How to Build Your Online Newsstand with RSS

Some day, RSS will be to our online life what catalytic converters are to cars and no one will care what it is or how it works–we’ll just be glad it does.

But that day of understanding and acceptance has not arrived–yet.  At our presentations and webinars, “What is RSS?”  continues to be a frequently asked question.

That’s why Business Wire account executive Malcolm Atherton out of our Phoenix office, and San Antonio-based Joseph Miller, our EON: Enhanced Online News Product Manager, have assembled an 11-minute video on How to Build Your Personal Newsstand with RSS (Really Simple Syndication).

As always, the approach is accessible and easy-to-understand.  Please take a look.  And if you want Business Wire or EON content as part of your online newsstand, please sign up for one of our customized feeds.

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.

2008 EDGAR, NYSE and NASDAQ Holiday Calendars

With the markets closed on Friday in observance of Independence Day in the U.S., here are links to official holiday calendars for 2008. Note that the NYSE and NASDAQ both close early on Thursday, July 3.

Calendar of US Federal Holidays (EDGAR)

NYSE Holiday Calendar

NASDAQ Holiday Calendar

International Press Release Distribution: The Three T’s

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!

New Multi-Platform Business Wire Widgets on Netvibes Ginger

  

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. 

Business Wire Announces New Website Design, SEO, and Multimedia Features

  

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.

New Surveys and Rankings Show Business Wire’s Strong Presence in Both Traditional and New Media

 

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

Google Comments Offers New Opportunities for Communicators

  

One of the goals of our Business Wired blog is to provide readers with better tools for communicating their messages in the ever-changing media landscape. Today we are happy to highlight a service we’ve been following with much interest that we and our friends in Google News thought would be of value to Business Wire clients.  

Earlier this year Google News launched a comments feature that allows individuals or organizations that are mentioned in news articles to add their own comments. Comments are then served up alongside those articles on Google News.  

Josh Cohen, Google News’ Product Manager explains: “Google News has always tried to present as many sources as possible to give our users a wide spectrum of views on the news.  Comments is an experimental feature that we believe will continue this goal by letting readers see exactly what people in a story think about current news.  We think this will help us increase the number of diverse and meaningful points of view on the news.”  

So how is this different from any comment section or discussion board? Well, on Google News only persons or organizations who are specifically mentioned in the story can comment. Google News then contacts the person submitting the comment or others in their organization to verify their identity. As a result, each story is expected to have only a handful of highly relevant comments that give readers a more in-depth look at topics in the news. Cohen adds: “their insight will both help readers understand the news, and cover views that may not be well-published or well-understood within the current coverage”. 

For PR professionals and marketers, this is an excellent opportunity to provide greater detail or clarifications when their press releases receive media pick-up. Also, it creates a new channel to follow-up on a press release with updates, success stories, or links to other relevant stories. Finally, it is another form of reaching out to your audience and participating in the conversation. While these comments differ from commenting on blogs or engaging in social networks, they can be a valuable part of the new communications mix.  

So how can you comment on a story that is relevant to your company or client?  According to the instructions on Google News you should send an email to news-comments@google.com containing the following information:

1. Your comment (hyperlinks allowed, but no attachments)
2. A link to the story you are commenting on
3. Your contact details: name, title, and organization
4. A way to verify your email address

Verification is one of the central components of Google’s comments feature. Therefore it is highly recommended to provide as much information that Google News staff can use (for example adding contact details of persons who can verify your credentials, or, if you are submitting a comment on behalf of a client, demonstrating that you are indeed authorized to speak for them). Keep in mind that Google News will not edit comments once the sender is verified, so they will be posted exactly as you emailed them. 

So the next time your press release or related articles are shown on Google News and you feel you have more valuable input to share, this can be a great new outlet. Please look at the Google Comments instructions page for more details. 

As usual, we’re happy to hear what you think. If you’ve already used Google Comments or would like to share your own thoughts about it, feel free to comment below.