For this week’s post, I decided to take David Meerman Scott’s example out of his book The New Rules for Marketing & PR. Scott mentioned how he was on Google looking for ideas for a keynote speech he had to give, and came upon a company called WebEx. He was searching for “accelerated sales cycle” and this site’s news release came up first in Google’s results. The same thing happened in the Google News section. Scott spoke with Colin Smith, director of PR for WebEx, and he explained how much power new releases have through Google. “Google and news keywords have really transformed the news release as a distribution vehicle,” said Smith.
The point here is that news releases are not dead, like most people think. David Meerman Scott is just one example of many people that search for these keywords, and it shows that someone can bring a lot of traffic to a company through SEO (search engine optimization). The phrase, “accelerated sales cycle”, was one that WebEx used in optimizing for their search. This means that when people like Scott search for that, a news release from WebEx will appear as the first link. By doing this, the company owned by Cisco can reach a lot of buyers. Not only using this one phrase or keyword, but plenty of others throughout all of their news releases. Also, what the company does with these news releases is vital to grabbing attention of the maximum potential buyers. They can litter the article with links to their products or sites, and including share buttons can help spread the word about a new product via social media. Reaching the maximum amount of potential buyers is the main goal of a PR professional in writing news releases.
Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing are main catalysts as to how news releases and companies can stay afloat during this ever-changing digital age. Optimizing searches through keywords and phrases can bring in a ton of consumers and customers, and promoting these products in news releases can lead to plenty of success for a company. WebEx is owned by Cisco, so their reach for buyers looks great from the start. However, promoting news releases on the company’s website and marketing through social media and search engines is key to bringing in the audience you want; it worked well for David Meerman Scott.
The digital world today is short and simple for the most part, as we limit most information to 140 characters or less. This is not the case for important news releases, and with help from search engines, it looks like they’ll be around for a while.
Dan Callahan's Internet Marketing Blog 