Over the last few days the Pressitt team has noticed a small uplift in spam releases submitted to the Pressitt platform and unfortunately a few slipped through the net.

As a consequence, Pressitt has updated it’s spam procedures and no longer allows content related to loans, finance, credit, along with the banned topics already prominent in the registration page.

Any account found to be abusing Pressitt in any shape or form will have its account terminated straight away.

However, if you feel you have a legitimate release covering one of the banned topic areas, please get in touch with the editorial team (contact@pressitt.com ) and we will review your submission on an individual basis.

Let us make it clear that the vast majority of Pressitt users publish relevant and newsworthy content, but we feel it is necessary to take these measures to maintain the standards of content available via Pressitt.

If you’re still not sure what Pressitt does and doesn’t allow in terms of content, please read our editorial guidelines before you submit your next release. All we basically want is relevant and newsworthy content.

To find out more about the different types of spammers out there, Joshua Titsworth at Search Engine Journal has written an excellent post entitled: Six Types of Social Spammers (none of which we want to see on Pressitt)

We look forward to viewing your next Social Media News Release.

The Pressitt Team

Just a quick note/request to ask for your support by voting for us at the Crunchie awards, the annual competition and award ceremony to recognise and celebrate the most compelling startups, and internet and technology innovations of the year.

The Crunchies is co-hosted by GigaOm, VentureBeat, and TechCrunch, and is voted for by the internet community.

We have been nominated in the Best Bootstrapped StartUp, as Pressitt was developed with no cash injection and thanks to the hard work of the Pressitt team. Put simply, we do it because we love the Social Media News Release concept and want to offer a social platform to share news and related content.

If you would like to vote for us, please click the button below. It’s as simple as that.

Many thanks,

The Pressitt team.

The Pressitt social media news release team are always striving for ways to get PRs, brands, small businesses, and anybody else interested in the SMNR format, to share knowledge about this increasingly popular communications tool.

Today, we are pleased to announce a new social network: Pressitt SMNR Best Practice – that allows you to share best practice and helpful tips when creating your Pressitt SMNR. We hope Pressitt’s new social network will help to crowd source knowledge from those that create SMNR’s and feedback into the community with best practice, helpful tips, advice and any other thoughts. Of course the Pressitt team will be fully involved in the network, adding relevant links, new forums topics, user examples and generally answering your social media news release questions.

So, if you use Pressitt regularly, or want to find out how to create SMNRs, please get involved and share your thoughts, recommendations and ideas.

Pressitt Team

To get the latest Pressitt SMNR’s please follow us on http://twitter.com/Pressitt

Last Thursday (5th of November) The Pressitt SMNR team were asked to present at the CIPR Social media for PR practise workshop - focusing on the CIPR’s Education and skills group.

Also in attendance was my colleges from Liberate Media PR and social media consultancy Tim Greenhalgh, who was on the sharing best practise morning panel discussion with Simon Collister of We are Social and Nic Mitchell from Teesside University and led by Tracy Playle, Vice-Chair, CIPR Education and Skills sector group and Pickle Jar communications.

Lloyd Gofton and myself Andy Merchant led the afternoon session focused on building social media news releases.

The Pressitt SMNR session seemed to go well,  and we had a mixed group in terms of social media understanding. When asked for a show of hands of people that had published an SMNR we received No response. But preaching to the converted is easy, but helping PR professionals to understand the benefits of a social media news releases was much more rewarding.

We faced some tough questioning which we welcomed as this wasn’t an audience of converts, this was an audience of concerned professionals that wanted to embrace new tools, but needed to ‘get-it’ first of all, which made us re-think our approach and additionally gave us some good ideas for Pressitt 2.0, which we hope to launch in the new year.

After the event we had a great deal of positive feedback and promises from a number of people to give Pressitt a go, which at least one has already done, and after all that’s all we can ever ask.

I will leave you with this, a quote from the CIPR’s research into the use of online media in UK higher and Further Education institutions.

“Press releases are nearly useless. They typically start with a tremendous amount of top-spin; they contain pat-on-the-back phrases and meaningless quotes. Often they will contain quotes from C-level executives praising their customer focus.

“Press releases are created by committees, edited by lawyers, and then sent out at great expense through Businesswire or PRnewswire to reach the digital and physical trash bins of tens of thousands of journalists … this madness has to end!”

His proposal: “Deconstruct the press release into special sections and tag the information so that as a publisher I can pre-assemble some of the news story and make the information useful.”

Now there’s a thought!

Some great examples of the rich features used to create a Pressitt Social Media News Release (SMNR)

We’d like to share a nice piece of feedback with you that we had about Pressitt’s Social Media News Release creation and publishing service.

The feedback was given by a gentleman called Chris from the Commission for Rural Communities.

Chris was a novice in the area of SMNR creation and publishing, and here is what he had to say.

“We have been delighted with our first foray into the exciting world of SMNRs, and Pressitt has made life very easy for us. It’s straightforward and intuitive to use and help is at hand if it’s needed. We’re also really pleased with the feedback we’ve had on our first release, and again it’s thanks to Pressitt for starting the ball rolling via Twitter. I would have no hesitation in recommending Pressitt to anyone thinking about doing a SMNR, but allow plenty of time to assemble all the content first – that’s by far the hardest part!”

