We’ve been working on some programming on the conference circuit with Webmaster Radio devoted to what’s new with PRWeb.  Here are the links to the episodes we have produced so far:

• 107/2008 - General Update with PRWeb from SMX
• 11/4/2008 - PRWeb Partnership with Entrepreneur from ad:tech

This morning we announced our new online newsroom product, which allows customers to easily create a newsroom that conatins their releases, company information, multimedia collateral, etc.  Their newsroom is then hosted on a newsroom directory on our site and linked to from their news releases.

I chatted with John Mulligan of SEO-PR about the new product at SES in New York.

We’ve already received some pretty great media coverage of our research. I’ll continue to post hits here as they come in. If you see anything out there please add it to the comments section.

Media Hits:

1. BizReport - How the press release can increase sales
2. MediaPost - Changing face of the press release
3. Public Relations Institute of Australia - Exploring the ROI of Online Press Releases
4. ClickZ - The SEO-Social-Media-Sales-Press-News Release

Blogs/Podcasts:

1. Communications & Legal Studies - Research brief: Changing face of the press release
2. For Immediate Release - ROI of Online Press Releases
3. A Shel of my Former Self - ROI of Online Press Releases
4. The Buzz Bin - ROI of Online News Releases
5. B2B Marketing Blog - Online Press Releases: What’s Old is New Again
6. Arketi’s Survey City: The Changing Face of the Press Release
7. mStonerBlog - The Press Release: Not just for PR People Anymore
8. In Front Of Your Nose - PR still stuck with traditional mindset toward online news releases

News Release Syndication:

1. International Business Times
2. PRWeb
3. eMediaWire
4. Promotion World
5. Top SEOs
6. SNCR Web site
7. New Communications Review
8. Yahoo! News

Today we announced our new partnership with Entrepreneur.com.  In a nutshell, we’re going to be giving them a full content feed for syndication on their Web site in a section reserved for small business news announcements.

For our customers this means great visibility on Entrepreneur.com - a potential audience of over 4.5 million uniques every month.  The audience is not only significant in size, it is also very targeted: Entrepreneur readers are journalists, analysts, investors and of course, other entrepreneurs.

Considering our shared tradition of serving the small business/entrepreneur segment, this is a really perfect match brimming with other possibilities.  The team at Entrepreneur.com has been a complete joy to work with and we’re looking forward to a long, fruitful partnership.

The last couple weeks I’ve moderated a couple of webinars with Steve Mullen talking about marketing and PR strategies for small businesses.  Yesterday we flip-flopped places and Steve interviewed me on SEO and press releases for Startup BizCast.  In the interview I discuss some of the topics I’ve blogged about recently including press releases and SEO, and our study with SNCR into the ROI of press releases.

This past week we (Vocus) hosted a webinar with the SNCR research team that included Dr. Mihaela Vorvoreanu, Jen McClure, and Shel Holtz.  The event drew a pretty good audience that stayed throughout the entirety of the presentation and the audience feedback lead to a great Q&A at the end of the presentation.

For the past year or so, the SNCR research team has been digging into the ROI of online press releases and has uncovered what I believe to be industry-leading findings on how metrics are changing when it comes to press releases.

I’d like to take this opportunity to jot down some thoughts on how this impacts PRWeb and the metrics we offer.

Let’s start with one of the general conclusions from the research:

Goals are changing

The goals for online press releases have expanded beyond the traditional objectives of increasing an organization’s visibility and credibility and announcing news, to include reaching customers directly with marketing and sales messages, creating online content, and search engine optimization (SEO).

Once upon a time the goal was simply about getting stories placed in the media.  Subsequently, the desired indicator took the form of media pick-ups and these could be gleaned from clipping reports.  Now, as the goals expand and encompass things like direct-to-consumer communications and SEO, the metrics also need to expand.  This is why we offer SEO statistics that tell customers which terms and search engines are driving traffic to their release.  It’s also why instead of focusing on how many places the release was picked-up, we focus on how many people actually read the release, which actually is a good segue to the next point:

Targets are changing

Reaching consumers directly has become a top goal of people using online distribution services, which is why we place so much value in our ‘reads’ metric.  Additionally, findings from the study indicate that “Reaching bloggers and new media outlets has become nearly as important as reaching traditional media.”

The issue with some of the more traditional clipping services is that while they are solid at showing mainstream media pick-up they often don’t do a good job showing the new media outlets and blogs where your news is appearing.  That’s why we run a custom query in Google to help our customers get a more comprehensive picture of where their news is appearing online.

Success Indicators are Changing

According to the research, “The top four measures of success for online press releases include: 1) the number of times the release is republished on websites; 2) the number of times the release is viewed online; 3) the publication of an article based on the release; 4) media interviews resulting from the release.”

So to break this down, we offer the following methods to hit the top success indicators:

1. Number of times the release is republished on websites - We offer a metric called ‘impressions,’ which provides a general overview of how many places your news release appeared on Web sites, RSS feeds, and e-mails in places we can track.  Granted, the trackable universe for us is but a small fraction of the larger Internet but this provides you with a baseline understanding of how much traction you got online from your news release.
2. Number of times the release is viewed online - This is where our ‘reads’ metric comes into play - a count of how many times someone clicked through and loaded the full version of the news release in the trackable universe.
3. Publication of an article based on the release - We use a custom Google query to provide users with an overview of where their article appeared online.  We use Google (instead of a clipping service) because our focus goes beyond traditional media into new media outlets and blogs.
4. Media interviews resulting from the release - I’m afraid that’s up to you guys to track

At any rate, I don’t want to make it seem like we are completely satisfied with the tracking tools we provide. Analytics are the lifeblood of professionalism for many of our customers, especially in a down economy where they have to show accountability for what they are doing.  At the end of the day, there is probably a lot more we can do to help them demonstrate this sense of accountability and believe me - we are constantly working on it.

