Pressitt.com gets some TLC
Over the last couple of months we’ve been working hard on the new version of Pressitt. If you haven’t heard of Pressitt it’s a site dedicated to the creation and release of social media news releases. We’ve been involved in the design and development of the Pressitt platform and the latest version has several updates and improvements.
So, what is Pressitt?
Pressitt allows you to create your own social media news release (SMNR) – also known as a social media press release (SMPR) or social media release (SMR), and publish it to an online community of journalists, the blogosphere and the general public.
Many journalists use the Internet as their primary research source when compiling a story. Pressitt SMNRs are designed with journalists and bloggers in mind. A Pressitt SMNR encapsulates all the information, multimedia and images needed to prepare a story, while offering contact details for more information, all without the usual PR fluff.
The Pressitt SMNR template offers all of the core information found in a traditional press release, but additionally takes advantage of linking, multimedia and Web 2.0 shareable features. It allows users to host downloadable hi-res images within their releases, along with PowerPoint presentations, and PDFs – YouTube videos can also be embedded. Each brand using the service is assigned its own RSS feed, and press contacts can be reached via LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Additionally, up-to-date bookmarking and sharing icons are presented including Posterous, Yammer and Sphinn.
Once created your SMNR can be published to the Pressitt platform and shared to social networks or via an email link to your contacts and colleages.
You can also view and talk to Pressitt on Facebook – why not become a fan!?
Our new Facebook page
That’s right, we’ve been working on a new Facebook page. Getting to grips with how to use the fan pages to showcase our work and allow our friends and clients to talk about us and show everyone what we’re working on at the moment.
If you’d like to find out more about setting up a Facebook page for your company or would like to know how getting involved with social networking could improve your business website, please contact us.
101 Best HTML5 sites
We’ve launched another 101 site! This time it’s not for mobile apps but a showcase site for the best HTML5 sites we can find on the internet. We’ve already added quite a few and you can check it out here:
HTML5 is the latest standard for all HTML websites. It’s been in development since 2004 and is just now being added to browsers.
HTML 5 introduces a whole set of new elements that make it much easier to structure pages. For a complete overview and introduction to what HTML5 can offer to designers and coders, I recommend taking a look at this article over at A List Apart.
We’re currently in the process of converting the site to use HTML5 but haven’t quite finished it yet!
Social Media Consultants?
Over the last year there has been a lot of discussion in the news about Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and Myspace and other social networking sites. In the wake of this there has been an influx of new businesses calling themselves Social Media Consultants. Is Social Media the new SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)? Should you be paying someone to tell you how to promote your site on social media?
At Best Served Cold we like to keep up with new trends and ideas – over the years we have signed up to hundreds of new sites – and we’ve been using sites like Digg, Reddit and Mixx for a number of years to help promote our new releases. Recently we’ve been experimenting with Twitter and Plurk and have a couple of clients who are trying YouTube as a way to gain traffic and interest.
SEO vs. Social Media
Well, that’s a bit of a leading title. It’s not a case of versus, it’s more a case of what to use and when best to use it. There is still and will probably always be a need for good SEO on a website. Along with Accessibility (the two go hand in hand) it’s one of the building blocks of a good website and needed to ensure your site gets indexed and found on search engines for the topic you want.
Social media is a broad term for a lot of different sites. It started with social bookmarking sites such as Delicious and social rating sites like Technorati. Closely followed by social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace the term has finally come to include all sites that allow communal interaction around a topic, personal accounts or news.
Modern websites are often built around a Content Management System (CMS) and as such will often have some from of social media built in – usually comments or a rating system – but to get the best results you need to look at other websites to see what they can offer you.
To take full advantage of the social media revolution a company has to consider how to get people talking about their products and services on other websites, do they write a blog, set up a YouTube account, do they Twitter, create Social Media News Releases or need a FaceBook page? There are a lot of options and it’s not always easy to understand the advantages one site has over another.
That’s where Social Media Consultants come in, they can advise about what’s best for your company and which sites you need to be joining. It’s not rocket science and with a bit of time most people would be able to figure it out themselves but, like SEO, it’s much easier to get someone else to do it!
Best Served Cold have been working with social media for a number of years and have a wide knowledge of what works and doesn’t work on various websites. If you’d like an introduction to social media and SEO for your site why not contact us. We can review your site and business and work with you to improve and build a social network of your own and, if needed, give advice on how to improve your SEO while you’re at it.
Pressitt newsrooms
We’ve been working on Pressitt continuously over the last few months and the latest update sees the release of our first social media newsroom: brightone.pressitt.com
If you’re not sure what a newsroom is, here’s an excerpt from Pressitt:
The Social Media News Room is a unique company landing page offering access to all of your multimedia news releases and developed to your specifications. It is a first touch for brands wanting to engage and participate with online communities, including journalists, bloggers, and even consumers researching your product or services.
We have lots more ideas in the pipeline for Pressitt, we’ll be talking about them in more detail soon!
More for GMBO.tv
A couple of weeks ago we launched an updated version of Get My Business On TV. We’ve added WordPress to the original site to give more flexibility and allow more frequent updates. There’s now a news section and areas for Testimonials, Jobs, Freebies and who’s searching for help in the TV world.
From the site:
Programme-makers are always on the look-out for products, services, locations and people for TV productions. We make the process of contacting them simpler and easier.
We aim to ensure no other service gets as many programme-makers and friendly businesses as close to each other as Get My Business on TV does.
So, if you’re interested in getting your business involved in TV, look no further than Get My Business On TV
101 reaches 100,000 visitors
After 11 months we’ve hit a milestone with our CSS and Flash design showcase site: 101 Best Websites. Launched after a weekend in July last year we’ve continued to work on and push the site and we’re very happy with the results.
Last week we crossed the 100,000 visitor mark which translates into 500,000 pageviews. With the site currently growing visitor numbers at about 15% month on month we should hit 250,000 visitors in just another 6 months!
Over the next few weeks we have a few more 101 Best branded sites to launch, we’re hoping to continue our success across several new categories… Watch this space!
Pressitt.com – officially live
Today marks the launch of Pressitt.com, we had a brief mention in PR Week last week and now the team are getting word out about the public beta launch.
Pressitt.com – create a social media news release
From the site:
Pressitt allows you to create your own social media news release (SMNR) – also known as a social media press release (SMPR) or social media release (SMR), and publish it to an online community of journalists, the blogosphere and the general public.
Many journalists use the Internet as their primary research source when compiling a story. Pressitt SMNRs are designed primarily with journalists and bloggers in mind. A Pressitt SMPR encapsulates all the information, multimedia and images needed to prepare a story, and offers contact details for more information, all without the usual PR fluff.
Through Pressitt, you can create news that is truly ‘social’, as well as enhance your SMNR with images and video clips. You can also add relevant links, upload PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, or whatever you need to get your message across.
We think it looks so good, we’ve alsoo submitted it to 101 Best Websites – it’s a blatant plug, but you’ve got to try! 🙂
Pressitt – Social Media News Releases
or SMNRs are the next big thing and we’ve got in at the start with a collaboration with Liberate Media: Pressitt.com.
We’ve just taken it into private beta release for testing – you can register to find out more but we’re only allowing a small number of users for the first couple of weeks while we make sure everything is working correctly.
There’ll be more information coming soon… watch this space!
101 Best Websites
We launched 101 Best Websites last summer and since then we’ve had an amazing response. The last few weeks in particular has seen traffic grow consistently – in January we had 7,756 visits and 37,374 pageviews. And February looks to be even better!
Thanks to everyone who’s been to check out the site and all those who have submitted and voted for their favourite CSS, Flash and Javascript based websites.