News Releases Cut Up The Dance Floor

The slow, inexorable decline of news continues. It's not that, really, but the decline of traditional news reporting as a single-play, profitable endeavor has been undeniable for a long time. That's what people think when they think news: conventional publishing, the advertising model to support it, and the ham-fisted attempts to migrate that model to the Web. Contributing to that decline has been the online environment created by search and social media, and some have surveyed the landscape and called for the death of the news release. But news and the news releases that give rise to it are very much alive, and on search engines and social media, news is cutting up the dance floor as we look for and share information.

What else can we make of the apparent trends reported in a Washington Post article last week looking at social media's impact on the sharing of news online? Google is the 800-pound gorilla on the Internet, sending around 30 percent of traffic to all news sites. And that gorilla has an up-and-coming competitor, Facebook. A large primate feeding every day, all day, on Muscle Milk™ and who knows what else, all in an effort to bulk up and match Google's fighting weight, Facebook sends as much as 8 percent of online traffic to some news sites.

These are all significant numbers, and let's focus on social media for a moment: Any casual or not-so-casual Facebook user can attest that news links are popular attractions. Look in the home feed at any time of the day, and a good half of all status updates come in the form of a comment about a link to some news story. These typically draw conversations, and you want people talking about your news.

Does this appetite for news mean people are hungry for news releases? Certainly not, if those news releases are stuffy, boring affairs intended solely for the press. But news releases aren't that anymore, and notice that lots of people now call it a news release, not a press release.

Business Wire says making news releases ready for social media and search engines goes a long way in helping to spread your news. The problem is that, even now, few folks are doing so. Applying SEO to a news release is a subject well covered, and yet, "Only 18 Percent of News Release Headlines Are Optimized For SEO," according to a study reported by Business Insider seven months ago, when mainstream efforts to capitalize on the combination of news releases and social media had just gotten underway -- e.g. PitchEngine's launch of an app to place newsrooms on Facebook.

News itself is all around, and just like rock 'n' roll, it will never die. That's a cliché worth repeating, and news, as a currency, remains the same. Make your news releases interesting, findable and shareable. We humans have a tendency to search for interesting information, and once we find it, we have a propensity to share.

Twitter, Meet the Upside-Down Pyramid…Sort Of

You ought to be inverting your tweets. This will make sense shortly. Read on.

The hallmark of informative writing is the inverted pyramid. Think about walking into a bona fide Egyptian pyramid. I've never been inside one myself; maybe you have. But I do know that no real, live pyramid is inverted. The fattest part, the footprint, is at the bottom, flush with the ground. And you probably have to climb a musty, ancient stairwell to get to the top. That's what I'm guessing, anyway. As I said, I've never been inside one myself.

But where's the top of the figurative pyramid when you're reading a news release, the mainstay of informative writing? That's right. The top is at the bottom. When we read, we read from top to bottom, and the most -- and most important -- information appears at the top of this upside-down pyramid, also called the inverted pyramid. Skillful writers can stuff that info into the first sentence, even. This way, if you're the reader, you're sure to learn everything essential in the first paragraph, and if you're the writer, you've imparted the gist of your message in the space where your audience is most likely to pay attention. And if the lead paragraph compels you to do so, as the reader you have the option to climb down into the rest of the news release, just like you have the option to climb to the top of a real pyramid if you are so inclined.

Sure, the analogy is rough. In a real pyramid, for instance, curiosity might compel you to climb to the top regardless of what's at the bottom. I don't know what's inside the fattest part of a real pyramid -- perhaps nothing of note. But the fact remains that you must first enter the fattest part of the pyramid before you can get to the tip, and the same goes when you begin to read a news release.

Take stock of the inverted pyramid's utility, for doing so will help you to write more effectively online. A well-put-together online news release, for example, contains many of its most important keywords in the very first few lines -- again, the fattest part of the inverted pyramid. These very first few lines, in turn, display directly underneath the news release's headline (another critical component) on a SERP (search engine results page).

Put another way, people aren't the only ones who best pay attention to and digest information presented in the inverted pyramid format.

But how do these concepts possibly apply to Twitter? Well, I recently read an article that shares several ideas on how to write tweets, and when it comes to Twitter SEO, one of these ideas cuts to the core of issue: your tweets' visibility online. To squeeze the most possible organic SEO out of your tweets, you must write them as tiny inverted pyramids of information. Include the keywords up front, within the first 30 characters or so, because when search engines index your tweets, these are the characters that will appear on the SERP.

Where, by the way, does this leave shortened URLs, the very basis of many tweets and arguably just as important as a tweet's original content? Place them at the end of a tweet. That's what I do, and this means my tweets take on the form of not just one pyramid, but two: an upside-down pyramid at the beginning joined at its tip to that of a right-side up pyramid at the end.

Yes, that's all pretty complex for a mere 140 characters.

But with just 140 characters at your disposal, do you really need to think about capturing the reader's attention before those 140 characters are up? Shouldn't even the most boring tweet still command some attention simply because it's only 140 characters? Conversely, shouldn't it take at least 140 characters to get someone's attention in the first place?

Yes and no. It almost seems pathetic and silly, the ultimate indictment of our ever-shortening attention spans. And it would be, except that the "reader" in this instance is a search engine, where a large population of your potential followers will learn of your tweets' very existence, let alone take interest in your micro blogging. In key ways, this makes the search engine your gateway audience, and now that Google has announced plans to make real-time search a reality, the time has come to invert your tweets and make them search engine–friendly.