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Digital News and Social
Content
How to revitalize your news
content and make it relevant in the
digital age
Adapting to the Digital World
A new format:
• Provide the facts
• Package it in sections
• Add visual material
• Tag everything so it is
easy to find
• Add embed codes so
it is easy to use and
republish
Tag News Content
By using news tags, a newspaper/news
site could pull together larger numbers of
news stories and the PR industry would be
helping the news publishers gather the
facts and present them in a near-
publishable format.
Source: Silicon Valley Watcher (http://s.tt/14aCy)
Digital Journalism
• 60% of news outlets have laid off staff in
the last year
• The online audience is growing rapidly –
North American news outlets audience is
mostly online.
Visual Content • You can get 9.7X more
views on a press releases
with multimedia added
The Media Wants Visuals
• Almost every media company has a
website
• Multimedia with a story gets more views
• Editors insist on multimedia with a news
story
• Journalists editors and bloggers all say
images and videos are essential
2013 Online Newsroom
Report
Only 21% of the Top 100
Global Brands use
multimedia with their press
releases
What Digital News Outlets
Need
A constant flow of excellent news content.
Multimedia to support and enhance the story.
“People are willing to watch a lot of video online now that speed and bandwidth have improved.
How people consumer news is changing by the day.
As journalists we can’t sit back and say this is how we’ve done it for the last 50 years and that’s how we will keep doing it.
We’re fighting for the attention of every reader. We have to provide what people want – we have to figure out how to produce better journalism and reach the national and international audience online.”
Jim Brady
Editor in Chief, Digital First Media
Formerly Chief Editor of Washingtonpost.com
Online Media Websites
• 89% use video on their site
• 84% will use video from an outside source
• 57% prefer to use fully produced, completed videos from external resources
• 47% offer advertorial with video opportunities
• 79% say this trend will continue and will grow next year
Source: Web Influencers Survey D.S. Simon Productions
Search
“The one factor that
has most impacted
the news industry in
the last decade is
searching for news.”
The State of the Media 2011 Pew Research
Image source: Danard Vincente Flickr
Optimizing News Content
Less than 20% of releases on the
wire are optimized for search
Source: PRESSfeed study 2012
Sharing News
“Sharing news
content is expected
to be the one factor
that most impacts
the news in the next
decade.”
Source: State of the Media 2011
Pew Research
Sharing Corporate News
Fortune 100
42% of Fortune 100 companies have sharing options on their newsrooms making it easy to share news releases, images and videos
INC 500
16% of these fast-growing companies provide sharing tools in their newsroom
New PR Skills
• Understand media consumption changes
• Learn what digital journalists need
• Format your press releases to meet those needs
• Provide quality content
• Tell interesting stories
• Add original images
• Add short, interesting video to enhance the story
• Present figures or data visually
• Optimize all content for search
• Make it easy to use and re-publish
• Make it easy to share
• Tracking and analytics
Understanding Search
for
PR and News Content
Google’s Algorithm
• +/- 250 signals
• Relevancy – quality, original content
• Freshness
• Keywords on the page relevant to the search query
• Title/Description = Headline and subhead
• Links on page
• Inbound links from relevant authoritative sites
• Mentions – social proof
Google’s Mission
“Google’s mission is to organize the
world’s information and make it
universally accessible and useful.”
Panda 2012 Focuses on high-quality
content that users love
Low bounce rate – they stay on the page
Original, well-written
content
Sites with low-quality, spammy articles or press releases get penalized
Penguin 2012
• Bad links
• Paid links
• Keyword stuffing
• Link schemes
• Deliberate creation of
duplicate content
Avoid any kind of spam
• Google considers social
signals to be a strong,
natural indication of site
authority and uses this in
its ranking algorithm
• Encourage genuine
engagement and grow
your following of real
people with real opinions
Headlines and Subheads
You have to tell Google what your content is about
Headline becomes the title
Subhead can be used as the description
Title/Headline
Description
Subhead
Headline
Google indexes 65 characters
Yahoo News still #1 – the
largest news audience in
the world
They have partnered with
ABC News # 12
Google News has
improved in 2012 –
moved up for #10 to #4!
Huffington Post is #6
News Search
• Operates with human
editors
• They pay attention to
rising searches and
trends
Yahoo! News
Tip: Use
Google Trends
– check the
rising searches
for your topic
Google Trends
Google News
• Volume and originality of content produced consistently about a topic
• Quality and quantity of links to the news story
• Relevance to the user's query (keywords)
• “Editorial interest" (how many editors consider a news story containing the search term more important than others)
• Page placement (have editors put a story on a site's home page or just buried it somewhere deep inside the site?)
• Freshness
• Local to the searcher
News Headlines
• Google 65 characters
• Yahoo News 85 characters
• Twitter max 100 characters (leave room
for the link and retweeting)
Aim for 65 characters.
Use the keywords or phrase you want the
release to be found for.
Interesting and enticing to the reader.
News Search Results
Digital Release Format
Core news
Bullet points
Research
Analyst data
Quotes
Expert sources
Visual material
Embed Codes
Contacts
http://www.press-feed.com/SMNR-template
Social Citations
• Google Plus
• Blogs
• StumbleUpon
• Forums
News Feeds (RSS)
Takeaways
• Google is most important for web search
• Algorithms change – good, relevant content gets results
• Freshness is important
• The news search algorithm is a little different
• Yahoo! News is most important for news search
• Google News is catching up fast – now #4
• Write good headlines – 65 characters
• Use keywords in the headline
• Aim to be a Google News source
• Social citations are becoming as important as inbound
links
Keyword Research
How to find and use the best
keywords in your news releases
and PR content
Topic of Release
• What the release is about
• Any obvious keywords and phrases
• Brand – is it a keyword?
• Use free tools to find keywords
Finding the Right Phrases
Free Google Keyword Tool
Paid Tools
Keyword Discovery
Correlates search statistics from a number of the world’s most popular search engines to create an extremely powerful keyword discovery tool.
Starts at $69.95/month
WordTracker
Provides access to Google’s keyword tool, and uses its own custom database comprised of phrases used by people searching some of the world’s best search engines.
Starts at $69/month
Alternate Keywords
Google Trends
Google Trends
Collaborate
• Ask other teams for
their top keywords
related to the topic
of your release
• Marketing
• SEO team
• Internet marketing
Own PR Phrases
• Find some unique
phrases
• Use them in releases,
blog posts and
articles
• Track their ranking
Take Notes
• Who else shows up
• Who writes about the topic
• Bloggers you could work with
• Check news results
Takeways
• Main topic of the release
• Look for obvious keywords
• Do keyword research
• Find best keywords
• Find alternative keywords with Google tools
• Collaborate with other teams
• Find PR keywords you can own
• Use keywords to find reporters and bloggers who write about your topic
Exercise
Using a release you brought with you, do the
keyword research.
Find one main key phrase and two minor
phrases you can use to optimize the release
for search.
Contact
Sally Falkow
sally@meritusmedia.com
@sallyfalkow
Watch the next module
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