The last time I wrote about Marketwire, I was praising the company for their progressive technology and social media 2.0 service.  I had also just worked with them jointly on a book signing in their exhibit booth at the PRSA International Conference in Detroit back in 2009. I’ve been watching Marketwire ever since, and thought it was time to write about them again. After hearing the announcement yesterday regarding their acquisition of Sysomos, I caught up with Marketwire President and CEO Michael Nowlan and Co-Founder and President of Sysomos, Dr. Nick Koudas, for an interesting and enlightening discussion.

From my own knowledge and interaction with both of these companies (my only disclosure is that I’ve used the Marketwire newswire service and the Sysomos platform for my clients), I definitely see how the acquisition made a tremendous amount of sense. It’s important for PR and communications professionals to take note of how Marketwire is maximizing technology to advance communications.

Here are a few of the things I learned during my chat with two very busy business executives, post acquisition announcement.

One of the first questions I asked was, “How do your customers benefit from this acquisition?” They explained that their customers have been facing the rapid conversion of traditional and social media.  It’s apparent that there’s a great deal of confusion and also a concern in the communicator’s mind on how to handle social media because social media has “literally exploded.” The acquisition is a serious step forward for Marketwire and it addresses a large need in the market.  As a PR professional, I talk a great deal about listening to what customers and stakeholders are saying. That’s exactly what Marketwire did.  Their customers were the main rationale for the acquisition of Sysomos.

I also wanted to know why the Sysomos technology was the clear choice, with all of the other monitoring platforms, and how closely the brands aligned, even in terms of culture. We discussed “Why Sysomos?” and after listening to the explanation, it was clear to see that the Sysomos technology and the organization’s progressive way of thinking aligned closely with the Marketwire brand.  It was also mentioned that, “the Sysomos technology speaks for itself.”

In addition, the two brands fit together because of their philosophies and style; both companies, early on, were innovators in the market.  When Marketwire was doing its due diligence, it immediately recognized how both organizations had a strong commitment to customers and their values and business principles were very similar as well. Another  interesting fact that I didn’t know, Marketwire and Sysomos are neighbors, practically in each other’s backyards, only four blocks away from one another.

When I asked about the Sysomos platform and if it would stand alone, I learned that Marketwire will immediately begin offering the Sysomos product set, which includes Hearbeat and MAP.  These products will continue to exist under the Marketwire brand.  Marketwire is also investing in the integration of the Sysomos product set into a Marketwire platform.  For the next 24 months, there will be an entire roll out of additional comprehensive features and new products to come. The acquisition is truly representative of Marketwire’s conversations with PR professionals and hearing what they had to say by addressing their pain points and helping them to make smarter business decisions.

Touching a bit on whether or not the acquisition would open up new markets and channels for the company, we discussed how communications, as a whole, is segregated.  Marketwire’s new offerings will integrate rather than separate communication into silos (I’m all for integration).   And, for the Sysomos product set, Marketwire brings to the table a well-established sales team with a direct sales force and the marketing background and backend administrative process the company needed.  Sysomos is a younger company, three years on the market, so the acquisition broadens the reach for its product set.

Through this acquisition both executives envision a world where communications professionals can release information and have quantifiable measures that demonstrate ROI.  So many companies will be able to benefit from the acquisition, from the large to the mid-size and smaller organizations.  Both Marketwire and Sysomos work with some of the largest multinational companies (PR agencies), so there’s a big appeal for these brands.  However, mid-size and small companies are also a major piece of Marketwire’s strategy and direction.

Then, I asked the million-dollar question, “So, what’s next?”  Both executives expressed how, in the immediate term, people are really looking to turn information into true intelligence (into ROI).  When you have good intelligence you can, in turn, use this to improve strategy.  The acquisition offers a truly integrated solution that also provides an intelligent workflow.  They touched upon the broad vision and the communications cycle; how the right tools release information and from there you need to understand the reach and engagement.  It’s imperative to bring this information back to the corporation and be able to quantify the impact (to know what works and what doesn’t work).  Sysomos furthers Marketwire’s capabilities to make this possible for its customers.

