NewsCactus Blog

You’ve surely heard the expression word of mouth. But have you heard the expression word of mouse?

I first heard it from Park City Mountain Resort’s director of marketing and communications, Krista Parry (@krista_parry).

The concept is simple: word spreads these days like lightning through the Internet. Social networks carry messages to the edges of the Web, away from the central hub (i.e., a corporate Web site) to the outskirts, so-to-speak.

For a public relations practitioner, that’s the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The more you can get engagement from others and have them share your message, the more effective you’ll be.

Word of mouse is where it’s at!

So how does an online media room help with search placement?

If you’re creating press releases and distributing them directly to the media and/or through the news wires, and not publishing them yourself in an online newsroom, you’re missing one of the most effective public relations tools in our digital age.

You already have the content, why not display it in your own newsroom?

An online press room that includes social media sharing tools makes it easy for others to share your message on their sites, like blogs, Facebook pages, favorite YouTube channels, Digg, Delicious, etc.

Having our information on several Web sites gives you more tickets to the online search lottery. Just like buying more than one lottery tickets gives you a better chance of winning big, publishing your keyword rich content on dozens of sites gives you even more opportunities to control the first page of search results.

If you’re controlling most of the organic content in online search, you’re winning the online public relations battle.

How does an online newsroom save you money?

Consider this scenario:

In 2006 I had a PR client with about 10 company subsidiaries. We were distributing two to three press releases through various news wires each week. We were benefiting from placement of the announcements on a couple dozen news aggregate sites. But we weren’t publishing the releases online for each company and we were spending a few hundred dollars each week.

Their IT department was robust, but overworked. They had no capacity to accept the almost daily press releases and then code a Web page with the information on the various company Web sites. It was what I was pushing for, but it just wasn’t a possibility with their existing resources.

So I began searching for an online press room solution that we could subscribe to, which would allow me, their public relations counselor, to upload press releases and manage the online newsroom section of their sites.

What I found was only a handful of services all charging more than $1,000 a month for their service. Multiply that by 10 and it became an unrealistic proposition.

So I went to work to create a new solution. Through a close relationship with a Web development company, I created NewsCactus, a hosted, social media equipped online newsroom solution for public relations and marketing professionals.

We initially charged $200 a month for the service. It’s now only $99 a month.

At less than one hundred dollars a month, the NewsCactus online newsroom solution is affordable for just about everyone. And it does just what I described above . . .

It puts the power of publishing press release content directly in the hands of the public relations or corporate communications professional.

Of course, companies and organizations can create their own online newsroom page. Then there are design and maintenance costs. As well as time and money spent researching online press room best practices.

For many companies, in these tough economic times, doing more with less is the mantra. NewsCactus helps companies do just that. For a $99 a month subscription NewsCactus clients have access to a powerful, social media and multimedia equipped online newsroom solution.

Feel free to browse the NewsCactus client examples to see the online newsroom solution in action.

Technology, more than any other thing, has caused the convergence of traditional advertising, public relations and marketing. Call it marketing communications, or claim it all falls under one of those three umbrellas, the fact remains: to be effective at securing customers or influencing opinion (and ultimately action), you need to master inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing is the process by which you drive traffic to your content, specifically online content.

There are many components to inbound marketing. Included among them are:

• Search engine optimization
• Search engine marketing
• Blogging
• Participation in online forums and communities; and
• Social media.

An online newsroom accomplishes many of these components, and here’s how . . .

The top 9 reasons why an online newsroom helps with inbound marketing

1. Press releases inherently contain keywords and appropriate information for your company or organization, product or service. This helps with SEO.

2. People are searching for information. Increasingly old print mediums are falling behind the Internet when it comes to locating desired information. By self-publishing your information, you provide it ‘straight from the horse’s mouth,’ so-to-speak. Your newsroom provides for both SEO and SEM.

3. If you have a good online newsroom, your news and announcements are tied to an RSS feed. That’s the same technology that powers blogs and makes blogging such a powerful search placement tool. Utilizing RSS in a newsroom turns your newsroom into an equally powerful search placement tool. Remember, it contains keywords and you update the information frequently. A press release a week will go a long way to position you at the top of online search results. This meets the blogging component.

4. If your online newsroom makes it easy for people to share your information, then you’re participating in social media. People should be able — with very little effort — to share your news through inbound links, tagging, or on social networks like Facebook. It also helps if they can print your press release with little effort and have a document that looks and feels like a press release with your corporate logo and contact information included.

