SEO-driven releases may be more likely to land up in a content aggregation site than they are ever to land up in a journalist’s in box, but they will be read by people as well as search engines, and in an ideal world will make people want to know more than simply what ranking Google delivers. The bunch of words created deserves also to be compelling reading.  And when it’s a press release, the reader expects news.

Before we start, we’ve all heard those comical rushed provisos, terms and conditions – the verbal equivalent of small print – at the end of radio ads. This next bit is the written equivalent of one of those: if the release you’re creating is for a highly regulated industry, such as financial services and pharmaceuticals, or for a listed company, it’s important to double check the specific rules relating to information release.

And think which type of person you would like to be reading your release (customer, partner, potential employee) and write in a style addressing them. Don’t fall into stereotype traps though – the results can be hysterical. The picture to the right is a great piece of government speak to teenagers in ‘text talk’ poster. You can see what the kids made of that.

I’ve made a recording with the key advice for creating releases on it, mainly because once I got stuck into this article, it drivelled on for far too long, but the key elements of a release, summarised, are:

1. Straightforward title explaining the story
2. First paragraph giving the important bits – who, what, where when, why in two sentences, top off with the reason anyone should give a monkey’s
3. Details of story
4. Optional: APPROVED quotes if used, properly attributed
5. Marker for the end of the story. (Conventions are to used the words /ENDS or ##)

The bit after the ‘end’ should be back up information, usually headed up ‘notes for editors

1. A ‘boilerplate’ – a standard description of around a paragraph in length, used for consistency, to describe the issuing organisation(s)
2. Additional information pertinent to, but not part of, the story
3. Any legal stuff that the lawyers insist on
4. Contact details

Generally the most important information needs to be highest up in the press release. With each passing paragraph you lose readers, so make sure it hooks the reader from the start. Any corporate guff needs to be right down at the end.

For myself, I usually make a bullet point list/mindmap of things I want to get into a story, and then try telling the story out loud, as if to a stranger in a bar. It works for me in an otherwise empty office. I can see some drawbacks in a crowded coffee bar. The aim is to cut out the unnecessary detail – or at least highlight what can appear further down the release.

This approach helps create a more natural tone too. Corporate speak and jargon are un-necessary. Check out Tim Phillips’ Talk Normal blog [http://talknormal.co.uk/] for some amusing rants about the kind of thing I mean. Sometimes it’s the professionals who are the worst offenders.

Most of all, think like a reporter – you want other people to pick up on what you’ve written and find out more, so deliver it like a reporter: in the third person (he, she, they rather than I and we), as factually and as interestingly as possible. And above all, honestly. Lying in such a public forum has to count as really dumb: unless, of course, you have a very dodgy PR strategy of creating a huge storm./ends

Claire Thompson, Waves PR is a freelance PR consultant with sometimes colliding passions for technology and the environment. She has worked on many campaigns campaigns from the big guys, like Kodak, Oracle and Apple, through to pre-launch start ups, including LastMinute.com in its early days. She can be found most places ‘socially’ as claireatwaves, but mostly only has time for Twitter, FaceBook and LinkedIN. Tel: +44 (0) 207 795 8147.

To illustrate; imagine I’m a small business in the 1960’s seeking to make the public aware of its existence. I’d have to think about physical, visible signage for my premises and advertise in the classifieds. All of that costs money and would involve hiring specialist professionals to create such signage and ad copy. Fast-forward to today, and a small business director has everything they need to make their business brand known; strong and discoverable, just a few keystrokes away.

Of course this works both ways! So, just as a brand owner has some great tools and resources to reach a wider audience more quickly, so does a brand consumer have numerous outlets to transmit their dissatisfaction or voice their opinion. And rightly so; as it’s a good thing this so-called democratisation of the web allows all of us consumers to voice our opinions in an open and public forum. It can be a headache for brands however, as this unregulated, unofficial content on the web vies for attention with your own material. Now; we’re not about to advocate attempting to bury all negative publicity, it is still publicity. What we are advocating is that you seek to ‘own’ your brand message at least on page 1 of the search engines.

Why Own Page 1 for Your Brand Results?

•    Consistency of message
•    Brand recognition and reinforcement
•    Increase traffic to your owned and operated websites
•    Look like a big deal

How to Own Page 1! (It’s easier than you think).

