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This has left the once noble press release a tool of significantly diminished power. It’s still a necessity; journalists still expect to see them, they’re the generally accepted form of packaging a news story for media. But email and search have opened the floodgates making it difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Meanwhile, social media is both creating new ways to package stories and changing the way relationships work, between PRs and media, media and their readers, and brands direct to their audiences.

Fixing the search problem

Of course Google has already started to address the search problem. The changes it made last month on its webmaster tools page on link schemes caused a stir, with some astounding misunderstanding demonstrated of what the purpose of the press release is.

But Google was not cracking down on use of press releases, just the misuse of them for manipulation of search results. The changes do not affect the press release’s original function, which is the packaging of a news story. So this should, in theory, lead to a widespread uplift in quality of the releases that are published online via wire services.

As with all of its algorithm tweaks, Google made these changes is because it cares a great deal about the quality of its search product.

Could Google fix the email problem?

Another product Google cares a great deal about the quality of is Gmail, and it recently made some pretty hefty changes to the product, introducing separate tabs for different categories of message.

Again, an industry stir has been caused, with email marketers concerned about their messages landing in a hived off section of users’ inboxes, but other than a few tweets from journalists I haven’t seen much analysis as to how this affects email delivery of press releases.

Doing a little experimentation of my own, I’ve found that if you use a standard media database email delivery system, any press release will end up in the ‘updates’ tab. Emailing the exact same release direct from my work email to my Gmail address lands it in ‘primary’.

So there are two issues here. Firstly, as I’m using my work address to email my personal Gmail, two addresses I frequently send things between, it would make sense for Gmail to recognise myself as a primary contact. But the media database delivery also technically delivers the message from my work email address, just via the database’s servers. So even when I am a trusted contact, I am still landing in ‘updates’.

The second issue is whether this matters. Some email marketers are arguing that Gmail’s tabbed inbox is good news. Perhaps it’s a good thing that your promotional message is getting filtered to ‘promotions’, as that is what it is.

I know personally that I’ve spent more time looking at the newsletters and email marketing I receive since the introduction of tabbed inbox. When I click over onto ‘promotions’ or ‘updates’ I am not expecting to see personal emails, so am willing to spend time sifting through in case there’s anything interesting.

Could the same apply to press releases? If releases are being filtered to another tab, that doesn’t mean they’re not necessarily getting looked at.

I know many journalists who use Gmail are happy to be seeing press releases being filtered. One told me that releases mostly go into promotions or updates, which helps combat the feeling of information overload.

Another journalist told me that he’s seeing Gmail cleverly deliver things of interest filter into ‘primary’. Which he’s very happy with, and it would suggest Google is using its affinity and interest data to filter messages for him.

Though by the subjective nature of what is ‘interesting’ the system is not flawless and requires occasional teaching, this is still quite a feat.

Relationships matter

Aside from content, the other reason an emailed release may end up in primary is that it’s from a known contact. One not quite so new ‘filtering mechanism’ that journalists have always used to determine what’s worth paying attention to is relationships.

By that I don’t mean the murky world of PR to journalist ‘I scratch your back you scratch mine’, I am talking here about trust, and authority. Journalists value their trusted sources above all else, and conversely PR pros value their relationships, those where they have established a position as a trusted source.

A PR person consistently offering newsworthy stories and quality content to the right journalists is how these kinds of relationships get built. Then there are face-to-face conversations and increasingly, interaction via social media.

Once again, we’re straying into a territory Google is looking to own – authority and relationships. With Google+, Authorship, Author Rank and Publisher Rank Google is increasingly not only building data on our interests, but on our relationships and our authority as sources.

What does the Google solution look like?

As with email, Google+’s effect on how PRs and journalists interact is incidental, but there is a big potential here.

In fact it’s happening already. I already know that if I can interact with a journalist on Google+, or get added to one of their circles, the next time I email them with a story I am more likely to land in their primary inbox.

