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I teach Comm 335 Writing Across Platforms (see syllabus), a class that in part looks at writing news releases and other content for the web. One tactic we talk about is creating Tweetable content for our social media releases assignment. PitchEngine – the social news release website we use for this assignment – enables users to write ‘quick facts’ that readers can Tweet.
So when I saw today a similar, more streamlined approach used by the Pew Internet project in their reports, I had to make a quick blog post about it. I was reading the Cell Phones, Social media, and Campaign 2014 report when I stumbled across this.
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The snow is coming down here in West Virginia! Classes are canceled today so I will be catching up on research and some other things. But let’s talk classes and syllabi!
In addition to the applied Communication Research class I am teaching this semester (discussed in the previous post) I’m also teaching a few other classes. :) I want to quickly share some of my syllabi for the semester. I’ve uploaded syllabi for these classes to my Scribd account, which is where I host past syllabi and class assignments. Click the link below to see the syllabus. (You can also see all the below-described syllabi as well as past syllabi via the menu on the left, by mousing over “syllabi.”)
Comm 335: Writing Across Platforms – Changes from Fall 13 include: A lab day for greater access to press release examples and working with peers on the first press release assignment, I’ve re-organized and updated the related social media and blog writing assignments, and have shifted a few lectures around to more effectively deliver material. Other minor changes to make sure content is up to date. I’m also super excited that for our PitchEngine assignment this semester, all of our students will be temporarily upgraded from the free version of PitchEngine to the paid level thanks to the awesome people at PitchEngine! So, students will get experience with advanced functionality.
Hope you find these new syllabi helpful! If you share your syllabi online, please share in the comments below!
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Hope you had a great Labor Day weekend. I’ve been writing lately about the Google Link Schemes update – what it is, how I am teaching in response to it, and what I think about it. As promised, here is my assignment that is impacted by this change.
As I’ve said before, I’m not too concerned about this change at the macro level. But at the micro level, I think it is important that press releases now contain the “no-follow” tag. To learn how to tag with “no-follow”, read my former post. It also contains lots of links to great articles explaining the Link Schemes update!
Press Release for the Web Assignment
The emphasis on my Social Media Release assignment (which I may be better off just calling a web release), at its heart is on writing for the web – e..g., keyword research, SEO. And so, whether the press release “dies” or not, I feel my students will be adaptable.
This assignment is taught in Writing Across Platforms (syllabus | related blog posts). The topics this assignment emphasizes are of course covered in class through lecture, discussion, and brief activities.
There are 3 files in my Writing Across Platforms category on Scribd that I want to draw your attention to:
Cover Page – The cover page is something I am using for all major written assignments in the class. Someone deserves credit for this but I can’t remember where I got the idea (if you know, please tell me so proper credit can be attributed). The purpose is for students to have to think through the purpose of their written piece, who their audience is, and what is “in it” for the audience – why they should care.
Social Media Release – Part 1 – This is prep work the students do, focusing on the keyword research and writing the release to conform to the scenario. An important thing for me is that students SHOW their research and highlight all keywords. Students bring in their draft to class and work with a partner on revisions. After, they proceed to Part 2:
Social Media Release – Part 2 – This is where they take what they’ve written and put it into PitchEngine. By breaking it up into two stages, the students can focus on the research and writing first and foremost before they get swept up in the coolness of PitchEngine.
If you have questions about any of these assignments, how I teach the material, or ways i can improve them, please feel free to drop a comment or contact me directly. How do you teach these topics? How can I approve my assignment?
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Happy Friday! We are wrapping up our first week of classes here at Shepherd University!
This semester I am teaching 2 classes related to social media and strategic comm: Social Media (syllabus), and Writing Across Platforms (syllabus).
I find myself using textbooks less and less. Perhaps this is because i am not finding what I am looking for, or maybe I am just not looking in the right places. Here are the books I am using in each class.