We are always discussing ways to enhance our analytics and constantly getting new ideas from customers that all are factored into the PRWeb development mix.  Hopefully, this posting will have provided you with a general sense for what we offer as well as the rationale behind it.

We’ve been getting some questions lately as to the SEO benefits of using a news distribution service like PRWeb so I’d like to take this opportunity to address some of these questions.

Search Engines and News Distribution - The Basics

I’ll begin by underscoring the fundamental role of search engines and news distribution services: In my perspective, it is the goal of search engines to help people find relevant content online including news content. It is the role of services like PRWeb to help people disseminate relevant news-oriented content online - search engines as a consumption facilitator, news distribution services as a production facilitator.

Now, everything else really stems from this core symbiotic relationship between search engines and news distribution services.

Tactically, search engines use different types of algorithms to determine what is relevant to a query. What distinguished Google in the late 90s was the PageRank algorithm, which placed a lot of value in the importance of back links in determining the relevance of a page.

Now, since then, the algorithm has changed quite a bit. These changes have been spurred for proactive reasons (breakthroughs made by Google’s über-talented engineers) and reactive reasons (to combat black hat SEO tactics). For instance, the practice of selling links or ‘link farming’ has compelled Google to make tweaks to their algorithm so these types of practices result in negative and not positive gains for perpetrators.

Anchor Text

Now let’s take this one level deeper and look at the concept of PRWeb’s usage of anchor text as a tool for search engine optimization. As the Google Webmaster blog states, “Writing descriptive anchor text, the clickable words in a link, is a useful signal to help search engines and users alike to better understand your content.” In other words, the anchor text helps explain to search engines affinities that may exist between keywords and a Web site.

On a simplistic level, PRWeb takes content from an originator and then moves it around the Web and gets it to people who consume that content and then often do something with it (like write about it). When they receive this content it includes the anchor text and when they discuss the content from the news release, more often than not they will include that anchor text in their hyperlink. Over time, the aggregate of all these individual bloggers, Web sites, etc. using anchor text and linking back to a destination site will have benefits for that destination site.

Keywords

Now, let’s look at another of our recommendations: to focus on a limited set of keywords or keyword phrases. Think of each news release that goes out in isolation - there is a compelling story that is behind that news release and the goal is to catch the interest of others out there on the Web - people who will consume and people who will push the story further through some means. All those behaviors (consumption and republication) have search benefits. Now, loading up on keywords on the other hands can have zero or even in some cases negative benefits. For instance, Google is pretty explicit about the practice of keyword stuffing.

Why? Because the goal of search engines is to help people find relevant content. So, if there is an indication that humans think that content is interesting because they are clicking-through or because they are blogging it, then a search engine will recognize that as good content. If it is obvious that the content is just loaded with excessive keywords and an attempt to game the system, then people will not click-through and people will not blog it - and the search engines will also most likely ignore it.

Hyperlinks

A final point about hyperlinks. Just like with keywords you should really use hyperlinks when they are appropriate. Too many hyperlinks can have a negative impact on your release. If there are too many hyperlinks, it runs the risks of not getting indexed in Google News. Furthermore, bear in mind that there is a lot of evidence out there to suggest that excessive links will dilute the PageRank conferred through individual links on a page. Just something to bear in mind.

Conclusion

Here is the best piece of advice I can give to those who want to gain search benefit through PRWeb: write a compelling story that people want to read and write about. Offer them the content needed (images, video, etc.) to make it easy to share your story with others through their Web sites, blogs, etc. Don’t focus as much on the little elements but instead focus on the underlying story. Now, you still want to follow best practices such as using anchor text, high-volume keywords, etc. but these should be a secondary focus after the primary focus of creating great content.

Over the past several months I’ve shared updates on the research being conducted by the Society for New Communications Research into the ROI of online press releases.  The research group, lead by Dr. Mihaela Vorvoreanu, Jen McClure, and Shel Holtz has recently finished the executive summary, available for download in the research & publications section of the SNCR Web site.

Some of the top-line findings:

• The goals for online press releases have expanded beyond the traditional objectives of increasing an organization’s visibility and credibility and announcing news, to include reaching customers directly with marketing and sales messages, creating online content, and search engine optimization (SEO).
• Reaching bloggers and new media outlets has become nearly as important as reaching traditional media.
• The top four measures of success for online press releases include: 1) the number of times the release is republished on websites; 2) the number of times the release is viewed online; 3) the publication of an article based on the release; 4) media interviews resulting from the release.

For more information visit the press release on PRWeb.

Brian Solis has authored an op/ed aimed at redefining “how startups (not solely tech companies) view and define early adopters and the ‘echo chamber’ in order to gain momentum in order to ‘cross the chasm’ to the next tier of evolution, adoption, and monetization.”

Reading through the article I couldn’t help but reflect on the value PRWeb has gained from having a tremendous circle of early adopters to lean on for feedback, creativity, and spreading the gospel far and wide.

One of our biggest drivers of new customer acquisition has always been and continues to be word-of-mouth.  When you consider the volume of customers we are working with on a daily basis it is just amazing how much actual value we have derived from creating solid relationships with industry influentials.

Anyway, getting back to Brian’s article, it is a great read for anyone in the start-up industry particularly in light of the recent economic trends.

In an interview with ReelSEO last week I discussed some best practices involved with using video in news releases.  Some of the topics covered included:

• Advantages to using video in news releases;
• Different approaches to using video;
• Customer success story;
• What types of video work online;
• The future of online video.

I had a great time talking with Grant Crowell and hope people find value in the article and podcast published on ReelSEO.