What if I could build my Author Rank via distribution of newsworthy press releases, further increasing the chances of an editor looking at it? Or even if I distributed them via Google+, using my circles like I do email media lists now?

There’s one assumption I’ve made for the purpose of this analysis, which is the all-pervasive use of Google products by PRs and journalists. Google Search, we can safely assume, is pretty much used by all. Gmail, I’d guess has a reasonably high usage rate among online media, but it’s far from the only email provider.

As Google Authorship grows in importance online media would be foolish to ignore Google+, but it still has its naysayers.

As I mention, the relevant moves Google has made to fix the problems with press releases thus far have been incidental, quality improvements from a giant that have a knock on affect. Addressing the issue of how PR people interact with media is not likely to be a business priority.

If I’d written this over a year ago, I probably would have mentioned Google Reader as another potential press release delivery mechanism, and we all know how much of a business priority that was for the company.

So will Google purposefully go about continuing to fix the press release? Probably not. Will it make further changes that have a knock on effect? Possibly. But if anyone can fix it, Google can.

Posted by TakeshiYoung

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

An introduction to Tumblr

There are so many social media platforms out there today that online marketers have to be concerned about when promoting content online, that it can be easy to overlook some of the important ones.

Tumblr is one of those social networks which is often overlooked, but which has tremendous potential for SEO and social media marketing. I myself was slow to adopt Tumblr as a social media platform, but once I started using it I became hooked by its power and simplicity. Hopefully by the end of this post, you’ll feel the same.

In this post today I will be covering 1) What Tumblr is and how it works, 2) The benefits of Tumblr compared to other social networks, and 3) Actionable advice on how you can use Tumblr for online marketing, including specific content ideas.

Sounds good? Let’s get started.

Why should I care about Tumblr?

Before we get too far, let me provide some stats about Tumblr which should help put things into perspective:

• 130.5 million blogs on Tumblr, as of August 2013
• 28th highest traffic site on the web according to Comscore
• 300 million unique monthly visitors according to Yahoo
• 50% of Tumblr users are under the age of 25
• 53.5% of Tumblr visitors are female

As you can see, the numbers are massive. There are now over 130 million Tumblr blogs (known as “tumblrogs”), which makes Tumblr the largest hosted blog platform on the web, compared to the 70 million blogs hosted on Wordpress.com. It has 300 million monthly visitors, basically 15% of all Internet users. And it has a demographic that is unique in that 50% of the users are under 25, many of whom are teenagers (whereas teens are reportedly ditching Facebook in droves).

Big brands have taken notice of this too. In May, Yahoo purchased Tumblr for $1.1 billion (the largest purchase of a consumer Internet company since Google bought YouTube), and many of the world’s largest brands already have a presence on Tumblr.

Clearly, if you’re not on Tumblr by now, you’re falling behind the curve.

What is Tumblr?

So what the heck is this Tumblr thing anyway? It can be hard to describe Tumblr because it combines the functionality of many different kinds of sites.

The way I like to think of Tumblr is as a cross between Wordpress and Facebook– Tumblr has all the blogging functionality of a blog platform such as Wordpress, but also includes all the features of a social site such as hashtags, following, sharing, and liking. Tumblr is similar to Pinterest in many ways, except instead of multiple boards you have a single blog.

So although Tumblr is one of the most popular blogging (or microblogging) platforms on the web, it goes beyond just being a blog and allows users to share and like each other’s content, follow other Tumblr blogs, and discover new content through hashtags. It’s a blog platform with built-in social functionality and incredible viral potential.

The benefits of Tumblr

Ok, so now we have a better idea of what Tumblr is and why it’s important, but what are the benefits of Tumblr compared to other social networks and blogging platforms? There are 5 key benefits:

1) Dofollow links

First the biggie. Links from Tumblr, unlike most other social networks are dofollow. Tumblr is at its core a blogging platform, and you have full control of how your tumblrog appears, including using dofollow links on your site.

