Category Archives: News release distribution

Google isn’t killing PR, but it may be applying some Weedol

There were two big topics of conversation in the PR world last week. The first was Google’s updated Link scheme guidance on how it treats links with keyword rich anchor text in press releases and Tom Foremski’s resulting post on ZDNet asking if this was the end of PR Agencies. The other was the Channel 4 fakefans investigation showing how some in the PR and Marketing world are buying fake likes and followers to inflate brands’ apparent popularity.

The first issue has particular relevance to us at RealWire. In response to Google’s guidance we have implemented the rel=”nofollow” attribute to all links within releases published from today onwards and will apply it to all links across historic press releases hosted by us over the next few days. We were already planning our response before last week’s “excitement”, however staff absence due to holidays delayed our ability to implement the changes necessary until today (note to self, don’t allow staff holidays!).

We considered limiting the changes to the types of anchor text links Google highlights, as such links are very infrequent in releases our clients ask us to distribute. Ian McKee highlighted this option in his very well thought through post on the whole debate. However given the nature and quality of our client base, we’re confident that any marginal page rank that might accrue from our site for the odd editorially relevant keyword is unlikely to impact materially on their rankings, or feature very highly on their list of reasons for using our service. Taken inconjunction with Google’s apparent preference for all links in press releases to be nofollow, we’ve decided that this approach is both safer for our clients, and avoids any confusion.

It’s also worth noting that a recent report by Searchmetrics (a user of our service) highlighted the increased importance to search rankings of having a mixture of backlinks, including nofollow links, and the reduced importance of links with target keyword anchor text.

So what about the wider questions raised by Tom Foremski’s post? I think these have generally been summed up as follows:

Is this change by Google the end of PR?  No.

Is it the end of PR Agencies? No.

Is it the end of newswire services? No, but it could hurt some, particularly any that are reliant on a client base that has been producing the very keyword rich, link filled, low quality content that Google is out to target.

It’s in this context that I would characterise Google’s action as more like treating a lawn with Weedol. Google is seeking to eliminate poor quality and irrelevant content i.e. spam, from its results, but it doesn’t want to destroy the good stuff.

The fakefans situation is also just another form of spam. The idea that buying fake likes on Facebook or followers on Twitter has any value is just ridiculous. Facebook and Twitter should take a leaf out of Google’s book.

The only thing that professional PR people, and quality distribution services, have to fear from these changes and practices is complacency. We need to make sure that once the weed killer has done its job, the lawn that remains is rich and green.

Finally, on a RealWire note, it may be coincidental but during the same period Google has been making its Penguin and Panda updates our ranking for keywords relevant to our own market has improved. So much so that at the time of writing we are ranked No.1 for “press release distribution” on Google.co.uk, when we were rarely in the Top 10 before Google started its clamp down.

Read into that what you will….

Social Media News Releases achieve three times the pickup

In the summer of 2009 we did some analysis looking at whether Social Media News Releases (SMNR) achieved more coverage than “traditional” press releases. The analysis of almost one thousand releases showed that SMNRs distributed by RealWire generated twice the editorial coverage and almost four times the blog coverage.

A few weeks ago whilst discussing the timing of a FIR interview with me on the value of press releases (which is now published here by the way) Shel Holtz asked me if I had any plans to update the research. As it had been over 18 months this seemed a good idea so I booted up Excel and here are the results

Social-Media-News-Release-Coverage-Analysis-Results-2011

1,044 releases were analysed from those distributed in the 6 months from September 2010 to March 2011
Coverage is data is based on RealWire’s Proveit coverage tracking and evaluation service
79 were Social Media News Releases (releases related to 62 different companies, across 21 different industry sectors)
965 were “Traditional” Releases (releases related to 339 different companies, across 28 different industry sectors)

So overall the sample of SMNRs achieved over three times as much editorial/blog coverage on average (15.7 pieces v 5.0 pieces) as the “traditional” releases.

Some examples from different sectors of high performing SMNRs include releases by Panasonic, Alterian, 3M, Warner Bros, Rolls Royce and Aviva.

As with the previous analysis I think one of the primary reasons for the difference in performance is that the additional investment that can often be required to produce an SMNR – multimedia assets, links to background research etc – means that they are used for stories that the sender perceives are potentially high impact and therefore likely to be of interest to a wide audience.

Another reason could be the lower proportion of B2B releases in the SMNR sample. However I am not necessarily convinced this is the case as there are plenty of examples of B2B releases in the traditional sample that performed to a similar level as the best performing B2C SMNRs.

As I indicated in my interview with Shel I think it is more likely that a higher proportion of traditional releases are more informative in nature e.g. new appointment, new customer, financial results, tradeshow attendance etc. These stories are of potential value to relevant publications, but it is likely that the number of such publications will be lower than where the release is around a broader topic of conversation e.g. research, market changes, new products etc. If people would find this of interest then let me know in the comments as further study of the nature of the releases themselves might shed some more light.

