PYSCH U2 IP

Utilizing the readings from the text and your research, provide an in-depth analysis of 3 social media platforms and how businesses are utilizing them to reach new and existing customers. Specific groups to be addressed are Generation X, Generation Y, Millennials, Baby Boomers, and 60+ market segments.

An example of a discussion idea is to research the trend toward mobility in social media and write a paper on how the different markets described in your Week 1 Individual Project use technology.

Note: Research is to be academic or professional in scope. Use of blogs, personal Web sites, corporate Web sites, wikis, or other social-media-related sources are not acceptable.

A minimum of 4 pages is required. Title and abstract pages do not count toward the page minimum. A minimum of 5 professional or academic references is required to support your paper and to provide additional discussion points.

17 VIDEO AND PODCASTING MADE EASY

Creating audio and video content for marketing and PR purposes requires the same attention to appropriate topics as other techniques outlined in this book. It requires targeting individual buyer personas with thoughtful information that addresses some aspect of their lives or a problem they face. By doing so, you brand your organization as smart and worthy of doing business with. However, unlike text-based content such as blogs or news releases, audio and video might require a modest investment in additional hardware such as microphones and video cameras, as well as software, and, depending on the level of quality you want to achieve, may also necessitate time-consuming editing of the files. Although the actual procedures for podcasting and video are a bit more convoluted than, say, starting a blog, they are still not all that difficult.

Video and Your Buyers

Organizations that deliver products or services that naturally lend themselves to video have been among the first to actively use the medium to market and deliver information about their offerings. For example, many churches routinely shoot video of weekly services and offer it online for anyone to watch, drawing more people into the congregation. Many amateur and professional sports teams, musicians, and theater groups also use video as a marketing and PR tool.

Video follows both blogs and podcasting on the adoption curve at organizations that don't have a service that naturally lends itself to video. 303Companies are certainly experimenting, typically by embedding video (hosted at YouTube or another video site) into their existing blogs and online media rooms. I'm also seeing video snippets of CEO speeches, customer interviews, and quick product demonstrations.

Business-Casual Video

In the United States, there has been a 20-year trend toward so-called business-casual clothing in the workplace. My first job, on Wall Street in the 1980s, required me to wear a suit and tie wi

18 HOW TO USE NEWS RELEASES TO REACH BUYERS DIRECTLY

Guess what? Press releases have never been exclusively for the press. My first job in the mid-1980s was on a Wall Street trading desk. Every day, I would come to work and watch the Dow Jones Telerate and Reuters screens as they displayed specialized financial data, economic information, and stock prices. The screens also displayed news feeds, and within these news feeds were press releases. For decades, financial market professionals have had access to company press releases distributed through Business Wire, PR Newswire, and other electronic press release distribution services. And they weren't just for publicly traded corporations; any company's release would appear in trading rooms within seconds.

I distinctly remember traders intently watching the newswires for any signs of market-moving events. Often the headline of a press release would cause frenzy: “Did you see? IBM is acquiring a software company!” “It's on the wire; Boeing just got a 20-plane order from Singapore Airlines!” For years, markets often moved and stock prices rose and fell based on the press release content issued directly by companies, noton the news stories written minutes or hours later by reporters from newswire outlets like Reuters and Dow Jones (and later Bloomberg).

Press releases have also been available to professionals working within corporations, government agencies, and law firms, all of which have had access to press releases through services like those from NewsEdge, Dow Jones, and LexisNexis. These services have been delivering press releases to all kinds of professionals for competitive intelligence, research, discovery, and other purposes for decades.

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And since about 1995, the wide availability of the web has meant that press releases have been available for free to anyone with an Internet connection and a web browser.

Millions of people read press releases directly, unfiltered by the media. You need to be speaking directly.

YOUR NEWSROOM: A FRONT DOOR FOR MUCH MORE THAN THE MEDIA

The online newsroom (sometimes called a press room, media room, or press page) is the part of your organization's website that you create specifically for the media. In some organizations, this section is simply a list of news releases with contact information for the organization's PR person. But many companies and nonprofits have elaborate newsrooms with a great deal of information available in many different formats: audio, video, photos, news releases, background information, financial data, and much more. A close cousin to the newsroom is the online investor relations (IR) room that many public companies maintain; however, I don't cover IR sites in this book.

Before I give you ideas on how to create a valuable newsroom of your own, I want you to consider something that is vitally important: All kinds of people visit your newsroom, not just journalists. Stop and really let that soak in for a moment. Your buyers are snooping around your organization by visiting the media pages on your website. Your current customers, partners, investors, suppliers, and employees all visit those pages. Why is that? Based on casual research I've done (I often speak about visitor statistics with employees who are responsible for their organizations' newsrooms), I'm convinced that when people want to know what's currentabout an organization, they go to a newsroom.