Where things get interesting is when you consider the social aspect of Tumblr. Tumblr has social sharing functionality (called “reblogging” in Tumblr parlance) built right in, and if you have a popular post it will be reposted to many other tumblrogs.

The thing is that each of these reblogs is a dofollow backlink to your original post! That means if you have a post that is reblogged 100 times, your tumblr blog just got 100 dofollow backlinks! For even more fun, you can include a link within the post itself. By doing so, both your original post on Tumblr, and the site linked to within the post will receive the backlinks.

Just imagine if every time your content got shared on Facebook, all those shares were dofollow backlinks. Wouldn’t that be nice? With Tumblr, this is the case. The same is also true with Google+ (Pinterest also recently dofollowed their links), but Tumblr has a more active user community and it’s much easier to have your content go viral on Tumblr.

Of course, you will want to be careful about what kind of anchor text you’re using in this post-Penguin world, but if you’re looking for some easy, dofollow backlinks, Tumblr is the place to get them.

2) Great content discovery

Another great benefit of Tumblr is that it has a great content discovery system built into it, thanks to its use of hashtags. If you’re ever looking for great images or memes, try searching Tumblr for the hashtag, and you’ll find some good material.

The great thing about Tumblr is that people actually use hashtags for content discovery (unlike, say, Facebook). This means that by using relevant and popular tags, it’s super easy for your content to get discovered on Tumblr, even if you don’t have many followers.

I have literally created brand new tumblrogs from scratch, and received dozens of reblogs for my content, even though I had zero followers. And remember, on Tumblr reblogs are dofollow backlinks. This is definitely not the case on social networks such as Facebook, where your content probably isn’t going to get a lot of love unless you already have a large number of followers.

3) Content testing ground

Another use for Tumblr is as a content testing ground. If you do a lot of social media marketing, you probably have tons of memes and images that you are considering posting to your Facebook page, or you if you create your own memes you may have different variations of a meme that you might want to test.

One of the ways that I like to use Tumblr is as a testing ground for new content that I’ve created. Tumblr’s dashboard is chronological like Twitter vs the more curated approach of Facebook’s news feed, and the upshot of this is that you can post a lot more content at once to Tumblr than you would want to on Facebook. Tumblr fans are more forgiving of less-than-outstanding content because they can simply scroll past it, similar to how users browse Pinterest.

This makes Tumblr a great place to post a lot of content to find which pieces perform the best. Then you can take the most popular pieces and repost them to your other social media profiles such as Facebook. And all the content you produce on Tumblr has a chance of being discovered later, thanks to the use of hashtags.

4) Microsites

Tumblr is the most popular microblogging platforms on the planet, which also makes it an ideal platform for setting up microsites. You won’t get the same amount of flexibility as you would with say a self-hosted Wordpress blog, but tumblrogs are quick to set up, simple to manage, and free. And if you want to switch from using a tumblr.com subdomain to your own domain name, it’s easy to switch to a domain name you own in the Tumblr settings.

Using Tumblr for microsites is a great way to build up a collection of web properties with decent PageRank that you can then point back to your main site. If you consistently post high quality content, it’s easy to get these tumblrogs to PR2 – PR4 within a few months.

Microsites are also a great option if your main brand is super serious, and you don’t necessarily want to associate it with memes and other silly content that does well on Tumblr.

5) Branding

Last, but certainly not least, Tumblr is another tool in your arsenal to promote your brand online. In addition to the other major social sites such as Facebook and Twitter, Tumblr provides another opportunity for you to establish your web presence. It’s another chance for your to engage with fans, build relationships with potential customers, and get your brand name out there, especially if you want to target a younger demographic. As the online marketer Pat Flynn always says, the best marketing strategy online is to Be Everywhere.

Content ideas for Tumblr

Hopefully by now you’re convinced of what a great opportunity Tumblr is for link building, content marketing, and branding. You may have even gone ahead and created your own tumblrog. Good work. But what kind of content does well on Tumblr?