5. Posting press releases makes it easy for brand champions to share your news with their online communities. It’s not so much about reaching that one top tier publication as it is about how deep your network is and how many individuals will share your information with their friends. It’s about leveraging your network. This is word of mouth marketing, and technology helps it work better than ever.

6. Online marketing strategy is no longer encompassed by a corporate home page. In fact, you ought to consider Google search as your home page. The more search results you control, the more likely you are to succeed at online marketing. Instead of utilizing your dot-com site as your main Internet presence, it should become a news portal — a place where you link to all your Internet properties — which can include your newsroom, blog(s), Twitter account(s), Facebook page(s), employees’ LinkedIn pages, Flickr account(s), YouTube account(s), online reference libraries like Digg and Del.icio.us, etc.

7. An online newsroom, like your main Web site, becomes a news portal where you link to all your Internet properties. This increases traffic to your sites.

8. A good newsroom will include multimedia such as images, photos, graphics, documents, video and audio files. With multimedia files associated with your press releases, you have a much greater chance of someone sharing your information either online, in print or in person. We live in a YouTube era where people want it all: words, audio and video.

9. Interactivity is key. A newsroom provides multiple ways to interact with your company. From viewing executive biographies and headshots, to linking to your social media sites, to sharing video about your latest product, the newsroom (like your home page) should be a place where your key constituencies can ‘touch and feel’ your company. A list of press releases barely scratches the surface of what an online newsroom should be.

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.

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

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.

We’ve all seen the pesky headlines asking whether or not the U.S. is in a recession. We know that now’s not the best time to travel overseas if you’re a budget-conscious consumer. So what do businesses need to do to gain a competitive advantage in tough times?

In a soft economy, some executives cut back on marketing, advertising and public relations. However, other executives realize the potential for carving out a niche during an economic downturn, and then reap the benefits of new positioning when the market picks up again.

From a corporate communications perspective, just about the worst thing a company could do is cut-off communication with key constituencies in order to save a few bucks. The challenge, then, becomes smart, cost-effective marketing.

Frequently, when businesses are cutting back on advertising budgets, there are bargains to be found. If you have considered a campaign previously and felt you couldn’t afford it, now may be a good time to revisit your ideas and work out deals with media representatives. With fewer advertisers in the game, you’re more likely to get a break.

From a public relations perspective, it’s a great time to get your message out. If others are cutting back or limiting the amount of information distributed, then ramp-up your communications and you’ll gain greater market share.

Online marketing, search placement and positioning have long been a very cost-effective way of corporate branding. Especially now, when some advertisers have pulled the plug, your company should be participating.

Look for additional ways of securing top search placement, increasing website traffic and securing new business online. The NewsCactus online newsroom is an excellent tool to accomplish just that.

When we installed the Les Olson Company newsroom in October 2007, their company Web site was the first Google search listing when searching by the company’s name.

After about a week following the addition of its NewsCactus online newsroom, the company secured the second listing in Google, doubling its search placement on the first results page. The only additional cost was the monthly NewsCactus subscription.

Another way to secure more top search listings is to pay for them, pay-per-click campaigns, banner ads, etc. But that can be an expensive proposition.

Additionally, a NewsCactus newsroom provides much more functionality than an online ad campaign alone. Features include self-publishing announcements distributed through RSS, multimedia, additional links, news highlights, links to the company in the news and media contacts, to name a few.

Online newsrooms provide valuable tools to secure top search placement. Because of the way NewsCactus newsrooms are named, news.companyURL.com, the newsroom secures a second search results listing in addition to the company’s main website.

In our Web 2.0 time, no company should be without an online newsroom.

Consider this: many companies need, or choose, to develop websites using Adobe Flash technology. Because of the way Flash sites are created, they are notoriously bad for organic search engine placement.

Now for those of you who don’t know: organic placement happens because your site has all the right keywords; paid placement occurs when you engage in an online campaign, like a pay-per-click or banner advertising campaign. But I digress…

Another reason to utilize an online newsroom like NewsCactus is to take advantage of the keyword rich content that the newsroom will naturally contain. The content, in HTML, is fabulous food for those surreptitious search spiders.

Online newsrooms not only help secure top search placement, they provide a place on your website where you can have plenty of copy and loose the flashy stuff. Journalists are more interested in content than bells and whistles.

A key advantage to employing an online newsroom is you’re able to spice up your website, knock yourself out with the latest technology, pimp your site . . . whatever you want to call it, and still provide the searchable content necessary to secure top organic search placement.