By Ryan LeClaire, Marketing Producer

There are a million reasons that your press release can succeed and only a few things that can hold it back. However, 90% of all press releases contain at least one of these mistakes and quickly makes the content easily forgettable and dismissible.

Here are five quick questions you can ask yourself as you write your release or while you’re reading it over. (more…)

By John Miles, Associate Editor

You’ve created the perfect press release, replete with groundbreaking information, a defined audience and a snappy headline that’s sure to grab the reader’s attention. All set for distribution, right? Sure, providing timely, relevant information to journalists and bloggers is still the single-most important aspect of a distributing a press release. Yet, without considerations for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), you’re only ensuring that your release will be distributed, not discovered. (more…)

By Lauren Barlow, Associate Editor

“You don’t get a second chance at a first impression.” This statement holds true in many regards, including when writing a press release. The first paragraph of your release will either grab the reader’s attention, or make them lose interest and move on. Pull them in to keep reading by including the most pertinent and interesting facts up front.

The following tips will help make your first paragraph memorable, informative, and most importantly, make your audience keep reading:

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By Lisa Davis, Director of Marketing

If you were online today, chances are pretty good you came across an infographic.  You might have liked it enough to tweet it, and maybe you emailed it to a friend.  Heck, you might even be ‘old school’ enough to have printed it and pinned it to the wall of your office cubicle. There’s no doubt that infographics are everywhere.  B2B and B2C companies are producing them by the thousands to communicate information as diverse as oral hygiene and uranium production.  They are posting them to their websites and Facebook pages and building them into their product launches, marketing campaigns and survey results.  But why?

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Our Editors rock! There I said it for all to read. Not only do they juggling multiple clients on a daily basis, they are also ensuring that each client’s news is distributed accurately and on a timely basis.

Though not every Editor can win he Hawk Eye award, the following are two individuals that hand an outstanding month and helped many of our clients. Congratulations to Joshua Moore for noticing several irregularities throughout the month, but his main catch for the month was correcting a dead URL link. He realized that anything after the “.com” in a URL is case sensitive. Changing the case of after the .com corrected the URL and made sure the link was live and active. Not to be outdone, Alberto Carta-Guerrero also noticed that a URL for a client’s webcast was linking to their pervious quarters. Correcting this saved the client a lot of potential embarrassment and the cost of a correction release. Well done guys!

To get to know our winners better, we’ve asked them the following fun questions. Unfortunately Alberto wasn’t able to get his answers to us in time.

Joshua Moore, Associate Editor (Toronto)

• What does Beyond Words mean to you?
  Media, especially press and news media, are drastically changing as we move full-force into an almost exclusively digital era of communications. Words alone are no longer sufficient. We must communicate with all media in order to connect. It is our role to facilitate that this communication extends far “beyond words.”
• What’s your favourite movie?
  Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life”
• What’s your favourite movie quote?
  “And finally, monsieur, a wafer-thin mint.”
• What’s your favourite colour?
  Green. It’s just so lively!
• What’s your favourite day of the week?
  Wednesdays: that’s my night out after work. $3 bottles of beer at the pub near my house are pretty much the most exciting thing I do outside of work.
• Cat or Dog?
  Living in the city, I’d only ever have a cat. If I had more space, I’d keep both as pets. I always grew up with 2 dogs and 2 cats.
• What was the last book you read?
  “The Favourite Game” by Leonard Cohen
• If you could meet anyone dead or alive, who would that be?
  Rod Serling (from the Twilight Zone) or Alfred Hitchcock.
• If you could travel to any region in the world, where would it be?
  I would love to spend a good amount of time somewhere rural in the West Indies. Alternatively, Northern Italy.
• Mac or PC?
  PC, running Windows and Ubuntu.
• Windows, IOS, or Android?
  Android forever!
• If I could eat any food what would it be?
  I feel like I could probably eat any food that I want nowadays, in this Global Village. However, I have always wanted to eat sushi that’s been properly prepared.
• If you were stranded on a desert island, what would you want with you?
  A copy of James Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake.” Oh, and probably a big knife.
• What would you do during a zombie attack?
  This really depends on where I am when it goes down. I would secure the area, prevent anyone from getting in or out, and figure out what available provisions I have. I have a firm plan at my apartment, but if this happened while at work, then we’d definitely have too many people to just board ourselves up.
• Anything else you want to share?
  I think the work we do at Marketwire is very important, and we are on the forefront of a new generation of communications. I hope that we can all learn from one another so that we can collectively become the leaders in not only-traditional media, but masters of the internet. Yeah, I said “masters of the internet.”

