Just back from Omaha and the Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders Meeting. It was Business Wire’s third meeting as a Berkshire Hathaway company and each year seems to get better and better.
In addition to getting to talk with so many Berkshire shareholders, this year we created a set of limited edition trading cards that we sold to raise money for a very important charity, CASA of Douglas County, Nebraska, an organization that provides a voice for abused and neglected children within the court system.
The cards (six different ones) feature photos of Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger and BW’s Cathy Baron Tamraz, along with quotes from each. We’re proud to say that so far we’ve raised $5,000 for the cause. We do have a few more sets available that you can order if you weren’t able to get to Omaha.
To order your set, please send a $10 check for each set to Business Wire (it’s fully tax-deductible - we’ll send you a receipt) with a self-addressed stamped return envelope to:
Business Wire
c/o Trading Cards for CASA
4100 Newport Place, Suite 530
Newport Beach, CA 92660
(Add: Business Wire CEO Cathy Baron Tamraz was interviewed on Fox Business News this morning talking about the cards, A-Rod and CASA)
At this year’s Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders Meeting, Business Wire has put together a series of six commemorative trading cards featuring quotes and photos of Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger and Cathy Baron Tamraz as well as “stats” on Business Wire. The cards are dated to mark this year’s BH shareholders meeting on May 3, 2008.
With these cards, we’re raising money for CASA of Douglas County, Nebraska.CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) is a charitable organization that provides a voice for abused and neglected children within the court system. So if you’re in Omaha on Saturday at the Shareholders Meeting, please stop by the Business Wire booth and make a $10 donation for this worthy cause. If you’d like to donate to CASA directly, contact them online.
We have a limited number of these cards, so they are available only at our booth at this time and on a first-come basis.
The SEC on Wednesday issued a Sunshine Act notice that on Monday, April 21, there will be an SEC Open Meeting to consider a possible rule for interactive data, also known as XBRL. The text of the rule itself will be published shortly after the meeting and we of course will keep you updated as to what develops.
Update: The SEC has changed the date of this meeting to Thursday Wednesday, May 14. The reason given in the SEC notice: “At times, changes in Commission priorities require alterations in the scheduling of meeting items.”
Curious clients have posed the following question of late : “Do you go to Technorati?”
Well, not exactly. ”Going” to Technorati is a misnomer, since what Technorati does is index blog content, not press releases.
Take the blog post you are now reading. When I hit the “publish” button, the clever WordPress interface I’m using sends a message–or “ping”–to Technorati and other blog search engines. When blog search engines receive the ping, they deploy a “spider,” or automated search program to come see what’s new.
That content is then indexed against all the other content competing for your attention. The order in which the blog search engine results are served up is based on hundreds of variables–things like in- and out-bound links, how many clicks those links are getting, what authority the blog has, how long it’s been around, how frequently it’s updated, and a slew of ever-changing factors.
So: does Business Wire and EON Enhanced Online News “go” to Technorati? You mean do press releases sent on Business Wire and EON: Enhanced Online News–or any wire service for that matter–show up in the Technorati blog search engine results?
Only if bloggers reference the content in the context of a blog post.
The goal of the professional communicator should be to engage the blogosphere to write (preferably positively) about your company or organization. Press releases, well-done, are a powerful tool for accomplishing just that.
P.S. Communicators who want to guarantee that their press releases are indexed by Technorati and other blog search engines should start their own blogs, follow best SEO practices, and figure out relevant ways to work their press release content into them.
We came across this interesting blog post by John Palizza, Rice University instructor and founding partner of Palizza Partners who was prepping for his investor relations class. His post provides a summary of various research findings related to investor relations and disclosure practices. Here’s a highlight: “improvements in the quality and quantity of voluntary disclosures improves a stock’s share price, trading volumes and narrows the bid - ask spread. The result of all this is increased liquidity and decreased volatility.”
There are a number of additional conclusions he draws about IR as it relates to the size of the company as well as the positive effects of having an ongoing, transparent investor relations effort. Very interesting. (apologies for errors in the original post - TB)
Four days at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) yielded many lessons for this recently appointed Vice President of New Media. Apart from ubiquitous guitar hero contests and a ride in a simulated racecar that was so real I got carsick, the panels and discussions at the annual interactive and gaming festival taught me alot.
Here’s some insights:
1. The Geek Nation can be brutal. The audience at the Mark Zuckerburg keynote was vicious in attacks on Sarah Lacy, the hair-twirling valleygirl journalist whose interview with the Facebook founder provoked an unforgiving backchannel on Twitter, the microblogging and social networking service. While Lacy deserved criticism for misjudging her audience and a flirty approach, the ambush seemed a bad fit for her ”crime” of being lame. As Catherine B. Taylor of Social Media Insider pondered: “…is this…the punishment we can expect…for a particularly bad day at the office?” The episode has made me reconsider Twitter.
