Upcoming Business Wire Events – November 9 Edition

Join Business Wire experts in your area for media breakfasts, panel discussions and other insightful events. We bring local media members and industry thought leaders to your market to discuss today’s most relevant topics, from writing for SEO to marketing with social media. Best of all, Business Wire events are usually free of charge. Check out some of our upcoming events in your area:

Social Media ROI: Being Seen is Not Enough

Hosted by Business Wire Cleveland

Your organization has started blogging, tweeting and updating your Facebook status, but is it working? Get ready to throw out your clips, circulation numbers and impression statistics and join us for an exciting panel discussion on social media ROI measurement. Our panel of Cleveland’s most savvy social media experts will provide you with advice on setting goals for your social media campaign and arm you with the tools you will need to generate both quantitative and qualitative results. Michael DeAloia, “Tech Czar”, moderates a panel including: John Heaney, Vice President, NESCO and Principal, Orange Envelopes; Dominic Litten, Senior Account Executive, Fathom SEO; George Nemeth, Chief Blogging Officer, Brewed Fresh Daily;  and Jason Therrien, President, thunder::tech.

Thursday, November 12^th at 7:30 am ET
The City Club of Cleveland
850 Euclid Ave., Second Floor
Cleveland, OH 44114
To register: Please RSVP to Melissa Chambers at Melissa.Chambers@businesswire.com or call 800-769-0220

Meet the Media Luncheon

Hosted by Business Wire Charlotte

Mark your calendar to join Business Wire in Durham for lunch and a panel discussion regarding the best practices for corporate communications professionals within the tech/biotech community. Meet Frank Vinluan from the Triangle Business Journal as well as Tyler Dukes from News 14 Carolina and learn tips on how to pitch your company’s news. Frank Vinluan’s coverage includes Biotechnology, Life Sciences, Technology, Telecom and Utilities. Tyler Dukes is Web Producer and a freelance reporter specializing in multimedia stories about science and technology.  The panel includes: Tyler Dukes, Web Producer, News 14 Carolina; Frank Vinluan, Tech/Biotech writer, Triangle Business Journal; and Allan Maurer, Editor, TechJournal South. This event is free for Business Wire members and $10 for non-members.

Thursday, November 12^th at 11:30 am ET
Sheraton Imperial Hotel & Convention Center
4700 Emperor Blvd.
Durham, NC 27703
I-40 at Exit 282 (Page Rd.)
To register: Please RSVP to Angela Hayworth at angela.hayworth@businesswire.com or 704-347-1590

Press Releases: The Road Not Taken

Hosted by Business Wire Nashville

Need to add more life to your press release?  Since most press releases do not venture beyond plain text, the “road not taken” can earn you big media results.  Join Tonya Bowen, Regional Manager of Business Wire in this enlightening workshop where you will learn how partnering your release with multimedia, stylistic elements, and SEO techniques can make your press release live BEYOND the day trip! This event is free.

Wednesday, November 18^th at 11:30 am ET
McCormick & Schmick’s Seafood Restaurant
719 Shades Creek Parkway
Birmingham, AL 35209
To register: Please RSVP to Brent Blackburn at brent.blackburn@businesswire.com or 615.661.6123

High Performance Press Releases: Getting Your Release Found, Seen & Shared

Hosted by
Business Wire Austin
Business Wire San Antonio

Get more mileage out of your PR efforts by filling your press releases with power-boosted SEO gasoline. Join speakers Bill Leake from Apogee Search, Charla Adams from Sweet Leaf Tea and Clint Howell from Business Wire for a discussion and tips on how you can optimize your press releases to make them search engine friendly and easier to be found, seen and shared.  This event is free for Business Wire members and $20 for non-members.

Wednesday, November 18^th at 12:00 pm CT
the Gallery at Chez Zee
5406 Balcones Dr.
Austin, TX 78731
To register: Please RSVP to Barbie Dunn at Barbie.Dunn@businesswire.com or 210.527.9100

Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 12:00 pm CT
The Quarry Golf Club
444 East Basse Road
San Antonio, TX 78209
To register: Please RSVP to Barbie Dunn at Barbie.Dunn@businesswire.com or 210.527.9100

Social Media: Your Questions Answered

Hosted by Business Wire Seattle

Learn how today’s savvy experts got started in social media and what advice they have for beginners. You’ll learn valuable lessons on interacting in social mediums like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  The panel is lead by moderator Hallie Janssen, Vice President, Anvil Media, Inc. and includes Carri Bugbee, Owner, Big Deal PR, Inc.; Marshall Kirkpatrick, VP of Content Development and Lead Blogger, ReadWriteWeb; and Imelda Khoo, E-Marketing Manager of Tektronix. This event is free for Business Wire members and $20 for non-members.

Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 11:30 am PT
Governor Hotel
614 SW 11th Avenue
Portland, OR 97205
To register: Please RSVP to Lauren Linscheid at Lauren.Linscheid@businesswire.com

Postcard from a “Hired Hand” at the Berkshire Hathaway Tweeting

A few days later, my head is still spinning from attending the 2009 Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting last weekend.

As announced here last week, eight Business Wire staffers joined CEO Cathy Baron Tamraz in Omaha. Playing off the western theme, ”Warren and Charlie’s Wild West Show” us “hired hands” sold playful collectable posters with Buffett on horseback, Munger slinging a lasso and Cathy riding the range with Buffett.  All proceeds benefit CASA of Douglas County, Neb., Court Appointed Special Advocates, a charitable organization that provides a voice for abused and neglected children within the court system, and were matched by Business Wire. CASA: your check is en route.

We were lucky to score front row seats at the Qwest Center for the Q & A and shareholders’ meeting.  I guess it pays to be a “hired hand.”  For an excellent recap of the  Q & A, check out the “play-by-play” by Omaha World-Herald reporter Joe Ruff.  Joe:  Well done. 

Meanwhile, we made our own headlines with Cathy, one of only four female Berkshire CEOs, being interviewed by Fox News as well as the BBC for a future documentary.  Cathy suggested in a CNBC segment that Buffett would “calm everybody down”–and that’s what happened.  Buffett and Charlie Munger were both optimisitic about the future.  All my bosses make me proud!

Live tweeting from the meeting and our ”follow @businesswire” Twitter contest was a successful experiment, with hundreds of new, targeted followers joining our Twitter bandwagon over the few days it ran.  Leigh Fatzinger of Seattle won the poster set and provided us an interesting case study on Twitter, which we’ll share with you at a future webinar.  Leigh:  your posters are en route (after we find a tube to send them in).  Read more about Twitter lessons learned in a separate post.

For more on the Business Wire/Berkshire Hathaway Tweeting, take a look at our Twitpic feed. Please excuse any typos committed along the way.  That happens.  And thanks to our staff, shareholders and all of you for joining us.

Twitter Lessons Learned at the Berkshire Hathaway Meeting

Last weekend’s Berkshire Hathaway tweeting provided us a great communications laboratory with several lessons learned.  Talk about a case study in multiplatforms and social media.  Here’s what happened:

Last summer, Leigh Fatzinger of OMV in Seattle began following Business Wire on Twitter.  Like many companies, we jumped on  Twitter, but nobody really owned the feed and updates were few.  It’s different now, but then, no one actively tweeted, so Leigh “unfollowed” us.

OUCH. That’s like saying:  “Take me off your mailing list.”

Leigh Fatzinger

But it’s OK.  On Thursday, April 30 at 9:16 AM Central Daylight Time, we posted our plans to tweet live from the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders meeting.   In that blog post, we invited people to follow us on Twitter. Those who did would be entered in a random drawing to win a set of  collectable Warren Buffett posters available only at the meeting.

On Friday, May 1, at 1:58 PM, Lauren Linscheid in Business Wire’s Seattle office touted the blog post, ”How Tweet It is to Attend the Berkshire Hathaway meeting,” in an email blast.

Leigh saw the email.   ”I thought that was a really good headline,” said Leigh, “so I clicked on it and read all the way through to the bottom and learned about the contest.”  At 2:49 PM, Leigh began “following” us again.

On May 5, we picked Leigh’s name randomly from the 243 new followers we harvested from the contest.  We searched him online and tried to call, but the phone number we retrieved was faulty. At 11:20 AM, we followed him on Twitter and sent him the following direct message:

“Leigh, Monika Maeckle from @businesswire here.  Trying to reach u re: Warren Buffett posters u won.  Please call @ 210.527.9100. Gracias.”

I was concerned about doing this via email or Twitter because I thought Leigh might think it was dumb “You have won!” spam.  But Leigh called me within 10 minutes, we had a great conversation, and we are sending him the posters as we speak.

This is a great example of how Twitter works as one cog in the marketing wheel–which in this case utilized a press release, several blog posts, multiple emails, Twitter posts, lots of hyperlinks all around–and the good ol’ fashioned telephone.  It also illustrate other lessons.