Tumblr, like most other social sites, is a visual medium. That means that captivating images and pictures will do better on Tumblr than long form text. If you’re already conducting successful social media campaigns on sites such as Facebook and Google+, then reusing the same content you’re posting there is a good strategy.

If you want some specific example of content to post on Tumblr, here are 4 types of content that I’ve found perform extremely well Tumblr:

1) Memes

Memes are my favorite type of content to promote on social media. Memes are just the ideal type of content for people to consume and share via social media channels, and they’re viral almost by definition. You can have a lot of success just by curating funny memes related to your niche that you find across the web, but the greatest potential lies in creating your own. If you want to try your hand at making memes with some serious viral potential, check out this post I wrote for the Moz blog.

2) Photos/illustrations

As with Pinterest and Facebook, compelling images are some of the most popular pieces of content on Tumblr. This is especially true since there is a huge userbase of teenagers with attention spans that are shorter than even most Twitter addicts.

Creating great photos isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible to do if you have a access to a DSLR. Even if your camera equipment isn’t up to snuff, apps such as Instagram can take your ordinary photos and give them a vintage feel that appeals to the teen and hipster demographic.

Drawings and illustrations also do very well on Tumblr, and if you have an in-house graphic design team, definitely leverage that. Even if you don’t have graphical talent, you can go to sites such as Fiverr, Elance, and DeviantArt to get custom artwork created for you that’s specific to your niche.

If all else fails, you can just curate other people’s photos and artwork and see some results, but always be mindful of any copyright issues, and give credit where credit is due.

3) Quotes

Quotes are an amazingly easy type of content to create that surprisingly few marketers are taking advantage of. Quotes are great because they’re simple to create, even if you don’t even have any graphical talent. Just take an inspirational quote, put it over an attractive image (or even just a plain background), and you suddenly have a piece of content that can go viral not just on Tumblr, but on sites like Facebook, Pinterest, and Google+ as well. It’s super easy.

4) Animated GIFs

Like Google+, Tumblr allows you to use animated GIFs in your posts. These are incredibly popular with Tumblr users.

Now, creating animated GIFs is beyond my abilities, but it’s really simple to just take existing animated GIFs, add a clever caption to them, and post them on your tumblrog. Instant backlinks, guaranteed.

When my client asks me why their rankings fluctuate every day, I’m like…

For a great example of this, check out the This Advertising Life Tumblr. It’s an incredibly funny site, and has a PageRank of 5 to boot. You can easily find great animated GIFs to use by searching Tumblr for tags such as “animated GIF” or simply “GIF”. There are also sites such as ForGIFS which contain nothing but funny animated GIFs.

Wrap-up

Tumblr is one of the largest social media and blogging platforms in the world, yet it is often ignored by online marketers. Hopefully this post has showed you why you should add Tumblr to your marketing mix, as well as provided you with concrete content ideas you can use to drive success on your tumblrog.

I have built dozens of Tumblr blogs over the past year, and I can guarantee you that if you use the content ideas above, and post on a consistent basis, you will be able to build up a large following on Tumblr and build some strong backlinks to your sites, as well as promote your content and build your brand online.

If you have any questions, feel free to post in the comments or hit me up on Twitter. You can also check out more of my ramblings on my blog. This post was adapted from a presentation I delivered at SMX Toronto.

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She suggested there were three things on which to focus:

• A mobile optimised website.
• Search and discovery.
• Reaching your customers where they are.

And here’s a run through of those three main points in more detail…

Mobile optimised site

The argument over whether small businesses should opt for a mobile site or an app is fairly irrelevant as if you can only afford one or the other then a mobile site will almost definitely provide more value to your business.

There’s possibly an exception if your business is heavily reliant on repeat trade, but in the vast majority of cases a mobile site is the best option.

Unfortunately the situation is complicated further by the fact that there are three possible methods of creating a mobile optimised site:

• Responsive design. This rearranges the layout of the page depending on the screen size.
• Dynamic serving. This method serves different HTML using the same URL.
• Separate mobile subdomain. For example, an m.domain.com site. 

