Merrick, Pamela and Mario - Coronado, California - December 15, 2006

We went to Il Fornaio restaurant in Coronado last Friday for our Holiday Dinner. Food was great and the service was excellent. Our table had a beautiful view of San Diego Harbor. Merrick gave a warm speech commemorating our achievements in 2006.

We would like to thank all our members for helping us make PR Leap into one of the best online press release services. We would also like to thank anyone who has personally referred PR Leap to a friend, co-worker or client. And most of all we would like to thank our family for their continued support.

Happy Holidays from PR Leap

P.S. Our flickr has a few more pictures of the team.

When Michael Gray author of one of the best search engine optimization blogs approached Merrick about doing an interview, he gladly made the time. GrayWolf provides insightful research brought to you from deep in the SEO trenches, we highly recommend subscribing to his blog.

We met GrayWolf at Pubcon last month. The interview with Merrick was posted today, which provides some backstory on the beginnings of PR Leap and a few press release tips.

Summary: Localizing a press release to a ZIP code and city will make it easer to get coverage from newspapers as they shift their newsrooms into 24/7 information centers.

The Gannett Company announced that it is reorganizing all of its 89 newsrooms into “information centers,” so they can become 24/7 operations.

To do this, Gannett has emphasized four goals:

• Prioritize local news over national news
• Publish more user-generated content
• Use websites to make the news operation a wire service 24/7 operation
• Use crowdsourcing methods to get readers to participate as watchdogs, whistle-blowers and researchers in large, investigative features

Why does it matter?

Newspapers turning to the public to get local news, videos and research will lead to more people being in the content business. This will make it easier to get coverage for your business, product or service, as more people will be available to cover a newsworthy story.

Newspapers going local means you need to go local. Localize a press release to its true locality to make it finable for search engines, bloggers, journalists and local news search engines like topix.net.

In November, we updated our platform and website to help you localize a press release to a Zip Code, city and state—making it far more accurate than the top 3 wires that can only localize to an MSA.

The PR Leap Local News service allows visitors (consumers, journalists, and knowledge workers) to find local news on prleap.com for every ZIP code in the country by just entering it into the URL on a browser. For example www.prleap.com/92101 displays news from San Diego, CA.

RSS feeds for each of the 32,000 US cities and towns are available.

Summary: Tie a press release to the holiday shopping season in a UNIQUE WAY and you have an instant news hook that can make the difference between good coverage and no results at all.

The news hook is the idea a press release communicates, which illustrates the theme. It’s the most compelling part of a news release. It’s the main point.

A press release that gets consumed by its target audience always meets some basic news criteria. Consumers, search engines, journalists and PR Writers usually share some common ground on what determines “news.”

Incorporate one or more of the following news values to write an effective hook:

1. Consequence – Position your product as the alternative to this season’s, out of stock, must have item. For the past two years, I have personally witnessed parents ask a sales attendant for a Sony PlayStation, or Microsoft Xbox, and walk away with a Nintendo Game Cube because it was the only game console in stock. Woody Allen once said: “80 percent of success is showing up.” Take advantage of your competitor’s limited supply. Show up!
2. David and Goliath – This classical theme can be used to craft a news hook that shows how a small company effectively competes against larger companies with much deeper pockets. A local running shoe store in my area is beating all the major athletic retail chains by offering a more personal experience. For starters…everyone on the staff enjoys running. They measure everyone’s foot and use that information to find you the best shoe in the store for your style of running. And to top it off, they only carry running shoes with the highest ratings. Guess where I bought my shoes this summer.
3. Freshen Up – Change the Rules – Everything old is new again. Find a new use for your product. Or, better yet find a new target audience. Dutch Boy increased its sells by offering the same paint in a new container that proved to be more usable for consumers. Think iPod. Apple was a late entry into the MP3 player space, but they quickly captured the market share with an easier to use device that ties to an online music store.
4. Trendiness – Public has an endless interest for what is current, new, cool, or just “happening.” Tie your story to an emerging social trend in your market or industry. Scan for emerging trends and provide your insights on the subject for consumers and journalists to use. Press leads to more press.
5. Relevance – Tie your story to an even bigger story. The goal is to show how your brand (business, product or service) relates to what is grabbing the media’s attention right now.
6. Prominence – The VIP Effect – Use a newsworthy spokesperson to attract attention to your company’s activities. Turn your own staff or members into VIPs and give the media reason to come to your company for information.
7. Proximity – Localize your story to increase the news value of a release. “Only about a third of the material needs to be local, and local statistics can be just as helpful as local names,” according to the Publicity Handbook by David R Yale. Go local whenever possible.
8. Create Newsworthy Event – Generate publicity by staging an event that is designed to get you coverage. For example, organize a toy drive to collect new toys to give to less fortunate children. Sponsor an event in your community, i.e., winter festival.
9. Human Interest – Tis the season for giving. Show everyone how you are giving back this holiday season. It can be anyone in your company. What’s important is the action. In college I remember hearing about a group of dentists and volunteers giving up Christmas with their families and going to Mexico to offer their dental services for FREE to less fortunate people.
10. Sex and Romance – Sex always sells: romance burns in the winter too. Share some newsworthy information with your customers that they can use during Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years, not just Valentines.