Your newsroom is for your buyers, not just the media.

329Visitors expect that the main pages of a website are basically static (i.e., they are not updated often), but they also expect that the news releases and media-targeted pages on a site will reveal the very latest about a company. For many companies, the news release section is one of the most frequently visited parts of the website. Check out your own website statistics; you may be amazed at how many visitors are already reading your news releases and other media pages online.

So I want you to do something that many traditional PR people think is nuts. I want you to design your newsroom for your buyers. By building a media room that targets buyers, you will not only enhance those pages as a powerful marketing tool but also make a better media site for journalists. I've reviewed hundreds of newsrooms, and the best ones are built with buyers in mind. This approach may sound a bit radical, but believe me, it works.

When news releases are posted on your site, search engine crawlers will find the content, index it, and rank it based on words, phrases, and other factors. Because news release pages update more often than any other part of a typical organization's website, search engine algorithms (tuned to pay attention to pages that update frequently) tend to rank news release pages among the highest on your site, driving traffic there first.

“There's no question that a well-organized media room often has higher search results and drives more traffic because of the way the search engines work,” says Dee Rambeau, vice president of customer engagement at PR Newswire. “A news release dynamically builds out a new set of content in your newsroom, with each news release generating its own indexable page, which the search engines all capture. Google and the other search engines love fresh content that relates back to similar content on the other pages of the site. Aggressive companies take advantage of this by sending news releases frequently to get high rankings from the search engines. Frequency has a great deal to do with search engine rankings—if you do 10 news releases, that's great; 20 is better, and 100 is better still.”

The Kellogg Company—the world's leading producer of cereal and second-largest producer of cookies, crackers, and savory snacks—uses its newsroom 1 for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes and as a tool to reach various audiences, including reporters and editors who cover the company.

“What we found through our research is that, more and more, our newsroom is extending beyond just media to other stakeholders,” says Stephanie Slingerland, senior manager of corporate communications at the Kellogg Company. “Anyone coming to the site, be it an investor, an NGO or other partner agency, or even a consumer—the newsroom is inviting for them to get the information which may be relevant.”

Slingerland has strong partnerships with people who work in other departments at the company and who also provide information to the public. “Our investor relations team are having conversations and engagements with analysts and investors. So, from our partnership with that team, we know what those stakeholders might be looking for. Or, for example, our government relations team are regularly engaging with government and nongovernmental officials. Again, we have a strong partnership with them. We know what they're looking for and can make sure that they have what they might be looking for on our site. The same with our corporate social responsibility team, who engage with agencies and others as part of our philanthropic activities.”

Based on what she learns about the needs of the news media and other stakeholders, Slingerland creates the right content, including news releases, fact sheets, news alerts, and more. “Since we are the folks that regularly engage with the media, we know what we're getting asked for over and over, like the fact sheet section,” she says. “And we also know that many people want to know the latest news about the company, but they don't necessarily come to our newsroom every day. So that's why we created our news alerts section, so they opt in to be alerted whenever

One important consideration that many marketing and PR people overlook when considering the benefits of a newsroom is that you control the content, not your IT department, webmaster, or anyone else. Youshould design your newsroom as a tool to reach buyers and journalists, and you don't need to take into consideration the rules for posting content that the rest of the organization's site may require. If you build this part of your site using a specialized newsroom content-management application, such as the MediaRoom 2 product from PR Newswire, you will control a corner of your organization's website that you can update whenever you like using simple tools, and you won't need to request help from anyone in other departments or locations. So start with your needs and the needs of your buyers and journalists, not the needs of those who own the other parts of your organization's website.

Start with a Needs Analysis

When designing a new newsroom (or planning an extensive redesign), start with a needs analysis. Before you just jump right into site aesthetics and the organization of news releases, take time to analyze how the site fits into your 332larger marketing, PR, and media relations strategy. Consider the buyer persona profiles you built as part of your marketing and PR plan. Talk with friendly journalists so you can understand what they need. Who are the potential users of the newsroom, and what content will be valuable to them? When you have collected some information, build buyers' and journalists' needs into your newsroom.

As you work toward starting your design, try to think a bit more like a publisher and less like a marketing and PR person. A publisher carefully identifies and defines target audiences and then develops the content required to meet the needs of each distinct demographic. Graphical elements, colors, fonts, and other visual manifestations of the site are also important but should take a backseat during the content needs analysis process.