In a perfect world businesses should make a decision on which option to go for based on their goals, technical capabilities and the user’s needs.

However for most SMEs with small websites Randolph recommended using a responsive template and a CMS like Wordpress. Site owners can then buy individual Wordpress themes, such as:

• Designfolio (from Presscoders): free, or $79 with a support licence.
• Responsive (from CyberChimps): free.

Alternatively, there are also premium Wordpress theme providers:

• Elegant themes: $40 per year with full support.
• WooThemes: prices range from free up to $70.

However, for business owners that don’t wish to use Wordpress there are a few other options: 

• SquareSpace: from $8 per month
• Wix: from $10 per month.

Obviously budget is often an issue for SMEs so a mobile site might not be an option in the short term. In which case Randolph recommended instead focusing on maintaining business pages on Facebook and Google+ as those are already mobile optimised.

It’s also important to remember that a mobile optimised site isn’t a mobile strategy in itself, it’s merely the starting point.

Search and discovery

Step two of the process requires small businesses to optimise for mobile SEO and local search.

Mobile SEO 

If a business has used responsive design then it doesn’t need to take any additional action. But site owners using dynamic serving need to vary the HTTP header in order to tell search engines that mobile visitors should be shown a different version of the site.

Finally, for separate URLs there are several different areas to look at, details of which are covered in a blog post by Randolph.

Local search

Brick-and-mortar stores and businesses that serve a specific geographic location or city cannot afford to ignore local search, as local listings are given far more prominence in mobile SERPs.

Furthermore, statistics from Google show that 40% of mobile searches have local intent and more than half (55%) of conversions from mobile search take place within the hour.

Ranking factors for local search include on-page optimisation for location (e.g. naming the business location prominently on the page) and whether or not a business appears in respectable local listing sites, such as Bing Local or Yelp.

Google+ Local is also an important consideration and shouldn’t be confused with a basic Google+ profile page. Businesses need to create profiles on both platforms and merge them.

Other local search factors include:

• Linkbuilding from local sites, such as news organisations, government sites or blogs.
• Consistent citations on other sites, so consider using Whitespark’s Local Citation Finder Tool to ensure that all references include the same business name, address and phone number.
• Quality, useful images to illustrate local listings.
• Structured data. Use the hCard markup and a KML file for Google Maps.
• Reviews and recommendations in Yelp, Google+ Local, Foursquare, TripAdvisor or Zagat.

Reaching your customers

The third and final part of Randolph’s talk focused on how SMEs can actively target their customers using mobile, rather just waiting to be found.

There are three potential methods of doing this – apps, exclusive mobile content and email.

Apps

As previously mentioned, it’s highly unlikely that small businesses will require a dedicated mobile app unless they rely on frequent return visits. But for those considering building an app there are two main options to choose between:

• Native app: such as an iOS or Android app
• Web app: built in HTML5.

There are various pros and cons for each method (covered in more detail in Randolph’s Slideshare presentation) but in general native apps are more expensive but are faster with better functionality, while web apps are cheaper and easier to maintain but can’t be accessed offline and don’t feature in the various app stores.

Randolph also highlighted several cost effective methods for creating apps:

• Bizness Apps: from $59 per month for native apps.
• ViziApps: from £29 per month for web apps or £99 per month for native apps.
• AppMakr: free native Android apps (with ads) or ad-free iPhone and Android apps for $9 per month.
• RedFoundry: contact for a quote.

Exclusive mobile content

Offering customers unique mobile content involves tactics such as exclusive offers or a loyalty app.

This is a route we’ve seen many major retailers go down, with both Game and B&Q launching loyalty apps that help to drive footfall to brick-and-mortar stores and also help to join up the offline and in-store experience.

Apps also allow brands to send push notifications to target customers with special offers, however very few brands take advantage of this tool. I have a number of retail apps on my phone but only Debenhams and B&Q have ever sent a push notification.

Email

Mobile email is a hugely important consideration for all size businesses as studies show that 41% of all email is opened on mobile devices.