Learn More

Press Release Optimization: How to write an effective headline

Summary

• Great People, Great Speakers, Lots of Networking.
• Go to PubCon it will pay for itself many times over.
• Don’t be afraid to introduce yourself, and ask people about them before talking about yourself.
• Local News is hot, Duplicate Content is not.
• SEO of Press Releases is yesterday’s tip.
• Yahoo! knows how to throw a great party, but invite only parties really piss off the uninvited.
• Short video interviews are good linkbait.
• Chris Tolles of Topix.net captured the essence of Pubcon.

First Conference as PR Leap

Mario and I attended our first conference with PR Leap last week, PubCon 2006. WebmasterWorld.com lined up a great list of keynote speakers including Danny Sullivan, Guy Kawasaki, and John Battelle.

We met lots of people at this conference, but the best surprise was when we met people who already knew about PR Leap and said they wanted to meet us at this conference.

Blogs, Feeds, and Social Search

The first session we attended Tuesday morning was Blogs, Feeds, and Social Search. After the session ended we introduced ourselves to speakers Rick Klau of Feedburner, and Chris Tolles of Topix.net. We missed the opportunity to meet Owen Byrne, Co-Founder of Digg, that day but had lunch with him the next day.

Michael Gray’s (AKA Graywolf) coverage of Blogs, Feeds, and Social Search session is here.

Local and Mobile Local Search

Just about every business can benefit from having a greater local presence on the search engines. Topix.net says 60% of their news traffic is local traffic. We are big fans of Topix.net and know the importance of local news. Last week we were the first newswire to fully implement local news. Here is the San Diego, California news page on prleap.com.

Graywolf’s coverage Local and Mobile Local Search here.

Search Engine Roundtable’s coverage Local and Mobile Local Search here.

Duplicate Content Issues (Yahoo & Google)

I overheard lots of people in the halls and other sessions talking about duplicate content woes.

Search Engine Roundtable covered Duplicate Content Issues (Yahoo & Google) here.

Press and Public Relations Campaigns Session

David McInnis of PRWeb, Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR, Lee Odden of TopRank Online, and Robin Liss of Camcorderinfo.com gave good presentations, I covered the Press and Public Relations Campaigns Session here.

(Mario Lozano, Greg Jarboe, Merrick Lozano)

Spider and DOS Defense - Rebels, Renegades, and Rogues

William Atchison of CrawlWall.com gave one of the best presentations all week. William had a problem with malicious robots bringing down his site. He developed tools to help him keep the bad ones out. A 90% reduction in bot activity saved him almost 5 terabytes in bandwidth, and gave him a 50% reduction page load time.

Search Engine Rountable covered the Spider and DOS Defense - Rebels, Renegades, and Rogues here.

The Party Scene is Where the Networking Happens

Ask Cocktail Receptions and Free Wifi

Ask provided cocktail receptions two nights at the conference hall and hooked up conference attendees with free wifi access. Just about everyone attended the first night’s reception making it really easy to meet/network with just about anyone you needed/wanted to. We met Monte of Moniker.com that night.

Yahoo’s Invite Only Party at The Palms Hugh Hefner Suite

Yahoo! threw an invite only party at The Palms Hugh Hefner Suite, but we couldn’t talk our way into this party despite our best efforts. Take a look at the pictures, the suite looks awesome. We spoke to someone who bought a Yahoo Publisher Network member a drink that night, the guy makes 100k a month on YPN and was not invited - ouch!