In the meantime on a short promotional note it is good to see that our overall pickup stat of 80%+ of releases gaining editorial/blog coverage still compares very favourably with our competition :-)

PRFilter Technology PR Rankings launched

The PRFilter platform has been publicly live for a month now and in that time there have been thousands of searches performed. But as well as finding relevant press releases PRFilter now has a wealth of data on press release content.

Independently Adam Sherk last month used PRFilter to look at how often buzzwords are used in releases – read more about it here. We in turn thought it would be interesting to look at which technology brands, topics and products have been talked about most in press releases over the last couple of months. As an industry there is a lot of time and money spent analysing what the media writes/talks about, but what are PRs trying to talk about and do the two things fit?

Thats why we have produced our first PRFilter Technology PR Rankings. These rankings analyse the tens of thousands of releases indexed by PRFilter each month and look for the most talked about technology brands, topics and products within them.

Highlights from this first month (February 2011) include:

  • Microsoft, Facebook and Verizon were the top three most referenced technology brands.
  • Cloud related technologies, websites and wireless were the top three most referenced technology topics with iPhone and iPad the top ranking products.
  • Mentions of Microsoft and Facebook were around twice the number of Apple (ranked 5th).
  • Releases mentioning cloud technologies were more than twice as frequent as those referencing social media however this was down from three times as frequent in January.
  • iPad related releases were down 37% perhaps reflecting a calm before March iPad2 storm.
  • Significant increases in mentions of telecoms brands e.g. Ericsson, Nokia and ZTE and technologies e.g. LTE and NFC, reflecting the hosting of Mobile World Congress during the month.

A presentation of the full details of the Top 25 technology brands and the Top 50 technology topics/products can be found here or view below.

This first month’s rankings demonstrate that a large number of stories are being created around certain brands and topics and not all of these are necessarily in areas that are likely to provoke great interest from the media.

We hope that producing these monthly rankings will assist public relations practitioners in developing a higher proportion of stories that journalists and bloggers find of interest and lead to improved coverage for the companies concerned.

As this is the first month there are bound to be things we could do better or information people would like to see next time so please let us know in the comments.

We have also started with Technology because that was the sector PRFilter was initially focussed on when it was first launched. However if there is demand we will look to expand the rankings to cover other sectors. Again feel free to let us know.

PRFilter Technology PR Rankings February 2011

View more presentations from RealWire

PRFilter – a breakthrough in PR relevance?

Andrew Lim – Editorial Director, Recombu and Founder of UKTJPR “PRfilter is a fantastic way to manage press releases and find interesting stories.

James Holland Editor, Electric Pig “Catering to the whimsy of fickle journalistic tastes is no easy task, but the intelligent tuning behind PR Filter shows great promise. A service that cuts the clutter, and brings me news I can actually use? Sign me up!

Stuart Miles Owner/Editor, Pocket Lint “PRFilter looks to be the service that will help me get the news I want and filter out the press releases I don’t

To date the use of technology to solve the issue of irrelevant or badly targeted PR content has been relatively limited. Database structures used for press release targeting are generally based around categorisation or perhaps keywords. Depending on the level of granularity this can often result in a poor match of a particular press release to individual journalists or bloggers.

Recently new language analysis based databases have started to be released that look at a journalist or blogger’s output in order to try and identify those who talk about a particular topic the most. This improves the intelligence of the approach for the sender if they use such tools effectively.

But even tools such as these do not address the issue from the individual journalist or blogger’s perspective. They don’t allow the recipients themselves to decide how relevant something must be to get their attention. Meanwhile spam filters or rules based inbox systems are often crude or time consuming to manage.

At RealWire we thought we would try and take a different approach. Having built a system to improve the targeting of our own distribution (which we will be applying in the coming weeks) we decided to go further. We asked ourselves – what if we could adapt the system to provide relevant releases to individual journalists and bloggers across thousands of releases a day from multiple sources?

So after months of development, in a bold experiment to both demonstrate our filtering technology and as a potential solution to the issue of irrelevant PR we have built PRFilter.

We believe PRFilter is something different:

Like the language analysis databases, PRFilter’s active interest technology builds a profile of a journalist or blogger’s interests from their own, or their publication’s, published articles. It then refines and updates this profile as new articles are published.

But then it flips things on their head and applies this profile to an inbound aggregated stream of press releases from multiple sources, presenting the individual journalist or blogger with the releases it thinks are most relevant to them – in a given time period, in selected geographies and even on a certain topic.

The user can then set their own personal relevance threshold and subscribe to alerts which pass this test (currently via RSS, other notification systems to follow). They can even train the system to improve its predictions by providing feedback on when it is right and wrong.

