Where do social media and PR meet: Writing a social media press release
Wednesday, November 21st, 2012
By Anita Saidi, Senior Editor, Los Angeles
As hard financial times put a strain on many small- to medium-sized businesses, the publicity budgets seem to get smaller and smaller. So how does a small company get the most ‘bang for their buck?’ The answer to this question is not necessarily simple, but there are tools that can be utilized to stamp a company’s Social Media footprint on consumers, without the need for a huge advertising budget. (more…)
In today’s digital landscape where content, SEO and social media collide, your headline is more important than ever. Whether it’s at the top of your blog post, press release or online article, the key to grabbing attention and getting your message across is to start with a captivating headline. You not only want your news to be read, you want it to be optimized for search and easy to share. When you write your headline, you need to consider writing to accommodate search engines, social networks and human readers alike. Lofty goals for a dozen words, indeed. Here are a few quick tips to help you with your headlines:
Congratulations! You’ve just created a thought-provoking, awe-inspiring and call-to-action-laden piece of content. ROI and back-pats, here we come. But then you let it sit there. Few people read it, nobody shares it and you’re the only one who tweets it. What happened? By rights, creating content that reaches the audiences we want to reach, grabs their attention and causes them to react in a positive way should be second nature for PR professionals and marketers; it’s what we’ve been trained do. But the demand from news consumers for content that is truly useful, interesting and engaging is so great, and the need for it to be portable and customizable is so ever-present, our jobs are not always so easy. 
More and more companies have set money aside in their 2011 budgets for social media, and social media press releases (SMPRs) are increasingly included in that mix. Many communications professionals are also beginning to send out social media press releases in place of more “traditional” releases, expecting their release to go viral and soar to the top of the Google results page. The outcome is an increasing number of disappointed PR professionals who misunderstand the role that an SMPR plays in the optimization and distribution of content. 
Call it the Blog-nomenon. Blogs have become ubiquitous sources of information, from the broad to the very niche. Chances are, there’s a blog to cater to your every whim. Whether run by big journalistic behemoths (i.e., The New York Times) or one-person operations (i.e., Perez Hilton), the most influential blogs have a significant readership and brand recognition that attracts throngs of people who trust them as viable news sources. That said, pitching to bloggers has become as important — if not more so — as pitching to traditional journalists. So,how do you get your story noticed by this new breed of “journalist”? 
