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.
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.
When you are new in town, sometimes you opt for the low key ‘get to know us’ approach and sometimes you pull out all the stops and throw the bash that lets everyone know you have arrived.
Business Wire’s opening of our office in Toronto definitely falls into the latter category.
The Canadian press and financial community have been an important component of Business Wire’s delivery for decades. We have served Canadian clients and public relations professionals there for years and we are gratified now to be officially part of the community.
Following a successful soft launch in December, we are glad to officially announce our new website upgrade. Over the next few blog posts we’ll discuss the changes we made on our site. The overarching theme of all these updates is making the content we distribute on behalf of our clients as accessible as possible to all the different user groups who look for it, and in the ways they look for it. First, our new and improved website design and accessibility.
So how is the new website design different and better now? Here’s what we did:
Redesign:
After successfully introducing a few new international websites in 2007, we were ready to shower our main website with some additional attention as well. So in order to make the site look more up-to-date we decided to make it a bit cleaner, less cluttered, and make more effective use of white space. We’ve also reorganized some of our pages in a way that makes important content visible to those looking for it, and in a way that fits the ways in which they look for it. Below is a screen grab of the new homepage design:
In addition to the improved look-and-feel, the new homepage structure strikes a good balance between offering news content and highlighting Business Wire’s key products and services. It highlights various important products such as our PR, IR, and Media services, while still displaying our news feed in a visible place on the page. It also highlights more clearly many important features such as our RSS links, tradeshow news, Business Wire’s own news, and more. This updated look and structure extends to our internal pages as well. Here is a screenshot of our new Products and Services section:
Search and User Visibility:
On the accessibility front, we’ve updated our website code to include improved labeling and tagging of different parts of our pages, in order to make it easier for search engines to spider our content; made it simpler and leaner under the hood so that pages load faster; optimized the site for some newer versions of web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari; and switched to a unified URL structure that also makes our content more search friendly and enables more accurate traffic measurement. All these increase the likelihood of our clients’ press releases showing up higher in search results, and of users being able to more easily and quickly access our clients’ releases.
Search Engine Optimization is a moving target, and there are no silver bullets. However, we continuously enhance our SEO efforts. Examples of this include offering our EON: Enhanced Online News search and social-media-ready platform; continuously providing our clients with tips and best practices on how to better communicate in the new media landscape and make their content as web-friendly as possible; and helping clients understand how to combine SEO efforts across press releases, new online services, and their own websites. Our continuous upgrades, like the one we’ve announced today, is another example of how keep making our content as accessible as possible. We encourage you to check out our new site design, and as usual, feel free to let us know what you think.
The official press release is here. Stay tuned for more on our multimedia and sharing updates.
As the blogsphere establishes itself as a meaningful and reliable source of information — with some tech, media, and political blogs wielding as much influence as, if not more than, some traditional media outlets in certain areas — we at Business Wire are happy to see that we are still able to continually serve both worlds well.
A recent journalist survey by the Arketi Group found that news releases are used by 90% of business journalists as sources for story ideas, sharing the top spot with industry sources. 54% of journalists mentioned they currently use blogs for story ideas, while 84% said they may report on stories that originated from blogs.
A larger survey with a slightly different focus, conducted by PR industry news site Bulldog Reporter and online newsroom provider TEKGroup (fair disclosure: all the above mentioned companies have ties with Business Wire), shows that 69% of journalists follow at least one blog regularly, 44% visit social media sites at least monthly, 37% are subscribed to at least one RSS feed, and 20% actively seek multimedia content from companies at least once a month. (this survey also shows some different data on commercial wire services. Michael Tangeman of Media Mindshare makes a few interesting observations on methodology and findings).
Finally, the recently published Techmeme Leaderboard, which ranks websites based on how frequently their stories appear on Techmeme’s increasingly popular technology news application, places Business Wire as its 24th highest source for news (as of the writing of this post), with similar ranking to traditional news organizations as the Wall Street Journal and the BBC, and blogs such as Search Engine Land and PaidContent.org.
In recent years Business Wire has put substantial effort into enhancing our multimedia capabilities for video, audio, and photo distribution; enabling our EON: Enhanced Online News search-optimized platform; introducing social media sharing features; reaching new-media sites and platforms; and creating robust RSS offerings. These initiatives are intended to help our clients reach end-consumers directly, interact with the blogsphere, and reach the young and young-at-heart generations of journalists who use new technologies and new media as tools and resources for their work.We are thrilled to see that these efforts are paying off with both new and traditional media, as indicated by the Arketi and Bulldog Reporter/TEKGroup surveys and Techmeme’s Leaderboard.