Content Rules: How to create killer blogs, podcasts, videos, ebooks, webinars and more that engage customers and ignite your business by Ann Handley & CC Chapman
Recommended: 1) AP Stylebook, and 2) Public Relations Writing: Form & Style (10th edition) by Newsom & Haynes
I have only used Likeable Social Media before so am excited to see how they others go!: What books are you using? What would you recommend?
(Note, I put the Amazon links in here but this is not an endorsement of Amazon nor are these affiliate links).
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Google recently updated its link schemes and it means an important change to how we teach students to write press releases for the web. This is because the change directly targets articles or press releases distributed on other websites, like an online wire service.
I’ve written a lot on this blog about teaching students to write for the web. And this is the biggest change I’ve seen to what we should teach since starting this blog.
Google wants links to your site to emerge naturally, that is organically via its popularity on the web because others like it and link to it via Tweets, blog posts, etc. That doesn’t include a press release, because essentially a press release is seen by Google as an advertisement you are putting out to drive traffic to your site. Google calls this “unnatural.”
“Lots of links, lots of repeated key words, and multiple postings of a press release to different sites, are all red flags to Google under the new rules. Such actions are viewed by Google as blatant attempts to trick its algorithm into ranking a site higher than its allotted position,” writes Tom Foremski.
When Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable asked Google Switzerland’s john Mueller “Why were press releases called out?” during the July 29 Webmaster Central Google Hangout, Mueller replied: “It is something that a lot of people are doing to try to promote the website. That’s something that we want to make clear, that we essentially see this as an unnatural link…” Later in the hangout, Mueller likened a press release to an advertisement. He is saying this in the sense, again, that the purpose of the press release distributed on the web is to drive traffic to a client’s site, the way an online advertisement does. I.e., an “unnatural” link. Of course, the purpose of a press release is to do more than drive traffic to your site, but not in Google’s eyes.
You can see this exchange by watching the first 10 minutes or so of the below video:
So what to do?
Having keywords be linked has been Best Practices for press releases over the past several years (in fact, if you have old press releases up it is best to go change them to the new format or risk hurting your client’s PageRank). I was planning to go into my Writing Across Platforms class (See syllabus. See other blog posts about the class) this fall with the advice to optimize keywords with links in the Social Media News Release assignment. As a result of this change by Google, this is what I’ll be telling my students:
Be safe:
Link Sparingly
nofollow all URLs in press releases and distributed articles on web.
Code for no-following: Why I’m telling them this:
I spent a great deal of time researching this new change and reading through varying opinions and reactions to the new link scheme update. While opinions differed slightly, Mueller’s own advice seems to be to no-follow all URLs just to be safe.
The penalty for upsetting Google? Possibly having your client’s site drop in ranking on Google search results – and no one wants that! In fact, in an article with the alarmist title “Did Google just kill PR agencies?” Tom Foremski warns ” PR agencies could be held liable for the damage they caused to the online reputation of client businesses through the execution of normal practices. It could lead to legal action and compensation claims on millions of dollars in lost sales. ”
So it seems best to me to not risk it.
Some great articles to learn more about this change and see what others are advising (note: I got many of these from a great podcast on For Immediate Release last week – listed below):
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At some point, I bet you’ve wondered – Why did you name your blog Social Media Syllabus?
No, it is not a syllabus. It is a way to help my target audience find me. Let me explain.
Several posts ago, I discussed introducing students to SEO and writing for search in my Writing Across Platforms course (though it could be taught in a social media course or a PR, marketing, or other course). This included an activity with Google Trends where students get an opportunity to see the importance of understanding how people search the web.
I want to use my blog name as an example to extend this to another great tool we should be teaching our students: Google Adwords Keywords Tool, a very popular tool used to conduct SEO keyword research.
Competition: Considerations for naming a blog (or a post, or post content, for that matter!) When I decided to start blogging a few months ago, I needed a blog title. I began with SEO in mind. I did a ton of research on Google Adwords Keywords tool for search terms related to social media education. I know my primary target audience is educators interested in teaching or using social media in the classroom. Clearly I’m not the only one out there writing on this subject, and there are many related subjects. So how to differentiate myself?
