This past Friday at midnight, we rolled out a brand new PRWeb.com.  This launch was the result of countless hours of effort logged by a wide variety of individuals – from developers, to designers, to writers and more, this was truly a collaborative effort that spanned the company.

Also worth noting is that the launch is a mashup of several different projects that have been on our roadmap for a while now.  Some changes will be immediately obvious, such as the updated look and feel of the site and the new press release template.  Other changes on the other hand, will reveal their impact over time – but more on this in a bit.  What is common throughout all the updates is our intention to better serve our customers – from providing them with more tools to get started to ensuring that the releases perform more effectively online, this launch was all about continuing to offer industry leading visibility to our customers.

As with all significant changes, there are sure to be questions that arise.  We want to take this opportunity to address some of the more significant changes you may notice with the new PRWeb.com:

1. We are no longer listing all $140+ releases on the home page

Back when PRWeb was a free service and publishing a far more limited volume of releases, front page placement was a benefit granted to certain customers willing to make a financial contribution to the company.  At this time there were more tangible benefits to front page placement in terms of readership and SEO.  Over time, the volume of releases published daily has swelled to a much larger number and we have ended up with a home page that can contain too many articles at times.  This has made the home page less than optimal for both users as well as search engines.

Our solution to this challenge has been to evolve from an architecture that focuses on one front page to one that has multiple front pages (from a search perspective). Tactically, we have done this by creating a section of our domain completely devoted to customer news releases, organized around industry verticals (i.e. arts & entertainment, technology, etc.).  This technique is one that is used by many sites with a large volume of content and is a generally accepted method for creating value in certain silos within the hierarchy of a Web site and passing value to the pages located within these silos (customer news releases).

As a result, we fully expect this new architecture to increase the volume of traffic to your release as well as your site.

2. We have made some major changes to the news release template

The PRWeb news release has undergone some significant changes.

First, you’ll notice that there is far more room being given to multimedia elements like video, images, and file attachments.  In the last several years we have gained a lot of empirical knowledge about the way that people consume news online.  Our own research into the effects of multimedia on news consumption showed that the presence of relevant images and video increased the average time users spent on news releases.  There is also notable research that has proven the correlation between multimedia and action.

Then again, all it takes is a quick look at the home page of CNN.com to see how multimedia is beginning to dominate the visual real estate of news sites today.

The second major change we have made is to place links to various actions such as sharing, further inline with the news content.  These days, news releases are not just about getting people to read a story; they are also about getting the reader to take some form of measurable action: to share on Facebook, e-mail to friends, and more.  Subsequently, we have optimized the placement of these links to make our news more action-able.

The final change we’ve made to the release is behind the scenes.  After years of adding code, the time had come for us to step back and optimize the code behind the release to make sure it was optimized for faster load times and better performance in search.  Speed is not only important for users, but leading certain search engines have been very vocal about the growing importance of speed when it comes to performance in search.

3.  We have introduced a dedicated learning center

Over the past few years, we have been consistently investing more time and resources into customer education.  We realize that although there are some folks who have been sending out press releases for years, the practice of creating and distributing online news releases is still relatively new.

What’s more, the varying backgrounds of our customers has created a need for a range of different types of content.  We have PR folks who want to learn more about SEO, and SEO folks who want to learn more about PR.  We have small business owners who want to move from sending out one release each year, to a more ongoing cycle of communication that results in the long term development of online visibility for their brand and their business.

So in response to the ongoing demand for educational resources, we are launching a dedicated learning center that will serve as a hub for all the various articles, webinars, and white papers we have put together.

Hopefully these points address some of the more glaring questions you might have.  If you have others (and I’m sure some of you will), please post them to the comments section of this article and we will make sure to address them as quickly as possible.

We’re looking forward to the conversation.

Introducing the New PRWeb Web site was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

If you took an informal survey today about where people get their commercial information, it’s highly likely most folks would avidly reply: “The Web, of course!” Or, when asked, “where did you hear that?” Their reply? “I ‘Googled’ it!” Easy—and immediate–enough.

But what does this mean behind the scenes? How does “stuff” get “Google-able, “Tweet”-able, or just made ready for a Facebook user to share with their friends?

The answers can seem confusing, and even at times overwhelming, as the “digg-erati” talk about the intricacies of Search Engine Optimization, hash-tags, Web 2.0, mash-ups and more.

