This is the third part of our tricks and tips blog post series, focused on getting the most out of the Pressitt Social Media News Release creation and publishing platform.

Part 3: Dont’ forget about your previous releases!

Pressitt previous releases tick box image

In page 2 of the editing and creation processing pages is a small tick box option that says “Tick the box if you would like to have your previous SMNRs listed. Only SMNRs from this company identity can be listed”

It’s always worth ticking this box as it always allows other SMNR’s created with this identity to be included on your latest published SMNR. This functionality helps give your viewer to your release a  chance to further explore your brands latest news.

Previous SMNRs image

We hope this gives you a few more ideas when creating your SMNR. Come back soon to see the next Pressitt SMNR tips and tricks post.

Over the next few weeks Pressitt will be offering you some tips and tricks blog posts to help you create your SMNR more effectively. The first in our series looks at the relevant links section of your release.

The relevant links section of the creation process gives you a great opportunity to show your viewers other parts of your brand. Ideas for relevant links could be a link back to your: Company Twitter account, YouTube page, Facebook group, blog, website, other coverage around your news and any supporting research. Here is a recent example of best practise from the ‘Women cyclists benefit from noseless saddle solution to riding-related health problems’ SMNR.

Here is another example: ‘Celebrate Asian music, dance and fashion at The Mela at The Mall 2009‘, notice here some of the social media profiles are highlighted with visual logos, which updates automatically when you add the link.

We hope this gives you a few more ideas when adding links to your SMNR in the creation process. Come back soon to see the next Pressitt SMNR tips and tricks post.

RRXPQF2M63BW

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

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.

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.

The team behind Pressitt, Social Media News Release creation and publishing service have come up with a guide on getting the most from social bookmarking and news sites. These play an important part of the SMNR share process alongside other sharing processes such as sharing via email to your PR contacts online and offline, adding to your news wire release via a link and forwarding to targeted industry experts and peers.

What are bookmarking sites?

Social news and social bookmarking sites are websites/portals that save website posts, blog posts, images, and videos - anything that a wider audience would want to view.

Social News sites also tend to have voting systems where users can vote for or against the articles posted, allowing readers to quickly navigate to the best articles. The more votes you get the higher ranked and recommended the post is, making it more visible and likely to attain a place on the home page where it gains maximum exposure.

Which is the best site?

One of the most popular sites using a voting system is Digg. It is separated into two sections: a ‘most popular’ list, which comprises articles receiving the most votes in the past few days or weeks, and an ‘upcoming’ list, which are new articles. Most other social news sites follow a similar setup.

Social news sites are also a good place to get a discussion going just like a blog commenting system.

Let’s get started

Pick out a social news site and browsing through the categories to familiarise yourself with the layout and the functionality. Try adding new articles to the site or commenting on existing articles. To do this you will need to register and set up an account.

Digg ,Reddit, Mixx are among the more popular sites but you might be better off targeting your efforts to a niche site that is more geared to your SNMR,  brand, products and services.

How to Use Social Bookmarking to Promote Your SMNR

Social bookmarking and news sites are a free and effective way to get* backlinks and drive traffic to websites and blogs. The bigger sites such as Digg and Reddit have the most traffic and are a good place to start.

When you start looking around the site pay attention to the blogs, websites, and articles that are bookmarked the most and ranked the highest on the home page, it’s also worth looking at how the headlines and summaries are written. This will give you an idea of what people like to see.

*Backlinks: Backlinks are links from one website to another website. The high Page Rank the website that contains the link has, the more power it has to help BOOST the linked website with its search engine position pushing above it’s rivals. So the more high quality backlinks you get the better position Google grants you.

Submission tips

• Don’t *spam, you will get a bad reputation and nobody will vote your pages up
• No sales copy - it’s boring and nobody fall for it!
• Entertainment posts, relevant news, and a snappy hook all help to encourage votes
• Only submit quality content - interesting and well written.
• Vote on articles quickly. Articles that get at least 25 votes within the first 15 minutes will rise through the social bookmarking ranks faster than articles that get 25 votes over two days.
• Don’t just vote for your own post and articles - If you are only promoting your own blogs and affiliate marketing programs users will quickly lose interest in your content. Remember, other users can view your profile to see what you are submitting or promoting.
• The best way to promote your content and get it on the front page for maximum effect is to get colleagues to vote for it, also Tweet about it ” Hey great post on xxxxx I think it really deserves a Digg!” and link to the post on Digg

*SPAM: In terms of social news sites means that you are only looking to submit and publish your own related content to gain an advantage. Users will realise you are not being part of the community and will not vote your submissions up, so you have no chance of gaining front page status. Spam is also considered to be one of the following topics, alcohol, activism, extremism, petition, prescription or other drugs, religious, ringtones, tobacco or vitamins related themes.

