Saturday, November 01, 2008
The Press Release: Not Just for PR People Any More
A new study conducted by Fellows of the Society for New Communications Research and made possible by Vocus concludes that the online communications landscape, new audiences, and SEO has transformed press releases into a new tool that is used by marketers as well as PR people. You can find an executive summary here [it’s the one titled “ROI of Online Press Releases Executive Summary,” though the others are interesting, too].
People who send out online press releases want to increase visibility and credibility and announce news; that much hasn’t changed since the press release was invented. But:
Beyond the unanimously agreed-upon goals of increasing visibility and credibility, the researchers noticed significant differences among communication professions with regard to the goals of online news releases. While PR professionals placed more importance on traditional goals such as announcing news and enhancing thought leadership, marketing professionals reported SEO and reaching consumers as important goals for their online press releases. Small business owners were concerned with using the release as a sales tool and reaching customers directly.
While traditional media are still the primary target for a press release, bloggers and new media follow closely. Not surprisingly, PR practitioners target traditional media more than marketers, who are “more consistently interested ... in reaching new media or consumers directly.”
People who write and distribute press releases still think about them very traditionally, focusing on writing a good headline/subhead with key words; making sure the content is interesting and newsworthy, incorporating keywords and links to the corporate website in the body of the release. And:
Only 57.8 percent of respondents indicated using SEO tactics, although some of the keywords and linking tactics in Table 4 are likely to help the release’s search engine rankings. This indicates a lack of knowledge about SEO on the part of most PR professionals, according to the researchers. Interestingly, very few respondents indicated using social media release formats (26.3 percent) and even fewer reported adding video (12.8 percent) or audio (9 percent) enhancements. Of all multimedia elements, photos were the most popular, used in online press releases by 49.5 percent of respondents. Even more puzzling is that less than half of respondents (48.8 percent) link to their own press releases after they have been posted online.
Posted by Michael Stoner on 11/01/2008 at 12:35 PMNext entry: Marketing to Teens: Email in an Era of Social Media?
Previous entry: Advancement 2.0
