Convince and Convert Blog: Where Social Media and Email Collide

Agency Advantage Tools - #3 In a Series

Since it’s invention by Todd Defren at Shift Communications in 2006, the social media press release has taken root.

Combining short paragraphs and bullet points with Web-friendly links, tags, and multi-media content, the SM release aims to give reporters and bloggers the key ingredients for a story in an immediately scannable and digestible fashion.

The SM release has been successful because it capitalizes on three converging trends:
1. The emerging use of multi-media content due to increasing bandwidth and ease of content creation.

2. The increasing emphasis on search engine optimization of media releases. After all, isn’t Google just the world’s most powerful reporter?

3. Email has created a deluge of pitches and writers can’t read 1,000 narrative pitches per day. The social media release format enables them to skin and assess what’s newsworthy.

Strategically Brilliant, but Tactically Sketchy - Until Now

The hang-up with social media releases has been actually getting them built. Most PR folks are not Web programmers, and the very nature of what makes a social media release useful (tags, links, multi-media) makes it tricky to execute if your definition of high tech is inserting a footer in Microsoft Word.

Historically, the best social media releases have essentially been customized landing pages, like this genius effort for Jim Beam from Jason Fall at Doe Anderson and Jason Swartz at PSB.

So, unless you have a Jim Beam budget and a Web programmer hanging around, making a killer SM release has been tricky, despite efforts from PRXBuilder (Wordpress and Microsoft Word plug-in) to make it easier. (note, I use PRXBuilder’s SimpleSMPR on this blog).

Enter PitchEngine

Newly launched - still in Alpha release - PitchEngine is out to change all that. Their slick, exceptionally easy online social media release creation engine is by far the best I’ve seen. Literally, if I took the time to explain what a “tag” was to my 9 year-old, she could make a release (it would probably be about ice skating or the dresses on The Titanic).

Here’s how easy it is:

- Request an account
- Log-in
- Add your boilerplate info, logo, contact info (don’t forget your Twitter account)!
- Click “create new release” and you get the screen above
- Type headline
- Type short pitch (Twitter pitch)
- Type rest of release
- Upload photos and videos
- Add links back to your Web site
- Add tags

DONE! Click a button and you have a beautifully formatted, all linked up social media release ready for distribution.

Distribution Included

In addition to enabling you to create your social media release, PitchEngine lets you easily distribute it too, by typing in whom you want to send it to (via email, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook). All releases created in the system automatically appear in the PitchFeed, a stream of current pitches that can be accessed by reporters and bloggers on site or via RSS.

All This, And It’s Free

For now, PitchEngine is 100% free, which is of course a ridiculously good deal. I suspect they’ll be going to a Freemium model at some point, with advanced features costing a few dollars here and there.

For all PR firms and client-side PR 2.0 and social media managers, PitchEngine is the new social media release champion, and an indispensable tool in the new media arsenal. Check it out.

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The variety and quality of banner ads online is truly staggering. From the infamous X10 Camera pop-up, to Punch the Monkey, to today’s highly engaging rich media video ads, turning out great banner creative is a universal challenge.

For nearly every facet of the creative process, there are libraries that can be used for inspiration. Font collection. Stock photography. Creative annuals. But until now, thinking through a banner ad design consisted of going to a few Web sites you like and hoping to find an ad that actually looked decent.

Not anymore.

Finally, a Banner Ad Search Engine

Yureekah is a free Web site that enables you to search banners ads by country (currently, U.S. U.K., India, and somewhat unexpectedly the United Arab Emirates), brand, or keyword. The site then returns a collection of banner ads matching your query, including where those ads are running.

For example, a global brand search for “Ford” returns 31 results, including banners for at least 20 different campaigns.

You can click a check box next to banners you particularly like and save them for future inspiration.

3 Ways To Use Yureekah

Yureekah is theoretically highly useful to ad agencies, interactive shops, and client-side marketers. Three primary uses for Yureekah include:

- Creative inspiration. If you’re challenged with making a great banner for a new sweater, type “apparel” or “sweater” into Yureekah and get some instant ideas

- Competitor campaign monitoring. If you’re JCrew (if so, please send discount code) and you want to know what Eddie Bauer is doing with their online creative, type “eddie bauer” into Yureekah to find out.

- Competitor media monitoring. Find our where Eddie Bauer is placing their online media.

The Reality

In fairness to Yureekah, the system is still in alpha (in fact you’ll need to request a log-in to get to the site). Consequently, we shouldn’t expect it to be perfect. However, there are definitely some gaps in the system.

- The overall amount of ads in the search engine is pretty paltry.

- The brand search is nearly useless. Except for Top 50 or so brands, don’t bother. Even my nifty Eddie Bauer example above came up with zero results.

- Inability to search for ads by format. If I need to create a Leaderboard ad, it would be nice to only see Leaderboard-sized search results.

- The email someone an ad system is very sketchy. It comes through as junk mail, and has no formatting or context at all.

If it continues to evolve and expand, Yureekah could be a useful site for many in the agency community. However, their original alpha launch was in late April and no changes appear to have been made since then.

Let’s hope it comes out of experimental phase and becomes the robust research tool it could be.

Welcome to Agency Advantage Tools, a regular blog series at Convince & Convert that spotlights inexpensive or free digital marketing tools.

There are literally thousands of different Web sites, applications, plug-ins, widgets and more devoted to helping digital marketers do their jobs better or faster. Most advertising agencies and PR firms are too busy doing actual marketing to keep up on this flood of innovation.

So, here at Convince & Convert, we’ll do the work for you. We’ll scour the Web to find the tools that are worth adoption at agencies.

Website Grader - Search Optimization Success Snapshot

Today’s tool is Website Grader. This exceptionally easy-to-use Web site shows you in an instant how your site, your clients’ sites, and/or your competitors are doing with regard to search engine optimization.

Website Grader is owned by Hubspot, an integrated, Web-based suite of tools for search, blogging, social media, content management, and competitor analysis. We’ll review the full Hubspot offering in a future edition of Tools You Can Use.

Website Grader takes information that has been in demand for years (number of links, page rank, metadata, etc.) and presents it in a very clean, easy-to-understand format. There have been a number of sites that provide portions of this data, but none with the savvy interface and non-SEO-professional tone.

You just enter your Web site’s URL, enter the address of competitors if desired, provide an email address (if you want a printable report), and click “Generate Report”. That’s it.

Analysis take about 30 seconds.

The resulting report provides information on 23 data points across four categories:

• On-Page SEO
• Off-Page SEO
• Blogosphere
• Social MediaSphere
• Conversion
• Competitive Intelligence