Business Wire and Bloomberg Toronto Host Talk with Bureau Chief David Scanlan

On June 25th, Business Wire Toronto hosted a seminar at Bloomberg’s Toronto office—home to a spectacular view of the Toronto skyline—where Bloomberg Bureau Chief David Scanlan spoke to a crowd of more than 30 of Toronto’s top-tier PR and IR professionals about how to craft an effective press release.

David’s talk focused on five “F” factors that increase the likelihood of press releases being noticed by Bloomberg’s reporters.

1. First Word: Bloomberg prides itself on being a high-caliber new service. Help their reporters to be the first ones to get your news out by writing a factual, concise release.
2. Fastest Word: When you or your client has company news, get it out to the media as soon as possible.
3. Factual Word: This one speaks for itself, but David encourages total transparency, too.
4. Future Word: Get the word out of what’s in the pipeline and include date and time of your next financials, upcoming events, etc. Reporters love this!
5. Final Word: Make sure your release is thorough. Don’t leave anything out or any unanswered questions.

Additionally, David passed along a few extra special tips to the group:

• Use charts and use them as close to the top of your release as possible, especially when it comes to financials. All reporters want to know if your profits are up or down, by what percentage over the previous year and why.
• Distinguish between U.S. and Canadian currency. Don’t assume it’s obvious, it’s always better to be clear.
• And finally, write your release like you were talking to someone on the street about it. “Hey, you’re never going to believe what happened…”

Our thanks again to David and the Bloomberg Toronto office for a great event!

Local Business Wire offices host several events each year on PR, IR, SEO & media topics.  Check out the Business Wire Events page to find upcoming events in your area.

Follow Business Wire events on Twitter! Hash tag #bwevents

Press Release Case Study #1: Lessons Learned From Texas Armoring Corporation

We had such a successful webinar last week on press release case studies that I thought I’d recap and suggest ”lessons learned” from each case.

For those who missed our webinar, we took five recent press releases and asked our clients:

1.  What was the goal of the press release?

2.  Did the press release meet or exceed expectaions?  and,

3.  Was it worth it?

All five clients answered the above questions ”YES.”  Each example featured a great story, well told, and smartly distributed.  In our webinar poll, Texas Armoring Corporation won the “readers’ choice” for favorite case study of the five presented. 

No surprise.  This press release had everything:  a great story including the drama of guns, violence, and international intrigue, a timely news hook (carjackings of the wealthy in Mexico), and a rich, well-built news release complete with a photo and deep links.  When the Associated Press picked up the story, well, read on….

Texas Armoring Corporation

Circuit:  San Antonio/Metro and Mexico w/ photo

Texas Armoring Corporation (TAC) is a small company of 50 in San Antonio, Texas, that transforms cars into armored vehicles. One car cult website described TAC as “a Texas company building pedestrian-looking cars capable of withstanding snipers and IEDs.”

In addition to visibility and branding, TAC’s goal for this press release was to generate sales leads from private, wealthy individuals concerned with safety in Mexico. Their initial Business Wire release was widely syndicated and produced respectable link clicks,  but when the story was picked up by the Associated Press, a media avalanche ensued.

Geraldo, CNN, and myriad TV affiliates jumped on the press release–even in español!   A reporter from Univision visited the TAC facility and recorded dramatic footage of an AK-47 blasting at a TAC-treated windshield and resulting only in a bullet sized hole with spiderweb cracked glass.  Very impressive.

Jason Forston, Executive VicePresident of Texas Armoring,  relayed that he did no pitching, and yet more than 160 editorial articles and dozens of video clips resulted from the press release.   “Our competitors are now imitating our every move—we’re truly leading the industry in a new way as a result of the coverage,” said Forston.

“It’s hard to quantify where every single lead comes from, “ said Forston.  “We had three- four sales from the U.S.–direct sales from the press release.”   NOTE:  a sale is worth more than six figures to Texas Armoring.

Lesson learned:  A great story, excellent photos and formatting, deep links that drive traffic, and turning the head of your local AP reporter can result in massive coverage that drives sales.

To watch the entire press release case studies webinar, check out the archived event.

Do you have an impressive press release case study that involves Business Wire services? Email monika.maeckle@businesswire.com.

Upcoming Business Wire Events – June 10 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:

An Investor Relations Survival Guide: IR Strategies for the New Age of Corporate Transparency and Accountability

Hosted by Business Wire San Francisco

Today’s financial crisis is certain to lead to greater corporate disclosure and accountability standards. Ironically, the definition of transparency itself has become muddied as a result of considerable — and often deliberate — misinformation in the marketplace. This Business Wire Spring Investor Relations Conference Series event will focus on the changing regulatory environment, the role of technology in investor outreach, revisiting Regulation FD, and the compliance challenges ahead. Don Clark, Deputy Bureau Chief, Wall Street Journal will moderate a panel of disclosure experts and thought leaders, including Jim Jelter, Corporate News Editor, MarketWatch; Peter Schuman, Manager, Investor Relations, Intel; Stephen Schrader, Partner, Baker & McKenzie LLP; and Alex Hughes, Director of IR, Dolby Labs. This event is free for Business Wire members and $15 for non-members.