Congratulations to you both and everyone else in Editorial who do amazing work on a daily basis.

Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day! So it’s not a legitimate holiday (you can’t take days off) but it is recognized around the world by people talking like an old-time pirate.

Of course we had to see what the world is saying about International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Arrgh!  (more…)

By Alex Hoag, Account Executive

Most mornings I start off spending a couple minutes combing through my Twitter feed. I am always finding fresh content that evokes new conversation topics to use when reaching out to potential customers. Recently, I came a across a three part series, written by Don Peppers (@DonPeppers), published by Fast Company, regarding customer service. Each article took a stab at ways to embrace customer service and inspired me to write about the importance of a consistent communication system. (more…)

Her Royal Highness, the Duchess of Cambridge, nee Kate Middleton, is on tour of  the South Pacific and the Solomon Islands with her husband Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge as part of the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations.

The tour is already being declared a success but it has been marred by the announcement by France’s Closer magazine of topless photos of the Duchess.  (more…)

By Karen Geier

Last week, we talked about getting your visual elements of branding off the ground. This week, I’m going to help you find your brand’s voice, and develop your ‘Tone and Manner’ document. (more…)

As summer wraps up, another one of our local Marketwire soccer team (football to those outside of North America) finishes their quest. The Marketwire FC team from Toronto includes Morgan Chmara, Heather Sinclair, Janelle Seto, Absal Abdulhafedh, David Black, Cam Steed, Homam Estwani, Ivan Aranda, Amir Jafary, Michael Perulli, Mike Cui, Matthew Tunzi, Clive Woodrow and Raghunath Krishnan. The team, from different departments within our organization, finished their summer quest by placing second in their Danforth Tech division from a group of eight. During their spring season the team finished fourth and as expected they are extremely happy with their summer results. Their great second place finish resulted in the team being invited to open the fall tournament to be held this weekend (September 15 –16).

Overall Standings

The team had a game every week for 8 weeks and only met once a week for their games. Understanding their roles on the team contributed to their great success.

Left to Right Top: Absal, Cam, Homam, Clive Left to Right Bottom: Ivan, Morgan, Janelle, Heather, Raghu

Left to Right Top: Amir, Ivan, Clive, Morgan, Heather, Michael Perulli, Janelle, Absal, Matthew Tunzi Bottom: Homam

Congratulations everyone on amazing team work and on your second place finish! We can’t wait to hear how your Fall Season plays out and if you are in the area, make sure you get out there and support them on their goal of finishing number one!

If your blog is hosted on Go Daddy, then you may have noticed it wasn’t working. Go Daddy was the victim of the hacktivist, Anonymous. Of course, the outage was noticed. Here’s what Sheldon Levine noticed in the social space:

Yesterday afternoon the popular domain registrar GoDaddy came under attack by a member of the hacktivist group Anonymous. This was actually an interesting attack because we’ve seen Anonymous take down websites before, but this time they managed to take out almost every website with any affiliation to GoDaddy. Not only were sites that were hosted by GoDaddy down, but even sites that were hosted somewhere else, but still used GoDaddy as their nameserver and DNS (meaning they registered their URL through GoDaddy, but point that URL to their hosting elsewhere) were out of commission. Even us here at Sysomos weren’t safe as GoDaddy provided our DNS (thankfully we’re back at 100% and didn’t miss a beat with our data collection as that happens somewhere else).

GoDaddy is the largest domain registrar in the world, with over 45 million websites, so when something like this happens, a lot of people notice. But just how many people? Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics software, we investigated.

Read more at the Sysomos blog.