1. The headline is really important.  Just like a press release, what you choose to put in the ‘tweet spot’ matters–even moreso when you only have 140 characters.
2. It PAYS to experiment.   The drumbeat of social media is: you must participate to understand.  It’s true.  We had no idea how this would turn out.   In this case, it worked.
3. There are no silver bullets.  All these  tools, tactics and platforms work together.  This has come up repeatedly in our webinars.  People want a single, one-size-fits-all answer.  Not gonna happen.

So…Leigh.  Congratulations to you!  And thanks for helping us learn a bit more about how to use Twitter.

How Tweet It Is to Attend the Berkshire Hathaway Meeting: Please Join us!

I drew one of the lucky straws to help represent our fine company at the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting this year.  A handful of Business Wire folks and I will accompany our CEO Cathy Baron Tamraz to Omaha this weekend, May 1 and 2.    

In preparation, I’ve waded through Snowball, the 900-page biography of Warren Buffett, the chairman of Business Wire’s parent company; boned up on Buffett trivia and quotes; and watched and read what to expect–like this profile of Buffett on Bloomberg.  Last week on vacation in West Texas, I even bought a couple of dipped cones at Dairy Queen  as a show of support for a sister Berkshire Hathaway company.

Wish you could be there?  We do, too.  That’s why Business Wire is “sharing the wealth” of our Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting experience in two ways.

First, I’ll be tweeting live from the meeting, starting on Friday, so feel free to follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/businesswire.  

I’ll start on the trade show floor helping set up our booth, and hopefully get my picture taken with Mr. Buffett (again!) when he does his walk-through.  I aim to provide updates on the annual meeting and all the hubbub associated with the bally-hooed “Woodstock for Capitalists” where more than 35,000 folks are expected.

Second, those  who become followers of  Business Wire on Twitter in the next few days will have their name put into a random drawing for a chance to win one of the limited edition Wired Wired West posters Business Wire is selling for charity.   There’s only 500 of these  coveted collectables.  The set of three posters features Buffett “the Bullett” riding shotgun on a black stallion, Buffet and Baron-Tamraz riding the range, and Charlie Munger slinging a lasso for a good cause.  Check ‘em out.  

We’ll announce the winner next week right here and on Twitter.  Hope you join us.

Round Up Your Exclusive BH Souvenir Posters for Charity

Following up on last year’s successful effort, Business Wire is again offering an exclusive commemorative item at this year’s Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder’s Meeting, being held May 2nd, 2009 in Omaha, Neb.

This year, we’ll be offering a set of three limited-edition posters, titled “Legends of the Wired Wired West,” featuring photos of Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger and Business Wire President and CEO Cathy Baron Tamraz.  The set will sell for $5, and will be available to conference attendees by stopping at the Business Wire booth.

All proceeds will once again benefit CASA of Douglas County, Neb.  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 at the Shareholders Meeting, please stop by the Business Wire booth and make a $5 donation for this worthy cause. If you’d like to donate to CASA directly, contact them online.

For a full-size look at all three of the posters in the set, take a look below the fold.

Applying Buffettisms to All Walks of Life

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett (disclosure: Business Wire is a subsidiary of Berkshire) has been called many things— the “greatest stock market investor of modern times,” for a while the richest man in the world, one of the most influential people in the world and one of the most generous and inspirational—but it’s doubtful he’s ever been called a search marketing expert.

We enjoyed this recent clever article from Steve Baldwin at Media Post’s Search Insider, relating some famous Warren Buffett quotes to major issues in search marketing (using Buffett ubiquities like “I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over” and “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get” to discuss the problems in going after the top placement on high-traffic keywords and the additional marketing intelligence value received from paid search). It’s an interesting study in Buffett’s ability to draw life lessons from different situations that can apparently be applied to just about anything.

Baldwin also chose to include another of our favorite Buffettisms, “Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it’s not going to get the business.” That one in particular applies to every form of marketing. As Warren Buffett might say, “If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”

Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders Meeting Trading Cards Still Available for Charity

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)

Raising Money for Children – BW Booth at the 08 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders Meeting

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.

Multimedia Upgrades on BusinessWire.com: New Layout, Navigation, and Video Options

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 here’s is how a You Tube embed would look like from the Business Wire Channel:




 

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.

O Canada! Business Wire’s 31st office opens in Toronto

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.

Our Toronto staff, lead by Country Manager, Roland Acheampong, and representatives from our distribution partners CanWest joined senior managers at Business Wire to host “A Conversation with Warren Buffett” moderated by our President and CEO Cathy Baron Tamraz.

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.