Thursday, June 11 at 8:30am PST
The Palace Hotel
2 New Montgomery Street, French Parlor Room, Second Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105
To register: RSVP to Sandy Donnelly at sandy.donnelly@businesswire.com with the subject line: “Media Breakfast: An Investor Relations Survival Guide” or call 415.986.4422 x561

Crafting an Effective Press Release: A One-on-One with Bloomberg

Hosted by Business Wire Toronto

As journalists become increasingly inundated with news and information, it is vital to understand and leverage the effectiveness of a well crafted press release to maximize your coverage in the news. Join Business Wire Toronto and Bloomberg News for a one-on-one with Bloomberg Bureau Chief David Scanlan. Mr. Scanlan and his editorial team will share their valuable insights about what it takes to help your press release stand out amongst the thousands of others that cross the wire every day. This event is free for all attendees.

Thursday, June 25 at 2pm ET
43rd Floor, Brookfield Place, 161 Bay Street, Toronto, ON M5J 2T3‎
To register: RSVP by Tuesday, June 15 to Rhianna Padamsey at Rhianna.Padamsey@BusinessWire.com

For more upcoming local Business Wire events or to see what’s coming up in our award-winning webinar series, visit http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/business-wire-events.

Follow Business Wire events on Twitter! Hash tag #bwevents

Business Wire PR Peeps Poll: More Than a Third Optimize Press Releases for Search Engines

Do you optimize your press releases for search engines? 

That was Business Wire’s 1-question poll for April, and we’re pleased to announce promising results:   34% of PR peeps polled say they optimize their press releases for search engines. 

Bravo!  That’s more than we expected.

Right behind the enlightened third, an almost equal 33% say they do NOT optimize press releases for search.  Twenty percent said they optimize “sometimes” and 12% “don’t know what it means” to optimize a press release for search engines.

Those of us catering to the public relations industry find these results heartening.  Press Release Optimization is a new concept and our educational webinars  suggest that the level of understanding is often shockingly remedial.  

As we said in a previous post, our clients tell us  they “don’t have time” to optimize their press releases for search engines.  That’s a shame.  One of the biggest pay-offs for doing so is better online traction through increased search engine results and sharing.

If you need help optimizing your press releases, check out the archived webinar on exactly that topic by Business Wire search pros Maria Van Wambeke and Michael Toner.  Watch for another Press Release Optimization webinar by our dynamic duo this summer.

To those who participated, thanks for taking the poll.  And how about helping with the next one?  What do you value more when measuring press release traction?

Business Wire PR Peeps Poll for April 2009:

Do you optimize your press release for search engines? 

 

                     207  Yes 34%

                     202   No 33%

                     123    Sometimes 20%

                       75      I don’t know what optimize your press release for search engines means 12%

607 respondents via Twitter and Business Wire webinar polls.  Poll conducted April 1 – May 5, 2009.

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.

We Are Pleased to Focus on this Unique, Innovative Tool

We’re obviously big at Business Wire on offering advice for writing a good press release.  Search Engine Optimization is an important part of that, but so is simply writing concisely and clearly — avoiding jargon, placeholder phrases, filler and other stuff that creates clutter and keeps people from understanding (or just getting through) your news.

Now, HubSpot has a new tool that can help you avoid gobbledygook phrases.  Their online Gobbledygook Grader will analyze your content — press releases, brochure copy, and anything else — and help you avoid the clutter.  Marketing strategist David Meerman Scott, who helped develop the tool, analyzed more than 700,000 press releases that ran over Business Wire and other sources in 2008; his top five, and the number of times they appeared:

1. Innovate       51,390
2. Pleased to     48,672
3. Unique            48,095
4. Focused on    40,964
5. Leading provider   33,101

Sounds like words that might be hard to avoid, but give it a try — your press releases can only get better.

Drinks Are On You!

Jason Chupick of PRNewser takes note of our recent survey results on how long it takes to write and get approval for a press release, especially the 11% of respondents who said it takes “weeks.”  But Jason’s got a great piece of advice:

If you’re in corporate PR, you can probably relate to the 11%. You may want to apply the parlor game of my former colleague, head of the Zusman Group consultantcy Barry Zusman in these instances: the person responsible for circulating the 10th draft of a release has to buy drinks for all concerned.

