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Business Wire San Antonio hosted back-to-back Austin and San Antonio seminars November 18th and November 19th, 2009. Attendees were provided tips to help optimize future press releases so they are found, seen and shared.

The well-rounded panel included Bill Leake, Founder, President and CEO of Apogee Search, the most prominent search engine marketing firm in the Southwest; Charla Adams, Communications Manager of Sweet Leaf Tea, a Business Wire client completely immersed in social media; and Clint Howell, New Media Specialist and Senior Account Executive at Business Wire.

Bill Leake, Founder, President and CEO of Apogee Search recommends:

• Get someone else to sing your song and it’s better than singing it yourself – the web is 20% your content/80% what the rest of the world says about you.
  If nothing else, get the keywords right – choose keywords that matter (the ones people are actually using to search not what you think they’re searching) by using a keyword search tool.
• The web is not just textual – create content with photos and video.
• If you have a call to action in your press release/message, build conversion pages – you have them there, now what do you want them to do?
• Don’t forget direct media pitches and don’t forget the bloggers (research beyond Technorati Top 50 and you’ll find the fat middle of niche bloggers that cover you and your industry).
• The future owner of social media will be PR because it’s a better fit than advertising – PR is all about conversations and dialogue.

Charla Adams, Communications Manager of Sweet Leaf Tea recommends:

• Sweet Leaf Tea uses a variety of resources to send their communication message – 15 employees tweet, they have Facebook Fan pages, blogs, YouTube channel, MySpace profile, Flickr photo pages, RSS feeds and even Sweet Leaf Tea TV and Sweet Leaf Radio.
• Tweet/post/repurpose your press release permalink (especially if you have an EON release, which is posted forever and can act as a free-standing webpage – Sweet Leaf Tea’s EON release got 2x the hits of the wire version because Charla pushed it out).
• Gauge your success by the level of participation vs. demographic breakdowns because someone outside your demographic target might be your most active engager – are they pushing out your message, writing a blog post for you, writing about you?

Clint Howell, New Media Specialist and Senior Account Executive recommends:

• Media is posting your news as you write it,  which is a testament to having good content in your releases and links to further details on your site.
• You can build your release for search and should.
• The headline is the most important piece of your release, the first paragraph second because websites/search engines use them as your title and meta description tags.

If you would like Bill’s presentation or the seminar takeaway packet with Joseph Miller’s SEO Tip Jar, please email Barbie Dunn, barbie.dunn@businesswire.com.
More questions? Contact Clint Howell: clint.howell@businesswire.com

Local Business Wire offices host several events each year on PR, IR, SEO & media topics. Check out the Business Wire Events page to find upcoming events in your area.
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