The CRC produced a really great first SMNR -Drive to push investment to heart of rural England - SMNR, which included a number of YouTube videos and images which made for a feature-rich Pressitt SMNR.

If anybody else would like to share their Presitt thoughts or feedback please get in touch. We look forward to hearing from you.

Pressitt went into public beta on the 20th of April 2009. The response to Pressitt over the last three months has been fantastic - well we think so anyway!

Here is an overview of statistics so far:

10,105 visits to Pressitt

6,509 unique visitors to Pressitt

31,462 pageviews, 18,281 of which were unique views

3.24 average pageviews per visit

Top three SMNRs to date:

1. Building Britain’s Digital Future: Government Unveils Action Plan for the Digital Economy - 1,525 unique views

2. Electric cars on UK streets as part of £25m trial - 571 unique views

3. New poverty plan will help millions of the world’s poorest people - 317 unique views.

These views are as of today, but will continue to rise as all Pressitt releases are hosted for life and searchable on Google and other major search engines forever.

My personal favourite:

Who do you want to make famous a Second Daim Around?

Social Media Newsroom

We have also created our first Social Media Newsroom and bespoke template for not-for-profit PR agency Bright One - view the release here

Press coverage

We have been featured in PR week magazine, on Brand Republic and many other well know blogs, and of course tweeted about many times.

As always your feedback and support is welcome to move the SMNR concept forward.

Many thanks for all the support so far, and we will be releasing new features and functionality soon!

We look forward to viewing you SMNRs on Pressitt.

Pressitt Social Media Newsroom competition

In order to celebrate the launch of our new Social Media Newsroom offering, we are offering a limited number of free bespoke news release templates and Social Media Newsrooms, which of course can be used in conjunction with the Pressitt platform and easily linked to from your own site.

What are we giving away?

Three packages are up for grabs that include a Social Media Newsroom and bespoke Social Media News Release template that our designers will mock up in the style of your present website.

Your Social Media Newsroom and release template will be given a unique url: yourbrand.pressitt.com
View an example newsroom here: Bright One

The Rules

The competition will run for one month after the publishing date of this post. (29th July 2009)

The competition is open to agencies, corporations, challenger brands, and anyone who has a passion and interest for the Social Media News Release and is going to use it!

To enter, all you have to do is sign-up to Pressitt with a valid email address. No Google, MSN or Yahoo sign up’s will be entered into the draw (make sure you only enter once).

All previous active members who have signed up with a valid email address will automatically get entered into the prize draw.

To qualify for entry, you need to have released one newsworthy SMNR on the Pressitt platform.

The draw will be made by an impartial adjudicator.

The winners will be contacted via email and sent a briefing sheet for completion of the Newsroom and bespoke release template.

A bit about the Social Media Newsroom.

The Social Media Newsroom is a unique company landing page offering access to all of your multimedia news releases. It is a first touch for brands wanting to engage and participate with online communities, including journalists, bloggers, and even consumers researching your product or service.

Follow us on Twitter and find us on Facebook to get competition updates and news.

Good Luck

The Pressitt team had a mad development day yesterday. We were working on suggested feedback and making our first social media newsroom live.

Latest additions

New blog commenting system. Viewers can comment via Twitter accounts. It also tracks comments on each release over the net.

Bright One newsroom and template made live.  Additional social media profile icons added and Flickr widget. View the Bright One Social Media News Room.

Download button added to all uploaded images on the release.

Pagination on the home page. Now readers can cycle through all the Pressitt SMNR’s from the home page.

News categories added to home page - NFP, GOVERNMENT, SCIENCE. If you would like to see other categories please get in touch.

Additional boiler plate wording added, to encourage users to add boiler plates.

Added previous release to preview screen.

New social media profile icons added to the Pressitt footer.

Helpful quotes added to creation pages.

More updates soon.

Here are some SEO optimisation tips to help your Pressitt Social Media News Release get a headstart on Google, Yahoo and other search engines.

1.Instead of just dropping copy in your release and hoping it will be picked up by search engines, use keyword tools such as Google AdWords keyword tool and Wordtracker’s FREE keyword suggestion tool.

Google AdWords keyword tool

You can either enter the keywords you want to research into the top box, or you can enter a URL of your website if you want to research that in the subject area.

The second half of the screen shows the actual keywords being searched into Google, the competition on Google Adwords and an indication of Search Volume (how many searches  per month).

2. Your most important keywords should feature once in the Pressitt headline, once in the summary/overview, several times in the core facts and in the boilerplate/company information.

When adding your keywords make sure your SMNR still makes sense to both your audience and to Google.

3. When adding images and documents to your Pressitt Social Media News Release make sure they are correctly labelled to tell the viewer what the images are or what the documents are about. All the images and documents can be indexed by Google.

4. Use the social feature within the Press Contacts section and relevant links to create a clear path back to any online ways inwhich you can be contacted, and social profiles/websites that can help widen your brand reach.

5. After you have published your SMNR you can re-edit, or change your keywords to try and attain a higher ranking in Google.

6. Search engine rules change for time to time as do search algorithms. Pressitt will try and keep you updated with the best way to write your SMNRs.

7. Most importantly, make sure your release is well written and of interest to your audience.

This post was written by Ian Howie Account Director at 1upSearch

Twitter: ihowie

Web: www.1upsearch.co.uk

Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ianhowie