July 2008

Have you checked out HARO yet? It is a great tool for PR professionals. Started by Peter Shankman as a Facebook Group, it has now gone viral.  It is a great way to become a resource for reporters looking for a source (and its getting lots of press).  If you haven’t signed up yet you should definately give it a try.

I was chatting with a client as I sipped my morning coffee today when she asked: “do you have any idea what Twitter is Malayna?”  Since that marks the third time someone has asked me that exact same question in the past 10 days, I decided it was time to answer it. (I guess that goes to prove Twitter is making a pretty big PR splash of its own!)  So, here’s a little info that might be useful if you’re interested in learning about Social Media and, more specifically, how sites like Twitter are being used by other PR professionals.

First, you might want to check out this fun-filled social media tutorial. Apparently, social media sites are more popular than porn sites! So if you didn’t want to learn more already, you should now… Read the rest of this entry »

Our New Media Releases are designed with the needs of journalists in mind. But our clients are PR professionals and we kind of like to make them happy too! One of the service features our clients appreciate the most is the back-end reporting we provide post send. We tell clients who opened their release, how many times they opened it, what links were most popular, and more. (We also tell them when there are problems so they know who did not get it.) Clients use this information in different ways: some use it for follow up calls, some to reach out to key journalists who did not open their release, some at PR firms use it to show their own clients, some simply to track what does and does not seem to be working so they can adjust accordingly over time.

Open rates, however, are a problematic metric. Read the rest of this entry »

This Press Release Grader from HubSpot is a pretty cool tool. It will analyze the links and language in your press release and give you advice about how to improve it so that it is more easily found and understood by both humans and search engines. It analyzes your links, advises you on readability and content, and provides a keyword cloud so you can see the keywords most commonly used. While technology cannot take the place of good writing and great content, this is a fun and informative tool. Enjoy!