Top social bookmarking and news sites

1  digg.com

383,598,000 - Inbound Links | 33,433,760 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 11,400,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 183 - Alexa Ranking.

2  Yahoo! Buzz

6,031,000 - Inbound Links | NA - Compete Monthly Visitors | 3,600,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | NA - Alexa Ranking.

3  StumbleUpon.com

234,000,000 - Inbound Links | 4,418,609 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 1,100,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 362 - Alexa Ranking.

4  reddit.com

161,685,000 - Inbound Links | 4,908,990 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 1,300,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 441 - Alexa Ranking.

5  Technorati.com

175,287,000 - Inbound Links | 3,309,174 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 2,000,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 662 - Alexa Ranking.

6  del.icio.us

427,665,000 - Inbound Links | 1,623,083 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 317,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 2,476 - Alexa Ranking.

7  kaboodle.com

2,600,000 - Inbound Links | 3,941,212 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 2,500,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 1,694 - Alexa Ranking.

8  mixx.com

16,005,000 - Inbound Links | 879,108 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 2,200,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 645 - Alexa Ranking.

Make it easy

Social Marker is a fully automated tool that allows you to type in the details (name, url, tags, description) of the post you are submitting to many bookmarking and social news sites.  You will need to have set up accounts at each of the individual sites first though.

Additional resources - Niche social news and bookmarking sites

List of Social Bookmarking Websites

http://knol.google.com/k/shital-jethva/-/1lch2budony0n/4#

50 Social News Websites: A List of General and Niche Social Media Communities

http://www.doshdosh.com/list-of-social-media-news-websites/

83 Social News Sites - Categorised By Niche

http://www.squareoak.com/blog/83-social-news-sites-categorized-by-niche/

List of Social Media and Social Networking Sites

http://traffikd.com/social-media-websites/

20 Do-Follow Social Bookmarking Sites That Actually Work

http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/do-follow-social-bookmarking-sites/

Other useful resources

Digg front page data - useful to see what sorts of stories are hitting the front page, plus lots of other insightful information:

http://socialblade.com/digg/diggfpdata.php

Link Attraction Factors Keyword Tool - Enter a keyword and the tool will return data on the average number of links accumulated by stories popular on Digg that mentioned that keyword:

http://danzarrella.com/link-attraction-factors-keyword-tool?word=free

LAF Title Check - Enter a title and the tool will break down the words and display the effect they had on the link accumulation of popular Digg stories:

http://danzarrella.com/laf-title-check

As a big advocate of the Social Media News Release (SMNR), and someone who has spent many hours over the last few years researching the subject for my own benefit and that of Pressitt’s, it’s worth noting where we’re up to with the SMNR concept.

On the plus side we have great vocal and influential supporters such as Brian Solis, who every year creates a huge resource-focused blog post to invigorate the SMNR bandwagon (hats off to the guy), other SMNR stars such as Todd Defren who frequently blogs and comments about the release, and there have been a few nice examples of the SMNR in action such as my own personal favourites - the Standard Bank cricket efforts, and of course all the good work carried out by Digital Snippets for Ford.

Other services like the fantastically successful Pitch Engine have been quick to realise the potential of the SMNR and have done a good job of creating a place to stimulate online conversation - something that Pressitt, our UK-based SMNR and creation service hopes to achieve and emulate.

On the downside, ask many non-digital and even some digital journalists what a SMNR is, and they still won’t have a clue! It’s not just about the journalist though, as SMNRs are also aimed at bloggers hungry for news, microbloggers and social communities (the social masses). These people need to be educated and helped to understand the benefits of the SMNR format. PRs and marketers are slowly getting there but there is still a massive education job to do.

Two rather worrying points that I’ve also noticed are:

- The Social Media Release blog has not been updated since the 7th of March 2008.

- The IABC assumes a Social Media Release leadership role, but they don’t seem to have taken a very proactive approach.

To sum it all up, in the three years since Todd Defren’s ground breaking SMNR template, not as much has happened as could have been possible. At Pressitt we are optimistic that in 2009 the SMNR will reach its tipping point. It’s going to take a lot of hard work from all of the people mentioned in this post as well as ourselves and others, but I really hope we can help to prove that the SMNR is a great way of creating and sharing news socially. I’ll be shouting about the SMNR from the UK rooftops!

Here are some of the better SMNR links I have discovered over the last three years:

Below is the next in the series of Pressitt help videos. This screencast shows you how to create your SMNR and get the best out of Pressitt social media news release creation and publishing service.

Other help Pressitt videos include RSS feeds and boilerplates/company information.

We hope you find these videos useful.

If you think a particular element needs explaining better within Pressitt please let us know and we’ll add it to our list of updates.

Regards,

The Pressitt Team