My last question asked both executives to impart advice to PR and communications professionals (and students) with respect to technology and the changing media landscape. Their response was focused on the importance of staying on top of technology and the tools (advice that is close to my heart).  They mentioned how the basic fundamentals of communications are not changing yet the technology is advancing rapidly.  Social media and the integration of technology mandate that you stay current.  This is especially important with students, who, hopefully, will be introduced and experience changes in technology as a part of their academic curriculum.

I believe we will see some excellent solutions and exciting advances in technology from Marketwire.  PR professionals definitely need integrated solutions as we find ourselves increasingly accountable to our brands for strategic social communication, engagement, monitoring and measurement that reveal impact and ROI.

Last night I took a stroll down memory lane to identify the core elements of, what I called at the time, my “PR toolkit.” These were the tools that Tom and I felt helped PR professionals to succeed with their online PR initiatives and relationship building efforts. What were Tom and I focusing on back then?  Here’s the list:

• Online research:  surveys, polls and online focus panels.
• Smarter e-mail communication to journalists, which produced better results.
• E-Newsletters to build better relationships with the media and other constituents.
• Monitoring tools to track online news stories, competitor initiatives and editorial coverage.
• Webcasts including training seminars, Town Hall meetings and speaking engagements/seminars.
• Crisis websites that mirrored public sites and could be switched on “live” if crisis struck.
• Online newsrooms with interactive features and information available for the media 24/7, to build stories and reach their deadlines.

I had a big smile on my face when I remembered toward the end of the book, what’s to come (now remember we started writing this book in 2001). In Chapter 15, we discussed how blogs are coming!  And, they sure did. About seven years later, it’s really interesting to compare yesterday’s PR toolkit with today’s social media PR toolkit.  Let’s take a look at what should comprise your NEW PR or PR 2.0 toolkit:

• A solid social media policy or set of guidelines for your organization to help employees engage the right way in social communities.
• A plan for social media communications that maps out your company’s social media journey from planning to execution.  Elements of your plan/map may include the following:

The MAP

Source:  Mango! Marketing

Or, you plan may include the following components:

Strategy Wheel

Click to enlarge

Source:  Mango! Marketing

• Monitoring/tracking tools – either paid software including Radian 6, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, BurrellesLuce, Meltwater News, Vocus, Scoutlabs or free resources including Techrigy, SocialMention, Collecta, Backtype, etc.
• Authority/ranking tools – Technorati, Blogpulse, Klout, Twitter and/or Facebook Grader, Alltop, etc.
• Social Media Releases (SMR) and Video News Release 2.0
• Blogs/social networking communities – after listening to determine where it makes sense for the brand to engage with customers and stakeholders
• Blogger relations guidelines on how to build relationships the right way with bloggers and how to not spam anyone along the way, with self serving messages.
• Blogger ethics (WOMMA has an ethics toolkit)
• Interactive company websites set up for community building and collaboration (including your newsroom area)
• A new guide to metrics (understanding the difference between capturing ROI (the bottom line) and Return on Engagement (ROE), Return on Participation (ROP) and Return on Involvement (another type of ROI).
• Web analytics to capture unique visitors, page views, bounce rates, a visitor’s location, amount of time spent on a page, etc.
• Other tools to consider:  wikis, widgets, RSS, video streaming and podcasts.

Building your toolkit is simple.  Some find working in a wiki really easy, so your team can share more ideas and everyone can build the social media PR toolkit together.  You can also spark ideas about what to add to the kit by bookmarking interesting articles on Delicious or Digg for your group to share.

There’s a big difference between what Tom and I discussed in early 2000, and what’s going on now in public relations.  Today, your toolkit should be based on meaningful collaboration with people, and valuable information and idea sharing.  We’re still focusing on PR to build relationships with all stakeholders, although I have to admit that my book in 2003 was really focused on relationships with journalists.  Today, we know that social media has all of us, as professionals, and our brands, connecting with the customer as well as many other different groups.

Your social media PR toolkit will grow with technology.  You will continue to add to this PR repository to better guide your overall strategy, planning and execution of new PR programs. What’s in your toolkit?  What do you think are the most important tools/items that we should all have?

