HarrisCom Blog

On behalf of the Public Relations Society of America, Steve Morella of  Tekgroup, today gave a very useful Webinar on how to integrate social media and online newsrooms.

I was impressed with Steve’s knowledgeability and pleased to learn of several new sites for monitoring social media outreach and campaigns.

Among other topics, Steve emphasized the importance of:

• Online newsrooms as  central headquarters for all materials–including not just press releases and contact information but also white papers, bios, articles, blogs, rss (real simple syndication)  capabilitt and feeds to social media  such as facebook,  twitter and linked in.

• Search engine optimization not just in the writing of press releases, but also in posting them in online newsroom postings
• Categorizing feeds by topic  (sales, financials, industry) and type
  ( news, features, video, audio, blogs)
• Co-ordinating feeds with social media outlets such as Facebook, linked-in, twitter, u-tube and blogs–as well as bookmarking/commenting/referral/sharing sites, like http://delicious.com, http://www. stumbleupon.com,  and http://digg.com.
• Including video, audio and hyperlinks, as well as links to stories, studies and the like, in order to create social media press releases with  “legs”  (my term, not his!)
• Setting goals and measuring success of  social media outreach using  sites like https://bit.ly/ shorten, shares, and tracks hits on your links; http://technorati.com, which allows you to search for blogs based on keywords;   http://www.blogpulse.com, which analyzes daily trends in the blogosphere.  Http://trendistic.com/ measures twitter trends,  www.twitalizer.com  measures users tweets and retweets; and www.tweetstats.com allows you to see when and how often your tweets are read or retweeted, so that you can  post when you’re most likely to be read.

Obviously, Steve’s  social media tactic worked; here I am, a potential competitor–posting a blog about it! (He’s the director of Sales and Marketing for Tekgroup, a global firm offering online public relations services).  Here are urls to the presentation slides.

http://www.greenjobsdaily.com/HowToUseAnOnlineNewsroomToInteractWithSocialMedia.ppt

http://www.tekgroup.com/marketing/HowToUseAnOnlineNewsroomToInteractWithSocialMedia.pdf

–Anita M. Harris

HarrisComBlog is a publication of the Harris Communications Group of Cambridge, MA. We also publish New Cambridge Observer.