(Hugh Hefner Suite at The Palms Las Vegas)

Since we could not get into the Yahoo! party we had drinks at The Palms lobby bar and met Graywolf, and Travis Finseth of USLegal.com. After talking shop for an hour we went up to The Palm’s Ghost Bar and met Chris and Victor, of Moniker, who were easy to spot in their Tommy Bahama’s Moniker shirts. They took the time to get to know our business and offered to help us switch registrars.

(Mario Lozano, Michael Gray (Graywolf), Merrick Lozano)

Microsoft’s Party at The Palms Kingpin Suite

We managed to get into the Microsoft invite only party at The Palms Kingpin Suite. The suite has a bar, two bowling lanes, a video wall, a room and a great view. Thank you to the Microsoft person who let us in!

(The Kingpin Suite at The Palms)

Google’s Cocktail Reception

The fine folks at Google kept the drinks flowing for a packed house. We chatted with a few Google Engineers and caught up with Owen Byrne of Digg. Vanessa Fox provided some advice on duplicate content. Later I spotted Shawn Hogan of Digital Point and chatted a bit about his lawsuit with the MPAA.

We Met Marco Antonio Barrera at the Wynn

While we are normally not big on buffet style restaurants, the Wynn’s buffet came highly recommended. We went Friday before the PubCon bar event. It is the most elaborate, high class buffet we have ever been to. With over 20 stations of main courses and a dessert selection that rivals some fine pastry shops it exceeded our expectations.

While at the Wynn we spotted Marco Antonio Barrera, the Super Featherweight Champion, which also happens to be a friend of a friend. We introduced ourselves, chatted briefly about our common friend, and then took a picture. It was the day before Eric Morales lost in his third boute with Manny Pacquiao. Morales also lost to Barrera two out of three times.

(Mario Lozano, Marco Antonio Barrera, Merrick Lozano)

Brett Tabke and WebmasterWorld organized a great conference, we will definitely be in Vegas next year for Pubcon.

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

We just launched PR Leap Local News service. You can now localize a press release by ZIP code, city and state—making it far more accurate than the top 3 wires that can only localize to a Metro area. Score one for PR Leap : )

This new service allows visitors (consumers, journalists, and knowledge workers) to find local news on prleap.com for every ZIP code in the country by just entering it into the URL on a browser. For example www.prleap.com/92101 displays news from San Diego, CA.

RSS feeds for each of the 32,000 US cities and towns are available.

For the time being, most of the Zip Codes do not have any news to display. However, this will change as more of our members take advantage of this new feature.

So what’s next? Very soon we will announce a major change to the service that will allow you to better categorize, organize and distribute a press release with Tags.

Make sure to check back with us next week, as we will bring you more news about PR Leap News Tags.

PubCon Vegas 2006 begins November 14, 2006 and PR Leap will be there all week.

(From left to right: Merrick L., Pamela C., Mario L.)

Just a few of the people we want to meet include Aaron Wall, Andy Beal, Andy Hagans, Danny Sullivan, Graywolf, Greg Boser, Matt Cutts, Rand Fishkin, Shoemoney and any PR Leap members.

We are staying at the Renaissance Las Vegas Hotel next to the conference. Look for us at the conference or the bar. If you spot us at the Pub, introduce yourself and PR Leap will gladly buy you a drink.

That’s not all, we will also give away 10 copies of Seth Godin’s must-read new book: Small Is the New Big. To win, be one of the first 10 to post a picture of yourself with any member of the PR Leap team to the PR Leap Flickr Group.

This summer we finally hired our first intern. We are lucky: we found an awesome person. Not only did she quickly gel with the team, but she is already up to speed reviewing press releases and providing feedback to members.

We are proud to introduce to the PR Leap community our newest addition to the team, Pamela Cappiello. She is an Integrated Marketing Communications major at San Diego State University. She is working part-time right now, as she is in the final stretch of completing her studies this semester.

We updated PR Leap’s design a couple of days ago in anticipation of the mandatory update to Internet Explorer 7.

PR Leap is developed on Mac OS X. Being a Mac shop means we are always on. However, we understand that 76% of PR Leap visitors use Windows. We try our best to make the site cross-browser friendly. Please let us know if you are browsing prleap.com with IE 7 and believe any part of the site is not working as expected. Send us your feedback here.

P.S. We will be announcing a major upgrade to PR Leap by Tuesday.