While at WebmasterWorld’s Pubcon 2006 in Las Vegas we attended the Press and Public Relations Campaigns session with speakers David McInnis of PRWeb, Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR, Lee Odden of TopRank Online, and Robin Liss of Camcorderinfo.com.

Greg Jarboe on Pitching Blogs and Online News Sitese

Greg Jarboe presented a case study of his work with the Christian Science Monitor on The Jill Carroll Story.

“Optimizing press releases is last years message here are some advanced tips.”

The Christian Science Monitor asked SEO-PR to provide SEO guidance on Monday, August 7 but said “help us in a way we would know you did something we did not do ourselves”, the story would already be covered by mainstream media.

Greg’s team pitched anchors of CNN.com and human editors of Yahoo! News. Yahoo News is lonely, they don’t use computer algorithms like Google News although most people think they do.

SEO-PR sent video, images and stories in advance to journalists. 90% of journalists say visuals are somewhat or very important to them. 41% of journalists said that visuals could dictate their content.

Greg’s son recommended posting video to YouTube, it was a success. They also added multimedia to the news release. There was no question SEO-PR added value because CSMonitor.com had not thought of these things.

SEO-PR pitched Boing Boing and Huffington Post in advance so they could also cover the story that mainstream media had access to.

If you want the links that are worth something you need a valuable story.

“Yup, we agree on this randfish. I’m just making trying to make sure everybody understands too. I’m not against doing press releases; press releases can be a useful part of getting traffic and building a brand. For ranking in Google, however, the main benefit of a press release is not direct links or PageRank from the press release directly; it’s primarily the people who decide to write an article and link because of that”, Matt Cutts

The campaign generated 1710 links, 763 new blogs linked to CSMonitor.com and their technorati rank went from #96 to #12 Technorati rank in one week. This generated record traffic to CSMonitor: 450,000 unique visitors flooded the site on August 14. New visitors were 7 times the daily average of July. Much of the traffic came from CNN and Yahoo News which provided excerpts of the series and links back to newspapers web site. The Huffington Post generated 3.4 times more visitors to CSMonitor.com than ABC News even though abcnews.com had run the story on page one for a few days.

Lee Odden of TopRank on Social Media Optimization

“Quickest way to get into the media is become the media, a blog helps you do that.”

Lee recommends combining press release optimization with social media. Comscore says half of all internet users visited news sites in June 2006. Yahoo News is more popular than CNN online.

There is an increase in the use of social media through:

• Blog Search Engines
• News Search Engines
• Social News
• Social Bookmarks
• Podcasts
• Video

Online PR is effective for consumer and media communications. Lee went on to discuss Push PR and Pull PR, and then mentioned his Blogger Relations Tips. I linked directly to his blog and encourage you to read his posts and subscribe to his blog, it has a good mix of press release optimization tips and search engine optimization tips.

Lee made a good observation, bloggers do not plan stories in advance with editorial calendars. Be relevant, take a look at the things they are currently blogging about and tie yourself to it.

Robin Liss (camcorderinfo.com) - How to be interviewed

You need to know the topic the reporter wants to discuss but it is not cool to ask them what questions they will ask.

Research the subject

Get the name and contact information for the reporter and publication and keep it handy on a memo. Write out 3-5 key one line message points you want to get across that will integrate well with your company strategy. Research data and facts which back those points up, place them in memo. Keep it to one page, and and highlight text so you can jump smoothly to a different parts of the document.

Practice

Prepare for the tough questions they might ask you. Practice in front of mirror and practice a lot. Learn to read off the memo by gracefully glancing down at it every few minutes. Learn how to fill space without ums, ahs, you know, like.

Give Straight Answers

Answer a question in 30 seconds. If you do not know, say I do not know.

Work your URL in very subtly

• One thing we do at camcorderinfo.com is
• What we believe at camcorderinfo.com is
• Like what we do at camcorderinfo.com
• Camcorderinfo.com is a great resource for that

Keep private information private

Nothing is off the record! Are you comfortable with public knowing how much you make? What you pay people? What your weaknesses are as a businessperson?

Don’t say anything to a reporter you would not tell your mother, your boss, your wife and a judge.

David McKinnis of PR Web

Choose a platform that allows for maximum penetration of the social media
space including social bookmarking and blogosphere.

Social Media Rules

Adhere to WOMMA guidelines