Get Your Domain Name: Make sure you own your brand domain name. www.whatever.com and the local TLD for each market in which you operate; that is if you don’t already! Your own company website is the easiest way to own your first result.
Join Professional Directories: Add yourself to professional and local directories for your sector, thus controlling profile information and having the knock-on benefit of association.
Write and Distribute Press Releases: Writing specific and tailored news about your company is a great way to inform often, and in an official way. Distributing this news as a press release to your online press and having this covered is absolutely invaluable. Trade press publishers naturally tend to rank well due to the authority of their content.
Create a Social Media Presence: Social media is a fantastic, wide-reaching and cost-effective way of essentially, advertising your brand. Facebook pages, Linkedin profiles and CrunchBase profiles are all good ways to extend your brand message. We looked at a couple of good practise tips to be aware of, when expanding your social media brand in a previous post.
Blog and Comment: Nobody knows your business like you do. So get out there and blog, guest blog, comment on related blogs. Establish your internet credentials by showing exactly how much you do know about integrated circuits, or bridal gown design or whatever it is that you do.

Although we can’t control (nor should we want to control) what is said about our brand, but we can control what we say about our brand; so there’s really no excuse not to.

1. Be discoverable
From Facebook to YouNoodle, many social media/networking websites offer you the chance to have your content surfaced to the search engines. DO take advantage of this opportunity. Firstly this is valuable from an SEO perspective as these sites and your presence on these sites can be spidered by search bots. Such reference to your brand and links back to your site from high-volume high-credibility sites, helps improve your own PageRank. Second reason to tick that box, is that if anyone searches for your brand, they will be able to see not only your own website, but also your presence on the social media websites you have chosen. Provided you are consistent in referencing your brand (more on this in a second) this helps add validity to your organisation and faith in your brand as the user is confronted with a back-up reference to your brand from additional trusted sites. Incidentally, if your own website appears below your Facebook/Linkedin/Crunchbase profile – come see us and we’ll sort that out for you!

2. Be consistent
Your brand is your intellectual property and should be treated as such. Larger organisations tend to have entire rulebooks dedicated to their various brand identities, corporate fonts, logos and other marks. Every brand, (no matter what size) should have some basic rules in place regarding company name, logo(s) and profile. As an example – our company name is theMediaFlow (all one word, with the emphasis on Media and Flow by the use of a capital ‘M’ and ‘F’) if you search for “themediaflow” using Google, you will find a number of results on page one, including our own site, our Linkedin profile, our CrunchBase profile and various news stories about us. In nearly every case the result references “theMediaFlow”. If a result references “themediaflow” this appears to be an inconsistency, and it would be natural for a reader to place less trust in such a listing. Your social media profile is your chance to reinforce your exact brand identity, image and message in a consistent, professional and controlled way.

3. Be your own biggest fan
Unless you’re McDonalds or CocaCola (in which case, “Hi, we’d love to manage your SEM. Skype me!”) you probably can’t afford to advertise on every billboard in town and in the Corry Street ad breaks. Until that time, social media is your space to promote your business and talk about how wonderful you are, what you do and who you do it for. Do not be ashamed to big yourselves up. Never feel silly writing in the third person; and DO remember to be consistent. We find it helps to use the same profile précis as a starting point for each of our professional network profiles.

4. Be yourself
You can’t win every single deal and you can’t please every single customer 100% of the time. Each organisation has its own cultural ethos and identity. It’s what makes an organisation most distinct from competitors. Ask anyone who has just chosen a supplier what clinched the deal for them, and oftentimes they will state that “the organisation was a good fit”;” the people really understood our business,” “we got a really positive vibe from the team” etc. It is therefore important to allow some sense of your organisational values and culture to permeate your social media communications.

You will find that the technical/functional differences between networks contribute to a certain tone of voice, i.e. Twitter’s 140 character limit promotes familiarity and less formality than say a Linkedin profile; therefore trying to have the same rigid tone of voice across all your social media may seem insincere.

Please note: I’m not advocating that every brand should do their own social media communications, but a good third party social media professional should be able to communicate with your audience as an extended member of your team. They should be able to speak of “we” and “our” goals and missions; and be able to understand your business objectives, core customers and values.

We hope you found this post interesting and useful. Please do add any other pertinent points that you think we have missed that are important for growing your social media brand.

I got to thinking that this could mean a lot of consumer brands and websites are adding content and functionality that is actually counter-productive to their brand, due to available resource and stage of development. It seems there is a lot of pressure and evangelical promotion of social communications that can lead a business to feel that they are not professional, ‘2.0’ or approachable if they’re not engaging in such activities. I decided therefore to examine the circumstances when it’s best not to blog.