Malcolm Atherton, our eloquent and new-media-savvy account executive, who is one of the strong proponents of our digital media offerings, provides some great info in an interview with podcast site Rocky Mountain Voices during the recent Blogging for Business conference in Salt Lake City. Malcolm sums it all up fantastically. Check it out:
Posted by Ken Zamkow, Director of Product Development, Business Wire
It takes a special person to sport decades of wisdom and experience with the agility to climb into the crow’s nest and see what’s coming, but Business Wire’s Laura Sturaitis makes that rare combo seem pedestrian.
For years Laura has led us by the hand through the changing landscape of mainstream media, multimedia, new media and most recently, social media. NOTE TO LAURA: You are one able tour guide!
Laura’s can-do attitude, boundless energy, and level-headed thinking have been instrumental in bringing some of Business Wire’s most successful products to market–like our Smart News Release and EON: Enhanced Online News. And her openess to new ideas grounded in wisdom-based-on-experience constitute a killer app that’s taking Business Wire to the next place.
Congratulations to our dear friend and colleague as she tackles the newly created position of Senior Vice President Media Services & Product Strategy. None of us who know her, love her and work with her have any doubt that Laura will make this latest adventure a success.
With Business Wire now a member of the Berkshire Hathaway (Fortune #12) family, Chief Financial Officer role takes on heightened significance. That’s why after an extensive search, Business Wire has hired Geff Scott to fill that extraordinarily important position.
A partner with Bay-area firm of Marinelli + Scott, LLP since 1992, Geff brings impressive credentials to his new role, including extensive experience in financial reporting, regulatory compliance, taxes and audits.
Geff previously worked at KPMG on the audit engagements of clients in various public and private industries, including SEC registrants, banks, savings and loans, high tech and venture capital firms.
The question of reliable disclosure in the changing media landscape, as well as that of journalistic standards in the blogsphere, was underscored this week when technology blog/magazine Engadget sent Apple stocks tumbling as a result of an email hoax.
On May 16 Engadget published on its site that they “have it on authority” that Apple pushed back the release date of its iPhone from June to October, and its new Leopard operating system from October to January 2008.
This news was enough to send Apple stocks sliding 4.3% in under six minutes, from $107.89 to $103.42, wiping out nearly $4 Billion of Apple’s market cap.
Later that day Apple clarified that both the iPhone and Leopard were on track. Engadget then told its readers the source it acted upon was an internal Apple email that turned out to be a hoax. Apple stocks recovered mostly later in the day.
It is unclear yet where the bogus email originated from, and whether Engadget tried at all to verify or cross-check the information prior to posting. What is clear however, is that the dissemination and publication of potentially market moving information is just as sensitive an issue as it has always been, and in fact even more so given the variety of new and immediate media available to both users and publishers. The iPhone hoax underscores how corporations bear the responsibility to disseminate their news in a consistent and trustworthy fashion that cannot easily be exploited by stock manipulators and pranksters. It also highlights the fact that new media outlets and bloggers bear the same responsibility as traditional journalists to verify the facts behind their statements.
Greetings from Omaha and the 2007 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders Meeting. We’re excited to be participating for our second year as a wholly owned Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary. I was lucky enough to be one of the Business Wire representatives last year and am excited to be back again this year along with our CEO Cathy Baron Tamraz, our co-COOs Gregg Castano and Phyllis Dantuono, VP Lee Marshall and sales manager Mike Ziskin.
In addition to getting to hear and see Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger discuss the state of the company, it’s really amazing to catch the interaction between them and shareholders, answering questions for hours and hours. For us, it’s also exciting to meet so many Berkshire Hathaway shareholders — thousands attend – first hand and interact with them, answering questions and listening to their ideas.
Often called the “Woodstock of Capitalism”, it all kicks into high gear for us tomorrow at 6 am.
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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 
Our Toronto staff, lead by Country Manager, 
For years Laura has led us by the hand through the changing landscape of mainstream media, multimedia, new media and most recently, social media. NOTE TO LAURA: You are one able tour guide!
With Business Wire now a member of the Berkshire Hathaway (Fortune #12) family, Chief Financial Officer role takes on heightened significance. That’s why after an extensive search, Business Wire has hired Geff Scott to fill that extraordinarily important position. 
Greetings from Omaha and the 2007 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders Meeting. We’re excited to be participating for our second year as a wholly owned Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary. I was lucky enough to be one of the Business Wire representatives last year and am excited to be back again this year along with our CEO Cathy Baron Tamraz, our co-COOs Gregg Castano and Phyllis Dantuono, VP Lee Marshall and sales manager Mike Ziskin.