Here are a few things off the a very large event “To Do” but it gives you a sense of what needed to be list accomplished back in 2000:

• Develop event micro site
• Send out a “Save the Date” via email
• Develop e-vites / RSVP date
• Distribution of save the date and invitation to approved list
• Follow-up by telephone to secure attendance
• Develop launch promotion simultaneously with invitation
  • E-blasts
  • Newsletter e-mailing
  • Event postcard
  • Update promo page on site
• Media alert with event details
• News release prior to event and post event release to capture the key highlights of the launch/photo opportunities
• Develop media package
• Small gifts for event attendees
• Reminder e-mail one week prior
• Prepare Presentation/Signs/Visuals
• Photographer to take event photos
• Follow up survey for event participants

There were other “To Dos” on the list but this pretty much captured my agency’s thinking back in 2000.  This list would look significantly different for a 2010 event.  Today, you would see much more social media thinking in your event planning and community building to engage your event participants, long before the program takes place (not to mention afterward too).  What would today’s checklist look like?  Here are a few things I’d put on the list. Feel free to add more!

Social Engagement Event Checklist

• Set up a Ning site and invite people to create up profiles and participate.
• Use eventbrite.com for invitations and RSVPs

• Create videos about the event and share them on YouTube (also embed them into your blog, Facebook, etc.) and with conference speakers and bloggers who may be interested in attending.
• Use a Social Media Release (SMR) to let everyone know the details about the event and to give a glimpse into some of the topics, speakers, etc. and then share it in your social communities.
• Set up live streaming for the event (ustream.com).
• Develop an event badge or widget for download.
• Encourage participants to ask the speakers questions prior to the event to get the discussion going and to see what interests the audience for better participation the day of the program.
• Ask your speakers to blog about the event and to discuss their topics (to give participants and potential guests an idea of what the session will encompass).
• Ask speakers or special guests to share event updates within their social networks.
• Create Twitter hashtags around the event and get the discussion going before the day of the event.  Hashtags should be used during and after the program too.
• Designate a member of the event committee to tweet during the conference using the hashtag.
• Take pictures (twitpics) and tweet them out during the event for people to share.
• Set up an event group or fan page on Facebook to share information photos and video from the event.

This list looks very different than our list from 2000.  Ten years ago we weren’t thinking about the importance of community and participation, and how true engagement and building a community around events leads to success.  What types of strategy do you put in place to capture your audience and to keep them interested and coming back for more events?  I’ll be discussing this on February 6^th.  Hope to see you at Event Camp (or at least virtually there)!

The panel was moderated by author David Meerman Scott (@dmscott) who recently wrote World Wide Rave and who is also the author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR.  David did an excellent job guiding the discussion and really kept the conversation interesting and interactive between all panelists as well as the audience through a good Q&A session at the end.

I was more than fired up for this discussion when I heard the presenter two sessions prior to mine discuss a slide with the headline:  PR is dead.  His comments inspired me to discuss how PR is quite alive and how social media is helping to reinvent our industry and improve our reputation as professionals.  Some thoughts from the panelists and a few key takeaways are paraphrased to the best of my ability below:

PR 2.0 is a new approach.  PR over the years has been equated to media relations, which is only a small part of the function of public relations.  Typically in PR, we are accustomed to working through a credible third party endorser (the media).  Today, PR 2.0 allows brands to connect with new influencers and their customers directly through the use of social media.

The news release is a tool in the PR kit and it is written in the AP style format. A Social Media Release (SMR) is a communications tool that allows a brand to tell its story through multimedia, links, and social media sharing tools.  It was also added that a true Social Media Release is housed on a blog platform and does not cross the wire like a traditional news release or a multimedia news release.

A news release will never be a social media release.  No one likes to write a news release and no one likes to read them either!

Although we were taught in PR to write a release to resemble the story that we wanted to read, somehow brands got used to crafting their messages with spin and hype.  These messages come from the top down and are not meaningful to the market.

Stories should be customized and a bottom up, listening strategy helps the brand to identify what kind of information needs to be shared with its customers and other stakeholders.  There is no more mass communication or broadcast messaging in the social media landscape.

You can listen through the Conversation Prism, which is the universe of social networks.  Every social network has a key word search where you can listen, observe and identify what information is related to your brand so that you can formulate a strategy for social media communications.  If you’re listening you do not have to pitch.