As such, if your business uses email marketing then it’s important to use mobile optimised email templates. There are a number of email services that provide these templates, including:

• MailChimp: from $10 per month.
• Campaign Monitor: from $10 per month or $5 per campaign.

And if you don’t want to use their full service then it’s possible to use these providers to build an email and then export the HTML.

CSR’s important to us, but instead of spreading our charity across many different avenues, we choose to support just one: the Hannah Memorial Academy.

Developing the microsite

The first stage was to create the Vuelta a Hotwire y 33 Digital microsite. Rather than just offering an opportunity to find the same information as stored on our event’s JustGiving page, we wanted to ensure that it was something worth visiting, engaging with and sharing.

We put simplicity at the heart of design of the microsite. We used a Creative Commons-sourced image for the background image to save on costs of image rights, and used our internal designer to create a logo, which was used as the main branding for the project.

The idea was to create something that engaged the audience while the cyclists were embarking on their journey. There were four elements of the page for the audience to engage and interact with. 

1. The livestream. By hosting a livestream of the cyclists in action, it allowed for followers, friends and family to watch the cyclists as they embarked on the journey.

   We opted to use Google Hangouts for any extra level of engagement through conversation as the bike rides went on.

2. The map. It was important to show the distance travelled throughout the journey. The initial plan, had we had a larger budget, was to have a bike that updated in real time for each kilometre pedalled.

   Given the lack of API on the exercise bikes and the limited budget to develop server-side scripting, we opted for the ‘light’ approach, which was to update the coordinates regularly throughout the day. 

   With each update to the coordinates, we provided visitors with fun facts about where we were staying that night.

3. Tweet your support. In our office; next to the bikes was a large TV screen connected to a laptop, displaying a Twitter wall (we used Twitter Fontana) of the hashtag #HotwireFit.

   The ‘Tweet your support’ button at the bottom of the microsite provided a pre-written tweet using the hashtag to offer messages of support to the cyclists on their route.

    

4. The cyclists’ Spotify playlist. The final idea was to put together the team’s perfect mix to exercise to. While the Hotwire radio played throughout the office, many took on their gym routine of putting earphones in and cycling away.

   So we polled the cyclists for their favourite songs to work out to, compiled them in a Spotify playlist and shared it on the site.

The microsite was hosted on a subdirectory of the UK Hotwire website, so from an SEO perspective, any links gained throughout the project would be beneficial to the main Hotwire website.

Social strategy

With the microsite established, we then promoted it and the event through Twitter and Facebook by regularly sharing photographs of the cycling teams, as well as status updates on both the distance travelled and the sponsorship received.

The results

• By Wednesday, half way through the project, we hit our target of £1,000. The vast majority of this had been gained since the official microsite launch at the start of the week. Total donations reached over 50% higher by deadline.
• Direct correlation between peak times visiting microsite and donating.
   
• The most engaged users came from the JustGiving page, who at peak days would on average stay on the site for 13 minutes, compared to a microsite-wide average of 10.
• There was a 220% increase in post reach on Facebook, along with an 81% increase week-to-week in engagement, with 83 photo likes.
• 385 total tweets to the #HotwireFit hashtag, resulting in 287,398 impressions, 486 unique visitors, with 958 visits in total across the week.
• Coverage in PRWeek, Gorkana and AMEC, which all mentioned the digital elements.

What we’ve learned

What could have been a very traditional charity approach, where people relied only on asking friends and family for sponsorship, became an engaging and highly successful digital project.

The microsite provided a level of interaction after the donation stage. These visitors were the most engaged users the site received, were more likely to remain on the site for longer, and more likely to tweet messages of support. 

For small projects, especially small-scale charity projects, where budget is limited, digital marketing can be incredibly beneficial.

We were able to dramatically improve the experience for those involved, exceed our donation target by 50%, and find a direct relationship between our digital marketing efforts and the all important outcomes and metrics of success: donations and engagement.