The London Summer 2012 Olympic  and Paralympic games are now over. During the quiet time between these two amazing world events, Marketwire’s Mark Crocker, Tom List and Mike Burrows competed and won their very own gold medals in the BBC West London 5 – a side soccer league (football for those outside of North America).

London Wins Gold – Mark Crocker, Tom List, Michael Burrows

Playing with a couple of non-Marketwire team members, the team won their league with a maximum of 9 points which earned them the right to play in the end of the season tournament on August 22nd. With their amazing skills and start, the “chaps” were able to make it through to the semi-finals, clinching their place in the final with a 1-0 win.

The final was a closely fought battle, that ended with a penalty shoot out after normal play and extra time. Mike ‘The Power’ Burrows scored the winning goal for the team securing their gold medal win.

With sore legs, the team posed for the picture below.

The Winning Team

Congratulations guys! A true test of determination and great team work.

Mm…burgers…

In all seriousness, you can download an excellent report on the state of the fast food industry when you go to our Sysomos blog:

The global fast food business is worth more than $200 billion.  Our free Fast Food Industry Insider digs into social media conversations to discover who’s winning (and losing) the burger wars. Get the social intelligence you need for any industry with Heartbeat powered by Sysomos and give yourself a powerful competitive advantage.

You can download and read it here.

The Culture Corner is the perfect vehicle to profile Marketwire employees.  We have so many talented and creative people within our organization who not only use their talents in their day-to-day work, but they also find ways to go beyond and broden their personal horizons.  

Meet Brian Willams. Brian is a Production Support Database Administrator working from our Toronto headquarters. One of his main functions is to watch Marketwire’s database and database servers to ensure that everything is running within normal parameters by using tools like Spotlight (which reminds everyone of a Star Trek terminal) on a daily basis. If something goes wrong, it’s Brian’s duty to problem-solve the issue and put things back on track with the help of his team.

Prior to working at Marketwire, Brian lived in Bermuda where he also worked as a Database Administrator for XL RE.  Brian and his wife moved back to Toronto 3 1/2 years ago to become grand parents.

Brian loves to paint. His love for painting came from watching Bob Ross on PBS TV every Saturday morning. Brian loved the way he was able to create beautiful paintings in a mere half-hour. Though Bob Ross loves to paint in oils, Brian prefers to paint in acrylics with an Impressionist style.  His works take him between 6 and 14 hours to complete, and while Brian likes to reproduce some famous painters’ works, he also loves to create original works of art.

Brian celebrated his 25th wedding anniversary last May with a trip to Paris where he visited the Louvre, Musée d’Orsay and Musée Marmortan Monet where his love for painting grew even stronger. Brian has been married for 25 years and has two lovely children and one grandson aged 3 1/2 years.

And now for some fun facts about Brian.

• What does Beyond Words to you?
  For me, at this point it’s just words – it’s what  we DO as a company that will bring meaning to them. If we go that extra mile. If get together and work as a team that is when they will become more than just words to me.
• What is your favourite movie?
  Avatar prior to that it was The Matrix.
• What is the last book you’ve read?
  Last book of The Hunger Games, Mockingjay.
• Favourite Colour?
  Colour fascinates me — hue, chroma, value. What you call colour I call hue. But to answer the question, I really do not have a favorite colour but I do not like black.
• What’s your favourite quote?
  “If I had 1 hour to save the world. I would spend the first 50 minutes defining the problem.” - Albert Einstein
• What’s your favourite day of the week?
  Definitely Friday. Afternoon is better than morning!
• Cat or Dog?
  I love all animals but I go for dogs.
• If you could meet anyone dead or live, who would that be?
  Leonardo da Vinci
• Andriod/iOS/Windows/Blackberry?
  Definetlly iOS
• If you were stranded on a desert island, what or who would you want with you?
  I would want my family.
• If you could eat any food, what would it be?
  Indian. My wife and I cook Indian food.
• If you could travel anywhere in the world where would it be?
  France, for the art and the wine!

Thanks for sharing your story with us Brian!

The Toronto International Film Festival begins in two days. Soon the stars of the latest movies and documentaries will be here to talk about their film while the businesspeople move behind the scenes looking to secure distribution rights.

Buzz is building but does buzz lead to box office? Let’s see.  (more…)