press releases on their website. Typically the releases are archived and sorted by date with the most recent on top.

What they don’t realize is in Web 2.0 expectations are higher. People are looking for a multimedia experience: photos, audio and video, and a way to share the news (known as social media tags).

We have found the NewsCactus online newsroom solution to be particularly effective at securing top search placement for our clients’ news and announcements. Search for words in titles of NewsCactus newsrooms and you’ll find the stories in the first page of Google search results in nearly every instance.

In addition to being a valuable search engine optimization and placement tool, an online newsroom is really necessary to effectively communicate with journalists in an all day, every day news cycle.

Consider how valuable an online newsroom with a corporate backgrounder, high-resolution images and corporate logos would be if you were to encounter a crisis situation, not to mention the availability of current information from you regarding the crisis. Media could basically help themselves as they did research and wrote articles about the situation. This would free up valuable time and energy for your key executives and corporate communications team members.

A newsroom allows companies to tell more of their story without relying on media gatekeepers of days past. It’s what we at NewsCactus call self-publishing. Instead of the dry text-only press release, you can provide digital photographs, audio or video files, as well as links to other pages with additional supporting information. And best of all, the information is archived, completely searchable and available for anyone in the world, any time. All at a monthly cost that’s less than most one-time multimedia news release distribution services.

There are many reasons why you should have a corporate newsroom that’s more than a chronological listing of press releases. In our minds, the two most important reasons are to obtain increased search engine placement and to tell your own story.

Are you a new NewsCactus client?

Do you have questions about populating your online newsroom with content?

Look no further.

Here’s a one-page, 11-step implementation guide:
NewsCactus Implementation Guidelines (35kb pdf)

Have you read about the NewsCactus online newsroom benefits and features on our website?

Are you interested in having a printed brochure that outlines the product’s features?

Here’s a one-page product description: NewsCactus Product Description (35kb pdf)

With the convergence of technology and advent of Web 2.0, the public relations practitioner’s standard old press release has had a makeover.

If your company is still sending text-only news releases by mail, fax or email as the primary way of sharing news, you’re missing a terrific opportunity.

Using the Internet, press releases can have so much more depth. In fact, you could probably only use the Internet and reach more people — consumers and journalists — than you ever could the old fashioned way.

Various surveys show that approximately 90 percent of journalists use the Internet to gather information for a story, find story ideas and read the news. Some 70 percent of Americans now primarily read their news online.

If your online newsroom is a simple, chronological archive of press releases, NewsCactus can help optimize your news for greater search engine placement.

Here are some key ways by which the NewsCactus online newsroom allows public relations practitioners to do much more with their press releases:

Search Optimization

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again — because NewsCactus news releases include keywords and descriptions in addition to the text of the release, and because of the way the individual pages are named, NewsCactus releases secure top search placement for your company, its products or services.

Multimedia

Include audio or video to help tell more of your story.

Important Links

Link keywords to other online resources such as research, white papers and articles in the media.

Social Media Tags

Users can share your news with others using a variety of Web 2.0 social media.

Distribution

Let users manage the way they receive your news, either by subscribing to your RSS feed (don’t worry, journalists are way ahead of the pack when it comes to using RSS) or electing to receive daily emails containing your news. And you can view RSS statistics and email subscribers.

Search

Every single online newsroom item is searchable using Google Custom Search, making it easy to find just what you’re looking for.

Schedule for Release

You can elect to publish your news release right away, save it as a draft or schedule the distribution for a future day and time.

By using an online newsroom you gain increased visibility on the Web. In fact, most NewsCactus customers now have two first page search links: one for their company, and a second for their NewsCactus powered online newsroom.