2. With new and social media it’s all about YOU. Kathy Sierra’s presentation, “How to Create Passionate Users,” explained that what customers think of you or your company doesn’t matter. What’s important is how your products and services make customers feel. A tad Maya Angelou, perhaps, but Kathy’s example of the typical Help Desk experience provoking either an accepting “Ooops!” or angry ”You bastards!” from users proves her case.
3. Social media will have it THEIR way (an extension of Insight #2 above), OR they will leave. One FAQ: what to do when the boss “just doesn’t get” that social media takes time? In four separate sessions, social media marketers bemoaned the “glacial” pace of change in their companies, wondering how to convince the boss to be patient with social media initiatives.
Advice from the experts: “Life’s too short. Go work for somebody who understands.”
4. Content or Context as King? Multiple sessions touched on the back-to-the-future notion that once again, content rules. Valuable content, well written, appropriately distributed reaps audience. When Social Media Club founder Chris Heuer and I debated this over beers at the Dell Lounge, Chris pointed out, “No, Monika. CONTEXT is king.”
For public relations and investor relations folks working on international press release outreach, we offer a Tips & Tools section on our site that might help. Our International Media Tips post features “The Three T’s – Targeting, Timing and Translations.”
Knowing where, when and how to send your press releases means you’ll reach audiences worldwide more efficiently.These tips, assembled by our in-house international media experts, helps guide you about the differences among our international circuits, what time to release your news for optimum impact, and how to factor translations into your plans.
For more information on any of our international services, contact your local Business Wire bureau – no matter where in the world you are!
We’re happy to announce our new multi-platform widgets we’ve developed with Netvibes.
Netvibes offers personalized homepages to users where they can easily aggregate all of their RSS feeds, widgets, and other content in one place. To many Business Wire users Netvibes is a familiar name: in 2007 we’ve launched our Business Wire Netvibes Universe offering our various feeds and widgets; have been featured in the Netvibes directory and ecosystem; and offer Netvibes subscription options on our RSS page.
Netvibes just launched its new platform, Ginger, that adds a social networking layer to Netvibes pages. So from now on, Netvibes users can share their entire Netvibes page itself (aka Universe) with their contacts. This means that their friends can see what kinds of feeds they are following, what interesting widgets they use, what networks they’re on, and more — allowing users to discover new content and websites through their friends. Users can also proactively share modules and widgets with others. While of course not every user wants all their contacts to see what they read and watch online, this is a great offering for many who wish to share and discover new interesting content sources.
In conjunction with the new Ginger launch, we partnered with Netvibes again to create a series of four new Business Wire widgets. Each of the new widgets offers up to 15 unique content categories from Business Wire, including multimedia news and various types of feeds by industry, subject, and language. Another great feature of the new widgets is that they are compatible across platforms like Windows Vista and Live, Apple Dashboard, Opera, and iGoogle. We’re very excited about the new widgets as this makes it easier for more users to access Business Wire content in the format and platform of their choosing. As an official launch partner, our premium widgets are also featured in the new Ginger directory, as can be seen in the image below:
Please feel free to give both Ginger and our new widgets a test drive and let us know what you think. Simply follow this link or the bookmarklet below and click to add one of our widgets to your page. To keep the widget there whenever you return, you’ll need to login or sign up for a Netvibes account.
Why? Because in the contest to appear more-social-media-savvy-than-thou, some industry pros are losing sight of what matters most when it comes to press releases: good writing and valuable content. After that, appropriate delivery gets your message heard.
Judging from the roiling conversation around the “social media release,” you might think that press release results are all about the technology–that sharing chicklets, trackbacks, multimedia and tags are a PR panacea.
We at Business Wire and EON: Enhanced Online News don’t buy that. We believe a well-written story, distributed through appropriate channels, gets your message across.
That DOES NOT MEAN press release content shoved inappropriately into social media networks and two-way conversations. Crashing the party and interrupting conversations has never worked for me in the past…how ’bout you?
In our webinars, we educate attendees on how new media tools apply to press releases, reminding them that tapping into social networks requires time, energy and understanding. That’s why it’s called “networking,” which applies online just as it does in person.
At a PRSA meeting, you wouldn’t barge into a group of people you don’t know, shouting “Have you seen our new product?!? It’s really great! You should buy it!”
You wouldn’t.
Rather, you’d listen, find common ground, start a conversation, develop rapport, cultivate a relationship…and maybe, just maybe…hours, days or weeks later, propose some sort of contact.
Making releases more web friendly can increase a release’s Web traction, no doubt about it. And surely you won’t be surprised to learn that IMHO Business Wire and EON: Enhanced Online News offer the best tools on the planet for delivering press releases to their appropriate audiences.
That said, even OUR superior technology is incidental to the content and the writing.
After discussing our overall website redesign in an earlier post, in this post we’ll focus on our new multimedia features on BusinessWire.com.