When it comes to deciphering new media, remembering that “the more things change, the more they stay the same” is extremely important. You attract customers in much the same way you always have: by having great products and services. Their satisfaction and positive (and negative) impression makes people share stories about you with their friends. You might also snag some coverage in the news media in one form another – local, global or trade.

Through it all, “word-of-mouth advertising” is still in fashion. What has changed is the speed at which the good news (or –“oh no!” bad news) about your business spreads. Thanks to the Internet, the good, bad and the ugly spreads like wildfire.  And, that places new requirements on you to understand how you can facilitate, manage, measure and track that process, so you can attract more customers, stay ahead of the competition and keep your business growing.

We see the success that the new digital world is creating; exciting stories of business growth, and great new relationships formed. We also see some puzzlement – and confusion. People are just not sure where to start first.

Together with some PRWeb partners, we’re putting on an online event to help businesses learn the basics of interactive and online marketing. Its called “Thrive 2010: The ins and Outs of Online Marketing.”  It focuses on the fundamental tools and strategies for achieving success in the new digital world – but, in simple language.

Many of us who live in this new-fangled social media world took a leap to get here. We had to figure out how it all worked–the best practices for helping our own businesses and our customers tap the power of social media and Web 2.0 technologies to take marketing and its revenue impact to new heights. And, now, tweeting, sharing, blogging and all the other “stuff” that goes along with social media is actually pretty fun. What life and work should be all about, right?

What are your thoughts, or emotions, about leaping into the new digital world?

Are You “Tweet-able?” was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

Over the past several years, PRWeb’s popularity amongst UK-based communicators has grown dramatically. This growth has mirrored the growth in online marketing and PR in the United Kingdom as well as the growing global influence of PRWeb.  In fact, over the past several years we have worked with over 2000 clients in the United Kingdom alone so it was just a matter of time until we rolled out a version of PRWeb tailored for the UK.

Our Approach to PRWeb UK…

Was guided by our vision of providing a localized experience while leveraging our global platform. Specifically, this meant the following:

First, we wanted to ensure that the user experience was tailored for customers in the United Kingdom.  This meant processing transactions in pounds sterling, using GMT as the time standard, using copy written in the Queen’s for a UK-based audience, and countless other details that required significant time and effort.

At the same time, our approach struck a balance between provisioning the user with a localized (UK) experience while keeping the core platform global.  For current customers, this means that they can use their existing credentials to log-in to PRWeb UK however their experience will be UK centric while in their UK console and US centric while in their standard PRWeb.com console.

Finally, from a distribution perspective, we made the decision to leverage our core online network while adding a layer of distribution focused specifically on the United Kingdom. This meant the creation of newsfeeds focused on topics and regions relevant to the UK, optimizing for UK search and creating direct channels to the UK media.

A major component of the media distribution piece is accomplished through a partnership with the Press Association that allows us to feed our content directly to the newsrooms at all of the major national and regional outlets throughout the United Kingdom.

It is our hope that the culmination of our efforts is an experience that is tailor-made for customers in the UK and results that will ensure industry leading visibility on both a global and regional scale.

PRWeb UK will be publicly available in early March.

Links:

• Official launch announcement on PRWeb UK.
• Launch announcement on YouTube.

PRWeb UK was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

Over the past year or so we’ve seen more and more PRWeb customers share their news release through Twitter once it is published on PRWeb, which doesn’t come as much surprise considering we are blessed with some of the most innovative and technologically savvy customers out there!

So we decided to help make things a little more convenient for the PRWeb customers who are active on Twitter by introducing a new social media feature called TweetIt that allows customers to automatically share their news release through Twitter at the same time it is distributed through PRWeb.

To take advantage of the feature, you first need an account on Twitter. Once you have created an account, you simply add your credentials and tweet (a short blurb) and we’ll auto-post it to your Twitter account as soon as your release is published.

If you’d like to see how it works, we’ve prepared this quick video demo that walks you through the actual steps:

If you’d like to connect with us on Twitter we have an official PRWeb Twitter account.

Introducing TweetIt, an Easy Way to get your News Release on Twitter was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

Over the past day or two, some customers may have noticed some discrepencies in their visibility statistics.  Just to give everyone a heads-up on what was going on: we were performing some maintenance over the weekend and a minor issue popped up that impacted the rendering of statistics for several customers.  Rest assured – the issue has been resolved, any impacted analytics have been fully restored and we’ve made an enhancement to our internal monitoring system to make sure the issue doesn’t crop up again!

Analytics Update was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com