NewsCactus Blog

Another cool feature of the NewsCactus online newsroom solution is the user’s ability to upload a press release now and choose from three distribution options:

1. Publish the press release immediately
2. Schedule the press release for future distribution; just specify the appropriate day and time
3. Save the release as a draft to come back later and polish it up

A value-added service at NewsCactus is the ability to distribute your press release directly to your target media list through eNR Services.

NewsCactus truly puts the power of publishing online in the hands of the professional communicator without relying on IT to get the job done.

Check out all the features and services offered by NewsCactus.

The NewsCactus online newsroom is mobile friendly. Newsroom visitors on mobile devices are able to easily navigate and locate company information.

Mobile marketing is one of the fastest growing trends in the communication industry. Using a tool that’s mobile compatible puts you and your organization ahead of the curve.

By way of example:

At a recent social media seminar I announced that the PDF handouts for my presentation were being published in my newsroom simultaneously as I spoke.

One of the features of NewsCactus online news release distribution is scheduling the date and time for publication. Before leaving for the presentation I set the publish time to be noon.

At the conclusion of my presentation one of the attendees approached and complimented me on the content in the Codella Marketing newsroom. I asked how he was able to see it so quickly, since I knew he hadn’t left the room to surf the Web on his desktop computer, and he said he looked it up on his phone.

Not only was he able to view the handouts, but he was impressed with how slick the auto-publishing process was and how well the newsroom looked on his mobile device.

The traditional approach to creating a press release is to use the inverted pyramid writing style and answer the five W’s — who, what, when, where, why and how.

The release format would include:

• Contact information
• Headline
• Sub-heading
• Dateline
• Lead sentence/paragraph
• More details
• Quote
• Boilerplate

For a variety of reasons, this format is becoming ‘old school.’

Everyone is busy, including journalists. New press release formats get to the point faster and highlight key points easily. They also include links to supporting resources and accompanying multimedia files.

The social media release is gaining popularity, as well as housing your corporate news in a social media newsroom.

The NewsCactus online newsroom is equipped with social media bookmarking functionality. Its modules and additional links also fit the bill for social media releases.

A social media release is designed to be more authentic, to create a dialogue and provide open access to information by anyone. It should foster and support a sense of community.

A social media release should include:

• Contact information
• Headline
• Sub-heading
• Quick facts
• Multimedia elements
• Dateline
• Lead sentence/paragraph
• More details
• Quote
• Boilerplate
• Keywords
• Tags/bookmarks

And when you write a release, stick to the conventional wisdom in KISS — keep it simple stupid. More often than not, less is more. Write so the announcement is something you’d actually be interested in and read if you were someone else. Don’t use industry jargon or buzz words, rather write in language that’s easily accessible for your intended audience, and be sure you know who that audience is when you set out.

There’s a trend in the public relations industry to provide more than the typical written press release. Many organizations are utilizing news wire distribution services that include multimedia distribution of logos, photos, audio or video files.

The reason for this trend is people are now accustomed to multimedia online. It’s not just about the written word.

Additionally, savvy public relations practitioners realize that journalists are no longer the only audience for press releases. Through the power of the Internet, those releases can be viewed by bloggers, shareholders, customers, etc.

For this reason, an online newsroom is vital.

Adding multimedia items to your press release in your newsroom helps tell more of the story. We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words. Enough said.

From carefully crafted news release headlines, to behind-the-scenes keywords and descriptions, to social media bookmarking, the functionality of a NewsCactus online newsroom covers all the bases.

Many corporate communicators see the benefits of blogging, but they hang back, uncommitted to embracing the trend for several reasons. Either they know that their CEO won’t take the time to blog, their legal department would never approve a blog, or they just don’t have the internal resources to create and maintain a blog.

Of course, these are valid reasons for not entering the blogosphere. But as we’ve seen before with new technology, you either climb on board, or the train leaves the station without you.

At NewsCactus, we see many benefits to participating in what we call online positioning. You see, it’s all about controlling the search results for your company, people, products or services. As we’ve said before, your company-controlled website is no longer your only concern. Google search is your new corporate home page. And how do you manage content on that page?

No longer is a static corporate website adequate. Companies need to maintain a web presence — several sites, including social media and networking sites, and online advertising. It’s about promoting and maintaining your brand in the same physical and virtual places used by your key constituencies.

Read more

We recently discovered a very handy blog post for getting more out of Photoshop when it comes to editing images for the web.

We highly recommend all NewsCactus clients review the principles and tools discussed on the BlogPerfume site.

Feel free to share your comments here after reviewing the article.

Also, for those of you who don’t own Photoshop, Google Picasa does a pretty good job of preparing images for the web. It’s free and you can use similar techniques described in the BlogPerfume post.

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.

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.