If you work in PR, Advertising, Marketing, or any kind of function that has to do with communicating with audiences, you’ve probably noticed already how important online multimedia has become in organizations’ new communications mix. At Business Wire we’ve had front row seats to see how a lot of companies started changing their online multimedia strategies in recent years. As a result we’ve been continuously updating our own offerings to best assist professional communicators and make sure we help them reach the audiences they look for in the best possible ways.
As part of our efforts, earlier this week we announced three new features that make multimedia a lot more visible on our site, allow our various user groups to easily find the kind of multimedia they need, and improve the user experience, sharing options, and measurement around video.
New Multimedia Gallery on the Press Release Page:
The first change we announced is placing the entire multimedia gallery on the press release page. While traditionally in our industry multimedia was often considered a separate part of the press release — placed in specific sections of websites where users needed to navigate to especially — we at Business Wire have shown the first two multimedia assets on the press release page itself, and then linked those to the full multimedia gallery. However, experience has taught us that internet users are busy and overburdened with information. Unless users absolutely need something, they often won’t go out of their way to look for it. Also, when forced to navigate several levels deep on a website, some users may drop out in the process. Therefore we decided to bring multimedia directly to the user and make sure all the multimedia associated with a press release is immediately visible to all, without having to navigate away from the press release page.
The screenshot above shows how our full multimedia gallery is now an inseparable part of our clients’ press releases. Whether a release goes out with just one or two multimedia assets, or with a full set of photos, videos, audio files, logos, or pdfs, all those assets from now on are immediately visible to anyone looking at our client’s release, from the first moment they land on the page. This leads to much greater exposure to each asset, that ultimately can increase media and blogger pick-up.
New Web2.0-style navigation:
Showing all multimedia was just the first step though: as many of our clients know, Business Wire serves multiple constituents. We serve journalists, who often need high quality multimedia to download and repurpose for their stories. We have increasing usage by bloggers, who want to embed multimedia on their blogs and link to other sites; we have end-users who simply want to see an image or play a video without saving any files; and then there are also analysts, traders, industry executives, and so on.
Our goal at Business Wire is to be able to serve all of these audiences in the right way so they are able to quickly and easily find what they’re looking for. So in order to give our users all the variants they need: hi resolution, low resolution, thumbnail, etc. or various video and audio variants, while minimizing the amount of navigation layers on our site, we’ve introduced new web2.0-style navigation menus for multimedia.
So now, when a user hovers on the thumbnail of a multimedia asset, they get all the options in a new menu that opens right there and then, whatever it is they’re looking for. Journalists can easily access high resolution downloadable multimedia files, bloggers can quickly find embeddable and linkable media, and end-users enjoy immediate viewing options. And the best part is that all these options are now only one click away from any press release, improving the user experience, helping drive more traffic to our clients’ multimedia, and once again, increasing the likelihood of gaining more pick-up.
New Video Player:
Finally, let’s focus on video: for several years Business Wire has been publishing videos using popular download formats such as Quicktime, Windows Media, and Real Media in several file sizes for users who needed to save and repurpose full files. We’ve also made all videos available on sharing sites such as YouTube, MySpace Video, Google Video, and Blip.tv, which is a great consumer-facing benefit, but is still a separate part of our site, and therefore provides a different kind of usage environment, and no unified measurement. So we decided to introduce our own branded video player that quickly and easily plays content from our site to end-users, can be embedded by bloggers on their own sites, and provides our clients with additional measurement in the reports we generate. And of course, we continue to make all videos available on leading video sharing sites. So now any user can easily play content distributed via Business Wire in the destination and format of their choosing, whether it is on YouTube or on BusinessWire.com, and whether by playing directly or downloading for other purposes. And the data from our own video player and downloadable files is easily shown in the measurement reports we provide clients.
So for example, here is where users can find all of Business Wire’s multimedia for a specific press release on our own site.
And finally, here is an example blog showing how the Business Wire embedded player would look like on another blog:
With a full multimedia gallery on the press release page, new web2.0 navigation menus offering 1-click access to all multimedia, and our new branded video player, we’re putting multimedia in the forefront so our clients can take full advantage of these benefits. We encourage you to check out the new features, and as always, feel free to let us know what you think. If you have questions on the best ways to utilize multimedia for your next release, don’t hesitate to drop us a line or call your local Business Wire representative.
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Berkshire Hathaway, Business Wire | Tagged: Berkshire Hathaway, Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders Meeting, Business Wire, CASA, Charity, Children's Charity, Collectibles, Fundraiser, Omaha, Trading Cards, Warren Buffett | 
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Posted by Tom Becktold, SVP Marketing, Business Wire
CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) is a charitable organization that provides a voice for abused and neglected children within the court system. So if you’re in Omaha on Saturday at the Shareholders Meeting, please stop by the Business Wire booth and make a $10 donation for this worthy cause. If you’d like to donate to 
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