Making finding relevant stories a quicker and easier task and ensuring that senders of PR know that when their releases are indexed by PRFilter they will be seen by the most relevant media.

As the quotes above show we have already had some great feedback from initial beta testers, but like all beta applications we know it won’t be perfect and are keen to get feedback from all interested parties. Either contact me @AdParker, [email] adam@realwire.com, follow @PRFilter or register your interest in a beta account or updates here.

Online Visibility-its not the size of your traffic that counts

At RealWire we have recently become aware that a major wire service is making a big deal out of their website’s high traffic numbers. In fact they have been specifically targeting the market trying to argue that their service is hugely better where visibility is concerned.

However they don’t mention the following three crucial issues about the traffic to their site.

1. That volume of traffic is clearly going to be affected by quantity of content.

2. The time visitors actually spend reading their content.

3. The relevance of those visitors to the content.

At RealWire we are always keen to make sure that discussions are based around the facts so let’s look at each of these in turn to see how our readership, engagement and relevance are all in fact apparently superior to Big Wire Corp’s.

Quantity of content

Q: Which is the more “popular” of the following two sites?

Site A – 1 piece of content and 1,000 page views in a month
Site B –  1 million pieces of content and 1 million page views in a month

Well according to their literature Big Wire Corp would apparently see Site B as a more popular destination because it has 1,000 times more page views. Makes sense, bigger is better right? Wrong.

Site A’s one piece of content has been viewed 1,000 times, whereas each of Site B’s stories has only be viewed once on average. Now which site is more popular? Site A of course.

Now let’s apply this concept to Big Wire Corp’s website.

First of all let’s get an idea of volume of content. The Google “Site:[url]” command gives you the number of unique pages indexed by Google on a particular site – a good proxy for the amount of content.

In this case the answer is 406,000.

Next we need an idea of traffic to the site. Google AdPlanner provides estimates of monthly page views.

In this case the answer is 7.5 million

I we then divide page views by content, we get an estimate of the number of views per article per month. Answer 18.5.

RealWire’s equivalent data from the same sources is
Content – 5,500
Page views – 200,000* (less than 3% of Big Wire Corp’s figure)

This gives 36.4 page views per article per month.

Twice the Big Wire Corp figure suggesting RealWire has higher readership for each article.

*I happen to know that the page view figure is too high in RealWire’s case (we do have analytics of course) but it could equally also be so for Big Wire Corp and so until I can get a hold of actual numbers for them I am being consistent.

Engagement

Q: Which of these two sites is engaging its readership the most?

Site A – average time spent on each page 2 minutes

Site B – average time spent on each page 5 seconds

Site A obviously. Each of the readers are spending 24 times longer reading an article on average than on Site B.

So let’s apply this to Big Wire Corp again.

Again Google AdPlanner can help. It tells us how many visits the site receives and how long each one lasts. From this we can get Time spent per Page as follows:

Time spent on page calculation

Big Wire Corp numbers

Time spent per visit = 3 minutes 50 seconds (230 seconds)
Total page views = 7.5 million
Total visits = 3.5 million

Time spent per page = 107.5 seconds or 1 minute 47.5 seconds

RealWire numbers

Time spent per visit = 8 minutes (480 seconds)
Total page views = 200,000
Total visits = 64,000

Time spent per page = 153.6 seconds or 2 minutes 33.6 seconds

43% more than Big Wire Corp suggesting readers of RealWire content are more engaged.

Relevance

Q: Which of these two sites is most likely to have the most relevant readership to a UK relevant story?

Site A – 100% of visits from the UK

Site B – 1% of visits from the UK

A: Site A – Yes I know these are getting ridiculously easy now! :-)

Big Wire Corp’s market report focusses on US usage of their site when comparing themselves to others such as RealWire. However given that the vast majority of their content is from US companies it will come as no surprise that the vast majority of their traffic does as well. Google Ad Planner again helps us out.

US traffic – 76% of total

But the majority of RealWire’s clients and therefore content are from the UK. So what’s Big Wire Corp’s UK traffic like?

UK traffic – 3% of total.

And RealWire’s UK traffic? Well AdPlanner estimates around 75% but the real figure is nearer 45% or 15 times the Big Wire Corp figure.

Suggesting that RealWire’s traffic is around 15 times more likely to be relevant.

Conclusion

When evaluating traffic between sites it is imperative that you don’t get drawn in by the size of headline traffic numbers and that you consider:

a) normalising traffic for levels of content

b) how engaged the readers are

c) how relevant the readers are

Or you could find yourself reaching some very misleading conclusions. Just ask Big Wire Corp :-)

* Hattip to Andrew B Smith for highlighting the value of Google Adplanner for such analysis