With respect to the question about the best kind of content to use to tell a brand’s stories, video unanimously was mentioned as a powerful resource.  VNRs tell a more visual and compelling story.  However, it has to be the type of video content that is engaging and valuable to the audience (long drawn out speeches from the CEO may not be considered engaging).

Just like any industry, you will find the PR professionals who uphold the good principles of communications and those who are the dreaded PR spammers frequently called out by bloggers and journalists. Social Media allows us to change that reputation and to move the needle forward the right way.  We have the opportunity to become influencers and champions and not just handlers and facilitators.  Through social media we can listen, educate and provide valuable information that people want and will ultimately request from us.

With respect the new FTC blogger guidelines you’re always going to have agencies that just naturally do the right thing and show full disclosure.  On the other hand there are those that will never abide by the rules.

I’m sure there are many other valuable thoughts and key takeaways that I may have missed in my recap.  So, if you were at #IMS09 or you have a few thoughts on your own to add to this topic, please feel free to share!

The panel was moderated by author David Meerman Scott (@dmscott) who recently wrote World Wide Rave and who is also the author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR.  David did an excellent job guiding the discussion and really kept the conversation interesting and interactive between all panelists as well as the audience through a good Q&A session at the end.

I was more than fired up for this discussion when I heard the presenter two sessions prior to mine discuss a slide with the headline:  PR is dead.  His comments inspired me to discuss how PR is quite alive and how social media is helping to reinvent our industry and improve our reputation as professionals.  Some thoughts from the panelists and a few key takeaways are paraphrased to the best of my ability below:

PR 2.0 is a new approach.  PR over the years has been equated to media relations, which is only a small part of the function of public relations.  Typically in PR, we are accustomed to working through a credible third party endorser (the media).  Today, PR 2.0 allows brands to connect with new influencers and their customers directly through the use of social media.

The news release is a tool in the PR kit and it is written in the AP style format. A Social Media Release (SMR) is a communications tool that allows a brand to tell its story through multimedia, links, and social media sharing tools.  It was also added that a true Social Media Release is housed on a blog platform and does not cross the wire like a traditional news release or a multimedia news release.

A news release will never be a social media release.  No one likes to write a news release and no one likes to read them either!

Although we were taught in PR to write a release to resemble the story that we wanted to read, somehow brands got used to crafting their messages with spin and hype.  These messages come from the top down and are not meaningful to the market.

Stories should be customized and a bottom up, listening strategy helps the brand to identify what kind of information needs to be shared with its customers and other stakeholders.  There is no more mass communication or broadcast messaging in the social media landscape.

You can listen through the Conversation Prism, which is the universe of social networks.  Every social network has a key word search where you can listen, observe and identify what information is related to your brand so that you can formulate a strategy for social media communications.  If you’re listening you do not have to pitch.

With respect to the question about the best kind of content to use to tell a brand’s stories, video unanimously was mentioned as a powerful resource.  VNRs tell a more visual and compelling story.  However, it has to be the type of video content that is engaging and valuable to the audience (long drawn out speeches from the CEO may not be considered engaging).

Just like any industry, you will find the PR professionals who uphold the good principles of communications and those who are the dreaded PR spammers frequently called out by bloggers and journalists. Social Media allows us to change that reputation and to move the needle forward the right way.  We have the opportunity to become influencers and champions and not just handlers and facilitators.  Through social media we can listen, educate and provide valuable information that people want and will ultimately request from us.

With respect the new FTC blogger guidelines you’re always going to have agencies that just naturally do the right thing and show full disclosure.  On the other hand there are those that will never abide by the rules.

I’m sure there are many other valuable thoughts and key takeaways that I may have missed in my recap.  So, if you were at #IMS09 or you have a few thoughts on your own to add to this topic, please feel free to share!

If you were asked the question: Is PR 2.0 a Revolution or Evolution of the PR Industry? What would you say?  For me it’s part Revolution (radical shift) and part Evolution (gradual change), thus the distinction: R(e)volution.  Let me explain.  For years, consumer behavior and the media landscape has been shifting.  Consumers gradually took more control of their communication and decided what information they wanted to gather, organize and then share with their peers.  For years, brands didn’t have the control over communication that they thought they had.  The shift also occurred as consumers decided where and how they wanted to find their news and what sources they trusted, which caused the movement from mainstream news gathering to receiving content from the new influencers/bloggers.