1. If you do not have the time or the resource

A blog should allow a consumer brand to give a less formal perspective and an inside view on activities and happenings within that organisation. If your organisation does not have the time or available resource to commit to regular and open communication, then schedule blogging for a later date in your brand development. Nothing smacks more of insincerity than a half-arsed blog.

2. If you cannot/will not disclose

If for whatever business reason you are not able to share more than you do in a press release, then don’t blog it. A blog is not media communication tool (though media professionals can of course get a great level of organisational insight from company blogs) so do not feel tempted to re-hash or replicate your press releases in blog form. Your customers and fans will not be hugely interested in formal announcements or whoever has just won your accounting software contract.

3. If you can’t take the heat (i.e. accept feedback)

Okay, so a blog technically by definition; (and as an abbreviation of weblog) is essentially a record of activities, happenings, thoughts opinions and sometimes feelings. A blog is still a blog without the facility to allow user interaction in the form of comments and feedback, but really why bother unless your brand is ready to engage with readers? Again we come back to the point of what are you really offering that is distinct to your press releases? A blog really is a valuable platform to spark conversation, debate, allow insight and open up your business or brand to the people that actually buy it. Why the hell not allow the most important people connected to your organisation (your customers) have their say too? If you are blogging well and if you are sharing real insight and excitement then allowing comment and community input can be the most valuable (and free) insight you can get!

These are just some of the reasons and situations I could think of when blogging is not the best idea for a consumer brand. Don’t misunderstand me, I am usually a great advocate of blogging and all social media in general; however I thought it important to get the point across. Don’t succumb to the pressure and blog for blogs’ sake.

Please help me expand on the list above and add other reasons you can think of when a consumer brand would be best not to blog!

theMediaFlow blog is written by Nichola Stott. You can follow me on Twitter: www.nicholastott.com

1.  Set an objective

Set an objective for your social media strategy to help you focus your efforts efficiently. You can go the ‘whole mnemonic hog’ with a detailed SMART objective. (Your objective should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable and Realistic in a given Time,) or keep things a little more relaxed. As long as you have a specific, realistic goal and an awareness of the tracking tools and measurements of success that are out there, you have the right framework. An example social media objective could be… “promote customer awareness and engagement with my brand by attracting a couple of hundred fans to my Facebook page in a month.”

2. Work the 80/20 rule

You know the 80/20 rule? You get 80% of your revenue from 20% of your clients? Well it’s true for audience as well. It’s extremely important with the huge volume of social media sites, products, tools and applications; that you focus the majority of your efforts where you have the biggest potential return on your (time) investment. Unless social media marketing is your full time job, you need to go where the greatest audience is. Facebook reached 22.7 million visitors in the UK in February (Comscore), which is over two thirds of the UK online population. Twitter grew 1689% year on year in the UK to almost 2 million users in March (NNR). It goes without saying that you do need to consider your audience demographic when compiling the short-list of sites for your social media campaign.

3. Create a consistent social media brand

Use and abuse all the customisation features and profile fields that you possibly can, to customise the look and feel of your profile page and deliver your message. It’s important to make sure that you use the same photograph (or logo), same strap-line and profile data, and the same company name and format conventions to represent your brand. If you don’t make and keep your profiles consistent, professional and recognisable you run the risk of being taken for an imposter profile (sometimes great for a laugh,) however users will be less likely to tune into and take notice of your message if they’re not 100% convinced as to your authenticity.

4. Integrate your social media

So you’re Digging and Tweeting and cultivating yourself an entourage big enough to push Paris out of the VIP area. Great. What about your company website? If you are generating awareness and interest in your brand and leading traffic back to your website, are users offered the same message and tone of voice as your social media? If your company website content is a little dry and lacking in social features this may put people off. Such mismatch in content positioning and tone of voice may come off as a little insincere. Additionally, for potential customers coming to your company website from search engines or type-ins, you may miss the opportunity to connect and interact if you fail to reference and promote your social media outlets. There are plenty of well designed, social media icons available freely on the web that you can use to easily drop onto the relevant space on your site, such as this lovely set from web design agency FHOKE. http://www.fhoke.com/blog/2009/05/07/a-set-of-14-free-social-icons/

Right... that’s the easy bit. Now comes the most important part, which is all up to you! Make sure that you have some great content, advice, giveaways and information to share with your friends, followers and fans or they may not stick around for too long.

theMediaFlow blog is written by Nichola Stott, who you can follow on Twitter @NicholaStott.