Pressitt now has customisable Newsrooms
After a lot of development we have just launched the latest update to Pressitt: customisable newsrooms. This update allows users to create their own branded newsroom to hold their releases and link to their social networks around the web. We’re very pleased with the new system and hope that it will bring Pressitt to the forefront of Social Media News Releases.
We’re already working with Eurosport on their jump into social media and hope that a lot more big names will start to see what Pressitt can do for them. Some of the companies that have already used Pressitt for their releases are: Google, Groupon, Lovefilm, Nokia, AVG, Intel and British Airways.
Find out more about Pressitt.com
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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 source of research when compiling a story. Pressitt SMNRs are designed primarily with journalists and bloggers in mind. A Pressitt SMNR encapsulates all the information, multimedia and images needed to prepare a story, and offers contact details for more information.
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.
Once published, Pressitt allows your news to be bookmarked, commented on, and shared.
WordPress for Android
This is something I’ve only just found about: the WordPress for Android application. As an extensive user of WordPress on a number of websites (including this one) and an Android phone owner I think this could be very useful!
WordPress for Android is an Open Source app that empowers you to write new posts, edit content, and manage comments with built-in notifications. Download it now and get blogging in no time. The latest version of the app has just been released:
WordPress for Android 1.3.8 has been released to Android Market. We squashed some bugs that we received from Android Market reports as well as added a new feature!
You can find out more about the project and download the app here: http://android.wordpress.org/
WordPress for Android is an Open Source project, which means anyone can play a part in its development. WordPress for Android is released under the GNU General Public License. Both our app and our source code are free to download and use however you’d like. In return, if you are able, we’d love it if you contributed your code, your design talents, or even just your suggestions back to the project.
To download the app from the Android app market, follow this link from your phone: market://search?q=pname:org.wordpress.android
If you enjoy using this app, why not vote for it on our very own 101 Best Android Apps
Social Media and how to use it…
Social Media is an often used term and it covers a broad range of different websites – almost all new websites include some form of social media: in comments, embedded media or links to social tools. I like to think of Social Media as an umbrella term that as a basic rule covers three main types of website:
Social Media
Sites such as YouTube, SoundCloud and Flickr are all Social Media website. Literally speaking they are used to display Media in the context of a Social community. In this sense media is used with the traditional meaning of an act of communication – via film, art, photography, music etc.
Social Networking
Since the arrival of MySpace and Facebook the importance of social networking sites has increased dramatically over the last 3 or 4 years. These are now the most used and most active type of website in the world. The basic function of a Social Networking site is to allow users to chat, view and interact with each other via a simple interface.
Social Bookmarking
This is the most difficult type of social website to describe and understand. The idea behind Social Bookmarking sites is to easily store and distribute useful information and links to websites. Rather than storing favourite sites on your personal computer you are allowing anyone to view your links and rate the web pages based on the relevance to topic, how interesting they found it or some other criteria.
So that’s a brief overview of Social Media but how do you use it to your advantage when marketing a new website, prodcut or service? That’s where the work starts!
There are lots of blogs that will help with talking about social media and marketing and how to optimise your Facebook pages and Twitter tweets but one of the easiest to understand I’ve read recently is this:
16 Rules For Social Media Optimization Revisited
Here at Best Served Cold we can help you get started with Social Media and guide you on the best sites to register with, who your audience might be and how you can utilise the social internet to promote your brand or website.
Getting Started with Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is the process of promoting your site or business through social media channels and it is a powerful strategy that can get you links, attention and large amounts of traffic. Sometimes the work involved can be quite time intensive but it is always low cost.
The two main benefits of developing a good social media marketing strategy are:
- High numbers of new visitors
- Quality links from external websites
Both of these translate directly and indirectly to a higher search engine ranking and increased traffic to
your website:
- New visitors from social bookmarks or networking sites may find your site or article, read it, and then leave the site. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t interested in the content. Online success is, at the most basic, a numbers game. The more visitors you can attract to your site, the more people will read your content and the more people will register with your site or bookmark you for future reference.
- A well written article, marketed across social networks will encourage other bloggers, journalists and network members to write about and link to your site. These links get picked up by search engines such as Google and this in turn increases the value / ranking of your site within search engine results.
If you already have a Social Media online marketing campaign in place we can still help you further by talking you through Social Media News Releases or SMNRs. We have helped to create Pressitt.com which is a frree service that allows you to publish online press releases across your favourite Social Networking and Social Media platforms. From Pressitt:
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.
With a Pressitt newsroom you can collate all your Social Network links in one place giving your customers an easy way to find you and your products. More importantly it gives you a high profile online presence to talk about your brand directly to your customers. If you’d like to find out more about Pressitt and Social Media News Releases why not contact one of the Pressitt team?
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!
Still using IE6?
Way back in 2001 Microsoft launched the much hyped and highly anticipated Internet Explorer 6. In internet timelines that’s the middle ages! At the time of release it was the best new browser for a few years. Finally we could get rid of Netscape and IE5.5 – buggy, hard to use and just horrible browsers.
But since 2001 there have been many more browsers released, there is a real competition and a couple of years ago even Microsoft acknowledged that IE6 needed to be upgraded, it was unsecure, easy to hack and didn’t support many new features that were becoming necessary for web developers and users. IE7 and now IE8 have been released and are pretty good, well worth the upgrade. I tend to use Mozilla Firefox and/or Google Chrome for most sites and testing things.
So, why are 25 – 30% of interenet users still using this outdated browser? In many cases it’s simply a lack of knowledge that it’s possible to upgrade and then there’s the problem that non-technical people don’t know how to upgrade or don’t think it’s necessary. Finally there are some people with computers that are just too old to upgrade, we still get a few visitors to this site using Windows 2000 and Windows ME!
But if you can upgrade it’s very simple and even if you know all this already but want to try a new browser – maybe IE7 isn’t working as well as you’d hoped or you’re bored of Firefox – here’s a list of useful links to find out more and choose something new:
- Firefox 3: Firefox remains the most-recommended web browser for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux users.
- Safari 4: This is Apple’s web browser that is made for Mac or PC. This is their newest release and blows away past or present versions.
- Google Chrome: The new Google Chrome browser is stripped down for fast browsing, with superb built-in search features, private browsing and a task manager to help prevent crashes.
- Camino: Camino is an open source web browser developed with a focus on providing the best possible experience for Mac OS X users.
- Flock: Reviews recommend Flock 2 for people who “live on the web” since it has all the speed, security and options of Firefox 3, but builds in a blog editor, photo-up-loader and big sidebar to keep current with social networking.
- Opera: (Best for Older Computers) Reviews and tests recommend the free Opera web browser as fast and lean, especially for older or underpowered PC and Mac computers apt to bog down on more resource-hungry browsers.
Google Calendar
Keep track of all your activities with Google Calendar. Make appointments with friends, keep track of appointments, all online!
Quick tool to check popularity
A tool to check at-a-glance the link popularity of any site based on its ranking, social bookmarks, subscribers and more!