I propose a corollary:  If you can nail it in one draft, everybody else has to buy you a drink!

How Long Does it Take to Write a Press Release? “Several days,” said half of those polled

Polling results are in for Business Wire’s occasional 1-question poll and to those of us in the press release business, the results are no surprise.  My sense is that PR professionals may want to use these results to justify billable hours spent on press release creation, too.  Here’s a summary:

Almost half of 277 respondents said it takes ”several days” to write and get approval for a press release.     Only 3%–nine of the total–were lucky enough to churn out a press release in “an hour.”  About 37%  said they spend “half a day” or “a day” to get press releases together while those poor PR souls who need “weeks” constituted an unenviable 11%.   Details below.

Several of you wondered why we didn’t make our poll into two questions–since writing a release and getting approvals are such distinct steps in the process.  The reason: we wanted to find out the total time investment in the release BEFORE it arrives at Business Wire.  We also wanted to keep the poll to one question to encourage participation.

So what are we getting at?  Press Release Optimization.

Anecdotally, clients tell us that they “don’t have time” to optimize their press releases.  Or they don’t know how.  That’s why we built a free tool, Press Release Builder, that walks you through the optimization process.   Thing is, clients aren’t using it because it takes an extra few minutes.   Huh?  

Why would you NOT spend an extra 30 – 45 minutes optimizing your press release for search given that you’ve already invested “several days” getting it to the one-yard line?   Business Wire couldn’t help but wonder.

One obstacle is that clients are not managing press release optimization into their workflow.  Frequently press releases are written and approved, and by the time they arrive at Business Wire, their creators have no no interest in tweaking keywords or rearranging paragraphs that might change the copy and require a return to the meat grinder for more time-consuming approvals.

We understand.  That’s why we encourage you to factor press release optimization into your budget BEFORE you come to Business Wire for distribution.  Even if you work with a digital PR firm or a search engine specialist, it will take time.   You can play around with Press Release Builder at your leisure, FOR FREE, when you’re not on deadline.   Talk to your account executive.  It’s worth the investment.

To those who participated, thanks for taking the poll.  And how about helping with the next one?  Do you optimize your press release for search engines?

Business Wire Occasional 1-Question Poll:

How long does it take to write and get approval for a press release?

an hour–3.2% (9 respondents)

half a day–20.21% (56 respondents)

a day–16.96% (47 respondents)

several days–48.73% (135 respondents)

weeks–10.83% (30 respondents)

 

277 respondents via Twitter and Business Wire webinar polls.  Poll conducted March, 2009.

Aristotle on Twitter, Mom Knows Best, and Other Lessons from SXSWi 2009

If Aristotle were on Twitter, he'd be a big retweeter.

Getting attention in a cluttered content universe was just one hot topic at South by Southwest Interactive this year, and the question, “Do you give good URL?” aimed to address the point in a delightful panel of  University of Texas at Austin academics.

Maybe my background as an American Studies graduate from UT predisposed me to this panel, but I found it was one of my favorites in the five-day new media conference of more than 6,000 attendees.

The discussion, “Is Aristotle on Twitter?” revisited the great philosopher and addressed the struggle many of us face online–deciphering style from substance. Giving good URL–that is, supplying readers with useful, relevant content via helpful links–indicates BOTH, say the academics.

Generous, appropriate Link Love not only shows your style, but reflects your judgement.  You wouldn’t knowingly pass along something you didn’t find valuable–would you?

While last year Twitter was oft discussed in the context of the horrendous Sarah Lacy/Mark Zuckerberg interview, in 2009 Twitter tips were ubiquitous, as attendees filled conference halls, laptops opened, Tweetdeck loaded.    Example: Retweeting may be the sincerest form of flattery and is strongly encouraged, say the academics.   “Retweeting creates judgement, while tweeting creates familiarity.” 

Other great takeaways:

1. Every cell phone is a media outlet.
2. Retweeting makes readers see through you; tweeting makes readers see you. Both are important.
3. Social media will provide the data helping determine the five things you SHOULD be doing rather than the 50 things you COULD be doing.
4. “Being better is its own word-of-mouth,” Kathy Sierra.
5. Distinguish the urgent from the important, as in don’t respond to “urgent” emails at the expense of those that are important.
6.  The humble “telephone is one of the best branding tools out there, despite being low-tech,” Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappo’s.
7.  The organization chart of the future will have customers at the top, CEOs at the bottom.
8.  When it comes to social media, it’s just as important to be interested as it is to be interesting.
9.  When hiring, chemistry is MORE IMPORTANT than skills.
10.  When you find yourself in the echo chamber, call your mom for a reality check on ideas. Mom frequently DOES know best.

As a mom, I concur.