Technology has also evolved over the years to support more advanced communication, resulting in the 2.0 collaboration that we experience today.  But, the Web 2.0 platform didn’t happen overnight.  For years, the technology has advanced from news groups, user forums and the early web logs to the blogs and social networks that we rely on today.  A good example of evolution that the PR person can easily relate to is the long overdue facelift to the news release.  We started with the traditional release, began enhancing it with SEO and then incorporated multimedia (video and audio).  Finally, we have a new shiny object, the Social Media Release (SMR) that contains social network sharing tools and community building capabilities (housed on a blog platform).  These changes happened over the years, even though for some industries it may appear to have occurred over night.

So, what’s the Revolution? The Revolution is in the approach:

• In public relations, we typically relied on the third party credible endorsement.  Although this is still important for us today (working with bloggers, journalists and analysts), our brands now have the ability to connect directly with customers and to use new social media tools that allow them to humanize and customize their stories.
• The technology is revolutionary to our industry as it allows us to listen in ways that we could never before, with a bottom up strategy rather than a top down broadcast method. One-to-one and one-to-many communication replaced one way messaging (allowing for participation in the form of conversations).
• The manner in which we distribute our news has completely altered for breaking news offering us new choices whether it’s mainstream, through bloggers or directly to our customers.
• We have easy access to new social media tools and applications that we can learn, use and experience daily.  We can use these resources to help our brands build community for better relationships with their stakeholders.

One of the most important changes that we see today, to further illustrate a Revolution, is how the role of PR person has changed from facilitator/handler to influencer/champion.  Today we are listening, connecting, conversing and educating through our networks.  The information that we share is that of a person who is a market expert, social media expert, web marketer, viral marketer, customer service representative and conversationalist.  In my last post I mentioned the liaison.  We are still liaisons in many ways but we are also making our own connections and championing our own roles (securing a seat at the boardroom table).  We are rebuilding our reputations in our companies as well as in our industry.  These are major strides that did not happen as quickly, or perhaps not at all, in years past.

I don’t think that PR 2.0 happened overnight.  As a matter of fact if you talked to Brian Solis (@briansolis), Shel Holtz (@shel), Todd Defren (@tdefren), Chris Heuer (@chrisheuer), and many other professionals who were there championing social media from the ground up, they would tell you that PR has been evolving for years.  However, the approach, the platform, the ability to communicate successfully through social media and to measure the value of the conversations in a whole new way, well that’s a revolution that we’ve all been waiting for … and, if you ask me, it was long overdue.

Brian Solis and I discussed our book, Putting the Public Back in Public Relations.  We also participated in a chat session on how social media builds brand champions (both internally within your organization and externally in social networks).  Other sessions were how to build a Social Media Release, an integrated approach to emerging media and maximizing the value of your news from Twitter to Google.  The conference emphasized conversations and made its way to Twitter, via the #vocus hashtag. Among the hundreds of entries from the #vocus hashtag, these are just a few:

Vocus had a strong social media program in place and its outreach pre-conference included promotions with links to discounts for speakers to share in their networks.  Vocus sent out a news release through PRWeb and also developed a Social Media Release (SMR) with my agency, PFS Marketwyse.  We’re currently reviewing the results of the SMR, and will be reporting on the analytics soon.

The virtual event had one of the most impressive platforms that I’ve ever seen.  Created by On24, the virtual conference had the participants enter into the Plaza where a video automatically played, with the Vocus CMO, Bill Wagner, giving a welcome message.  Attendees could then enter into a Networking Café, a Resource Center to access documents/presentations or an Auditorium.  My favorite area and probably one of the most popular was the Networking Café.  In this area, attendees interacted in Group Chats and also Scheduled Chats.  My Scheduled Chat with Brian was very fast paced and we fielded a tremendous number of questions from interested participants.  There were definitely more questions than we had time to answer in our half hour chat session.

I guess if you’re going to have a social media conference, then you have to do it the right way.  Everything should be about social media, from the topics and promotion to the interactive environment and the ways people participate.  Vocus was very happy with its virtual event.  As a presenter, I’m still discussing conference topics and answering questions.  Now, that’s the true value of social media.  The conversations are only the beginning.  Relationships are formed, and moving forward there’s plenty of opportunity as a result.

