Social Media Strategy | Online PR | Proactive Report | Sally Falkow

The Proactive Reports is a blog about social media strategy, shifts in media consumption and online PR trends

Sally Falkow - Social Media Strategist

SES San Jose 2006: RSS enabled news content featured by PRESSfeed

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PRESSfeed’s syndicated news system for online press releases positively affects search results

The Internet has changed the way people access news. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project 50 million Americans get their news online and news search engines like Yahoo News and Google News are in the top 10 news and media websites along with MSNBC, CNN.com, USA Today, The New York Times, and BBC News. Technology has also changed the way journalists look for story ideas and experts. The one tool they have in common is search.

I am speaking at Search Engine Strategies 2006 San Jose on August 8th in the news search session about the role of RSS and syndication in how the public and journalists find, tag and share news content online.

In the past press releases were only intended for journalists, but today the public is finding press releases on the news search engines.  A recent study from Outsell found that press releases have surpassed trade journals as the number one source of information for knowledge workers.

This sounds like good news for marketers, but unless your press release is optimized, and has distribution beyond the news search engines in social media sites, you may well be missing the influencers who search for, tag and share news content online.

Finding influencers who generate word of mouth has always been the holy grail of marketing, and social media has taken this to a new level. Sites like digg and del.icio.us offer new ways to find and share information. To tap into this shift in behavior marketers are moving to "connected marketing" – actions that create conversations in target markets that add measurable value to a brand.

To do this your audience must be able to find, tag and share your news content. RSS is the one important element that facilitates connected marketing. RSS feeds positively affect your inbound links, raise your search engine visibility and make your content available to your audience in a format that gives them control.

Meet us at the PRESSfeed booth #332 at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose and we’ll give you a full demonstration of how quick and easy this RSS syndication system is.