You see, Google’s Adwords Keyword tool can be used to assess keyword competition.
Keyword competition is simply the idea that if too many people are using the same keyword in their web content, then competition to be the top search result will be fierce and the chance of ranking high in search is more difficult.
Google Adwords Keywords tool’s primary purpose is actually for writing search engine marketing ads on Google. People bid on keywords for ad placement on Google searches and the highest bids show up. But many folks use it for keyword research for SEO as well.
Pulling from our example from the Google Trends post last week, imagine you’re writing web content about an automobile brand. You may have found in Google Trends that “fuel economy” and “safety rating” are more popular than “cup holders” or “park assist” what people are searching for a new car. But you don’t know how many of your competitors are creating content with these terms. If they are, your chances of showing up on search results are diminished.
To find this out, people use Google Adwords Keywords tool. The theory is that if competition is high on Google Adwords, it is likely high on organic content as well. So, in the simplest sense, a high search volume and low competition are though to be ideal.
It is of course more complicated than that. We also must think about specificity and context. Is what people are searching for what your content is about?
Here’s an example. If people search for “drums” they may be searching for brake drums, gallon drums, musical drums, etc.. Drums then is non-specific. It is a bad keyword – because it is not specific and lacks context.
If you’re writing about break drums, of course your content will have the words break drums in them. But what else?
We must be creative in coming up with “long-tail” keywords – those longer phrases that get less search volume, but have less competition and that a very specific target audience is searching for. Should you use “cracked break drum”? “brake drum issues”?
This is not an easy task. But it is something that is becoming more and more important. Our students need to learn it.
Why name my blog Social Media Syllabus? What I’m trying to do in positioning my blog, is figure out what a social media educator / person wanting to use social media in the classroom is going to search for.
When I did my research, I found I was in competition with a lot social media education programs – such as online courses, certifications, etc. That’s not my niche (which is again, social media educators) – but we share search terms. There are, of course, also articles about social media and higher education. These seem to span from examples of how it is being used by universities rather than by educators, to higher education recruiting, and other related topics but not what my target audience is looking for. Again, not my target audience – but related search terms that similar audiences are searching. Many of these have medium to high competition and not a ton of searches (click image to enlarge – sorry it’s my template).
I did a number of other searches and considered a number of things but finally settled on Social Media Syllabus. It has low search volume – but again, I’m targeting a fairly small niche – but someone searching for a social media syllabus is clearly looking for what my blog is primarily about, teaching social media. And, I have the syllabi they are looking for on my site. So, theoretically speaking, I should fulfill their need (click to enlarge).
I hope this explanation offers an example of 1 way of going about thinking about the role search plays in content today, and how we can try and differentiate ourselves with specific terms.
Is it working? Having moved from Posterous to WordPress (free version), I no longer have Google Analytics, which I miss dearly. Without robust stats it is more difficult for me to be sure my plan is working, as often WordPress doesn’t tell me the search terms that brought people to my site (reading “other search terms” or “unknown search terms). However, it has stated on a dozen or so occasions that people arrived to my site from searching ‘social media syllabus.’ As my blog is fairly new, I should be building authority over time that will help me in search results.
Final Thoughts: Once the right keywords are chosen, they are used in writing headlines and high up in the body of text of your content. You then want to monitor your web traffic to see what keyword searches are driving traffic to your article. Monitor and adjust. For example, you may find that people are finding you using keywords you hadn’t anticipated, or that people are searching for something off topic and finding their way to your site. Likely, these people are not hanging around as your site’s content is not what they’re looking for.
I hope that brief intro was helpful. There is much more that could be discussed. I will post a class activity for students using Adwords Keywords tool in a future post.
What did I leave out? Other considerations? Educators; Have any resources to share to help students understand SEO? Readers and I would love it if you shared!
A Social Media Education Blog by Matthew J. Kushin, Ph.D.
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