CorpComms Magazine

When Apple's iPhone was launched in 2007, the online furore as people debated the pros and cons of the new gadget was immense. A humorous blog on the Times' Money Central site, entitled '50 reasons not to buy an iPhone' was met with outrage from protective Apple consumers who posted comments such as 'You suck mate!! Get a life!!', '50 reasons not to buy The Times' and 'Note to the Editor of Times Online... sack the spanner that wrote this and throw the clunky windows-based PC laptop he typed the article on out after his sorry ass... loser!'

Clearly a sense of humour does not always accompany an enthusiasm for all things techy. But Apple fans had come out in force to herald the arrival of the iPhone and the Blogosphere was crammed with buzz about it.

The online noise about the iPhone - whether good or bad - served only to heighten awareness of it, both in cyberspace and real life. And although most industries do not always attract quite the same passion for their products, it is possible for any to harness what communications experts term 'social media', using multimedia press releases.

Multimedia press releases are web-pages which feature a range of multimedia attachments including text, company logos, high-resolution photos, pdf downloads, video, Powerpoint and audio. They can carry hyperlinks to company or other websites, and links to social media outlets such as Twitter, Flickr or an RSS feed, where bloggers and other consumers can search and comment on them if they wish. Video can be added and uploaded into video portals such as YouTube to gain maximum exposure.

Some wire services will post press releases on feeds such as Twitter as a matter of course, rather than just providing a bookmark link for consumers to use.

Engaging users

'The main benefit of using multimedia in press releases is increased user engagement,' says Monika Maeckle, vice president of new media at wire service Business Wire. 'We see two-and-a-half to three times more click-throughs when our clients add a photo or graphic to a release.'

Maeckle adds that in the ongoing downturn, while newsrooms are squeezed more than ever before, it is beneficial to save journalists time and effort by including all the resources they may need within one press release.

But it is not just a journalistic audience you can attract with online tools such as this. 'It's a tired cliché, but the Internet has changed the way we communicate dramatically - both to the media, and, perhaps more importantly, to consumers,' says Roy Jacques, director of sales UK at Marketwire.

'Today's communicators need to think beyond text, we need to package our news and tell our stories with pictures, audio and video. These elements make the press release three-dimensional, and allow you to support or expand upon your story in so many different and engaging ways.

'Multimedia has great power to convey a message. Think about a standard PLC releasing its annual results... typically, it's a long document with lots of tables. One of the ways of bringing this to life - and really attract and engage stakeholders and potential investors - would be to have the chief executive commenting on the results via video embedded in the release itself. It gives the end user more insight and a better 'feel' for the news.'

When you consider that YouTube is now the world's third-most searched site on the Internet, it becomes obvious that this is an opportunity that nobody can afford to ignore.

Bloggers' rising importance

'Today, what a blogger posts about your product or service, or what a disgruntled customer Tweets about your company can be as powerful and influential as a column in the business section of a national daily,' says Jacques. 'With bloggers gaining more influence, and many traditional media active in sites like Twitter, it's important not only to engage stakeholders and consumers directly via these channels, but to respect how users on these sites want to be engaged.'

As Samantha Proctor, marketing and communications director at PR Newswire, sums it up: 'Companies have got to engage with social media because everyone 'owns' everything these days. Everyone's got an opinion and wants to engage.'

Universal Music has been exploiting this fact for some time to promote its artists. The Chinese musician Sa DingDing, for example, has become well-known in the West through the use of online PR, even though as recently as 2007, she was unheard of outside of China.

Paul Honey, managing director of creative digital marketing agency Strange Corporation, which produces multimedia press releases for Universal and airs them on Business Wire and Business Wire's EON:Enhanced Online News service, says: 'Social media is very cost effective for reaching a large proportion of your target market. The challenge is how to harness it in a brand-facing way. It has involved a big shift of culture and attitude for many clients.'

For Sa DingDing, Strange produced a press release in July 2007 which was translated into 12 different languages. The relevant language would load up depending on where in the world it was accessed from.

'This helps build relevance and enables people to post releases on local networking sites, which happened very extensively in this case,' explains Honey. 'You are also generating a lot of in-bound links to your website from all around the world. The release was structured from a human-journalistic point of view and written in a way to work well with search engines. It included a multimedia release of the album track remixed by a well-known producer as an MP3 download, which really encouraged pick-up.'

