5 Best Practices For Online Press Releases

Public Relations means all the actions to build up a constructive relationship with your target group and stakeholders through information and dialogue.

The best way to do this is to detect your opinion leaders (journalists, politicians, organizations,…) and to build up, maintain and strengthen your relationship with them. Or by communicating directly with your target group.

You can inform your public in many different ways but in this article I want to specifically talk about PR 2.0 or Online PR.

And how the digital age has augmented the range for your news and therefore increased your possibilities. But do not delude yourself, this only works if you do it right!

The digitalization also means information overload. At this moment the art is to stand out from the crowd and to let those that you want to notice your message.

When you create an article make sure it is newsworthy. 

Press releases

In the field of PR it is very common to send out press releases (an official statement sent to media outlets providing detailed information about an event the company wants to get into the news like a new product launch,…).

There are some best practices for press releases you should consider both online as offline.

But specifically for online press releases we have got some tips for you:

1. SEO Press releases

As told before the digital era makes it more difficult to make others notice your press releases. That is why you should consider SEO in creating your press release.

SEO means that you have to include keywords, an anchor text, internal links on your website, video’s, images. But the real challenge is to write a natural text when using SEO for press releases.

2. Inform bloggers

Before you send out the news through other channels, inform important and relative bloggers (Bloggers with a lot of followers probably gained a certain online status and are considered to be credible).

First you should find influential blogs and web sites in your niche to spread the word. Sign in to their RSS feeds and keep up with the topics they write about.

Comment on influential blogs (if you can add value) and let people get to know you. Then send your press releases to influential bloggers so they can spread your messageThe good news is, smaller blogs copy bigger blogs. When you enable your blog with pings and trackbacks a comment will be placed in the entry on your blog when another blogger links to a blog entry on your website.

3. Google news

Foresee your e-news with the right headers, short sentences, hyperlinks because Google News seeks specifically for news articles on your website.

4. The World Wide Web

Tell your own story through your own website and others and don’t forget e-zines. These topics do better in search results than the own corporate news site. The more relevant your content, the more credible you ought to be.

5. The Social Network

Note that lots of journalists are on Twitter. So why shouldn’t you? And because of new media there are loads of possibilities regarding texts, images, videos, sound.

Channels like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are very powerful tools. The difference with the past is that now there is a two-way traffic.

Modern monitoring of press coverage

When you want a decent public relations management, you have to keep up with what people are saying about your company on websites, forums, blogs,…

By monitoring these channels you can analyze this. Fortunately through the internet it is much easier and cheaper than ever to monitor.

Monitoring steps:

• Determine what you want to monitor? It goes further than key word tracking. You can monitor: your company name, key employees’ names, trademarks you own, competitors names, key search engine phrases,…
• Monitoring tools:
  • Through RSS you can keep track of web sites without having to visit them. You just need a feed reader (Google Reader is free).
  • Technorati is a blog search engine where you can track down mentions of your favorite topics,…
  • Google Alerts = to know when your company or product is mentioned in the major news or blogs.
  • Ofcourse you can appeal to other tools and external experts like Engagor, twitterserve, trackur,… = toknow when PEOPLE mention your product of company
• When people are talking about you, the next step is to rank them and to think about how to respond.

Thank in a short message for favorable comments. Be careful responding to negative comments, don’t be too defensive.

• For more tips about how to measure the effect and return of investment of Public relations in the press read the article the future of PR (in the digital era).

Sources:
Eley, B. & Tilley, S. 2009, Online Marketing Inside Out, Sitepoint Pty. Ltd.
http://www.extendlimits.nl/nieuws/artikel/social_media_revolutie_deel_ii/
http://www.eurib.org/index.php?id=235
www.cim.be: Centrum voor Informatie over de Media
www.mm.be: Media Marketing