Of course, you have to know when to use an SMR or whether or not another form of news release best suits your story.  Brian and I talked a lot about the various types of releases in our book Putting the Public Back in Public Relations: How Social Media Is Reinventing the Aging Business of PR.  Chapter 8 in the book was devoted to the SMR and other types of releases leading up to this new shiny object.  We touched on traditional releases, customer focused releases, SEO releases and of course SMRs.

I believe that the SMR is one of the greatest breakthroughs in PR because it really helps professionals to craft a better and more customized story for the people they we want to reach.  The SMR complements the traditional or SEO release by combining many the newsworthy facts with digital assets that are interactive and viral in a social community.  Of course, SMRs are not going to fix a poorly written story and they are definitely not about presenting hype, spin or BS in a new, cleverly developed template.

One personal example of SMR success was the launch of mine and Brian’s book.  By using this powerful communications tool, we could see the results instantaneously.  We were very pleased with how the SMR facilitated direct conversations through the many sharing tools offered in the template.

For the book launch, we developed the SMR through PitchEngine.  We also had a traditional announcement that was released by Pearson Education announcing that Putting the Public Back in Public Relations had hit the major bookstore shelves.  The SMR complemented that release and within minutes of posting it to PitchEngine’s PitchFeed, we could see the results; heavy traffic to the PFS Marketwyse website, a huge spike and direct book sales through my PR 2.0 Strategies blog.

Here are a few of the results.  Based on the average site traffic 30 days prior to posting the SMR our site, traffic increased dramatically on the PFS Marketwyse site, with a 433% spike in traffic on the day of the announcement and 1100% the day after.  You can click here to see the full case study results on PitchEngine.

With respect to sharing, we tracked the day we shared the announcement up to a week afterward on our book’s Facebook fan site and on Twitter.  We had 86% of our traffic coming from those social networks.  Only about 10% of the site traffic was from the traditional PR distribution methods.

The SMR is a great sharing tool to ignite conversations and to build one-on-one relationships.  Many of our initial conversations that stemmed from the launch release led to great opportunities including blog interviews, book reviews, radio interviews and numerous webinars, teleseminars and speaking engagements booked in 2009.

Of course this is only one example of the success of an SMR.  What are your experiences with the SMR and has the use of this communications tool been successful in your PR efforts?

However, reviewing my explanations, I think I’ve found the easiest way to make other communication professionals, business owners, entrepreneurs and executives get the major difference – it’s the ability to use the SMR as a viral tool that is shared by people in web communities.

The news wire services such as Marketwire and PR Newswire are successfully providing traditional news releases or multimedia releases with these downloadable elements.  Traditional news releases can be search engine optimized (with hyperlinks and key words) and they can also be enhanced with multimedia, but they are generally not equipped with sharing tools and they are not distributed over the wire.

The distinguishing differences are in the sharing and the platform of the SMR.  It’s the sharing tools including:  Reddit, Digg, Technorati, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Newsvine, Furl and many other Web 2.0 applications that allow people to gather, organize and share the information in an SMR.  The sharing tools make the difference.  The other distinctive feature is that the SMR is housed on a blog platform with the ability for people to comment.  Although many of the newswire services have added some of what I call the “PR 2.0 sharing tools” (as I mentioned above), SMRs typically don’t go out over the wire.  Brian Solis and I wrote about these very differences in Chapter 8 of our new book, “Putting the Public Back in Public Relations“.

“SMRs should not cross the wire. They should be hosted on a specific company blog channel dedicated to SMRs to complement traditional releases, SEO releases, company blog posts, and all other outward focused communications. Any customizable blogging platform will more than likely serve as an effective-and social-platform. Remember that a traditional Web page isn’t necessarily social, so any published SMRs on a standard Web site will most likely not appear in social search.”

It’s the viral component and the ability to tell many different stories that are meaningful to people in web communities that are the major difference between the SMR and the traditional result.  SMRs enable you to share news.  They also allow readers to bookmark and share the content with anyone at anytime, with one-click from the news release.

As a result, communications professionals need to recognize when and why they need to use the SMR.  It’s more than just a new, shiny object; it can be a very powerful tool that ignites conversations and two way conversations with journalists, bloggers and customers.