Evaluating audience participation

The other side of online PR is, of course, monitoring the reaction to it. 'We could see an ever-increasing long tail of traffic coming in from specialist blogs and forums,' says Honey. 'The result was very pleasing.'

This is the real beauty of social media press releases. 'Unlike text releases, which have a finite life span, with a multimedia release, the longer it's out there, the more momentum it gathers and snowballs,' says Proctor. 'It has the opposite effect to a text release - you can get people sharing it and blogging about it.'

When Honey decided to promote his own agency's white paper predicting trends for digital marketing in 2009 at the end of last year, he went down the same route with an online press release. 'Online marketing trends change very fast and we spent a lot of time last year working out what the trends would be in 2009. We came up with 16 trends and we published a white paper outlining them.'

The press release highlighting the white paper was optimised for search engines, using words likely to be searched online by potential readers, and it linked to RSS feeds and tagging tools to allow consumers to share it on sites such as Twitter.

In the past three months, the release, which was aired on Business Wire and EON, has had more than 9,000 unique views and more than 2,000 people have downloaded the white paper. It has also been translated into 12 different languages 'which we would class as a very good performance', says Honey.

'We have also seen a big impact on our agency website. Typically we get a lot of traffic coming in from searches of the agency's name. But we have noticed in the past three months that six out of ten links are coming in on searches on keywords relating to the paper. A social media release can be a very good marketing tool.'

PRs take charge of online media

Proctor says social media has changed the dynamics of media distribution and very much broadened its reach. 'Text releases were always designed for print journalists. We are now doing marketing and advertising as well as PR,' she says.

However, online media distribution remains firmly the preserve of the PR professional. 'PR people are the right people to be doing this, not marketing or advertising people,' says Daryl Willcox, chairman of wires service Daryl Willcox Publishing. 'If you approach social media with the attitude of an advertising person, you will fail. The PR industry is very strongly positioned to take advantage of social media.'

Measuring the response to social media releases is also more straightforward than traditional text releases. All wire services will produce an analysis of response to releases. PR Newswire's Proctor says: 'We produce a report to include the number of people who clicked from that web page, how many people streamed the video and where from, how many downloaded all the individual files, so you get a better idea of what content people want. Then we produce screen shots of blogs etcetera where the text appears on other websites.'

The cost effectiveness of online press releases is, therefore, appealing. 'If you treat your press release as a digital billboard on the information superhighway it can be amazingly effective in directing traffic to specific pages on your site,' says Maeckle. 'It's also an incredible reader service - only readers who are interested in that link will click on it, so you're getting qualified prospects delivered to your doorstep.'

And, of course, as Proctor points out, the marketing and advertising benefits of tapping into social media come as an added bonus. 'It costs a lot more to advertise than to do a multimedia press release,' she says.

It is vital to understand that social media is not an end in itself, however. 'It takes time to get results with social media and it is not free,' warns Maeckle. 'Social networking is like normal networking. You get out what you put in.'

Search engine optimisation is vital

She recommends, for example, that companies ensure they have very good search engine optimisation of their releases and do not cut corners. 'We have a press release builder which is a search engine optimisation tool for press release content,' she says. 'It helps companies choose key words, or suggests alternatives which are searched more frequently. The words you choose make a huge difference, but we often have to remind people to spend the extra 30 minutes doing this. A recent poll we did showed that nearly half our clients spend a few days planning and getting approval for a press release, so why not spend the extra 30 minutes to get the most out of it?'

The fundamentals of good PR do not change in hyperspace, in order to build and maintain strong relationships with your stakeholders. 'It's important to engage your audience where they are active, and how they want to be engaged - be they traditional media via wire distribution, investors via financial media relations or consumers and other influencers via Twitter or LinkedIn,' says Jacques. 'It's all about knowing who your audience is, and what they want to hear.'

A company will guarantee maximum visibility by ensuring that its releases are on its website, its PR agency's website and a handful of wire services, but it is also important to target its social media audience. It must be prepared to really work at attracting the attention of the relevant blogger crowds.

Willcox advises: 'Get an RSS feeder and follow blogs which are important to your industry so you understand what they are writing about. Follow 50 or 60 people on Twitter in your industry to hear their thoughts, and let it feed back into your content. Listen to social media. It can be a very useful tool. Add your own comments to other people's blogs, create your own influence. Turn Twitterers into supporters of your brand.' 

share me: del.icio.us | digg | reddit | Tweet