As Google alerts, social networks and online communities grow in strength and accuracy when sourcing stories and building relationships – what becomes of the wires? Do they become less important? Do they cease to exist?

Given that we’re in the business of helping you create and distribute social media press releases (though we’re not a traditional wire service), we took a natural interest in this debate. The general consensus of the experts is, predictably, that the traditional news wire isn’t dead; it’s simply evolving.

We’d like to offer an additional take. While the news wire is still a useful component of your PR strategy, effective PR is and always has been about building strong relationships. Sending a generic press release to thousands of publications via the news wire might get you a temporary boost in traffic or even – if you’re lucky – a mention in a big publication. But in the long run, ten strong relationships with influencers in your industry are worth more than 10,000 media outlets who’ve never heard of you.

Press releases, the news wire, multimedia content and your social media newsroom are powerful tools for the PR professional, and as you begin building solid relationships with influencers, they’re great resources for your contacts. But they’re no substitute for genuine human interaction. This was true long before the social web rose to prominence.

Do you still use a traditional news wire? If so, why? If not, why not?

So what distinguishes a successful pitch email from one that falls flat?

The Anatomy of a Well-Crafted Pitch Email

1. The Subject Line: Don’t be vague, and don’t leave the subject line blank. Use clear, concise language that’s specific to your story. Include your company name and, if possible, an interesting tidbit that makes your audience want to read more.
2. The Introduction: Keep it brief – a couple of sentences at most. Tell your influencer who you are and why you’re reaching out, but more importantly, show them how you can provide them value (this goes right along with doing your research to ensure that you’re sending the right message to the right person in the first place). Which leads us to number 3…
3. The Value Proposition: The most important thing to remember here is that it’s not about you. It’s about how your story will benefit your audience. Know in advance what they care about and personalize your pitch accordingly. Be respectful, but be friendly and human, too. The goal of this first email isn’t a full-blown write-up in a top publication; that will come later. Your initial goal should simply be to pique your target’s interest enough to start a conversation.
4. The Supporting Evidence: Don’t just tell your prospects about your story – show them why it’s worth their while. Pictures, multimedia and factual research will all greatly enhance the story you wish to tell.
5. The Next Step: Make it as easy as possible for your contact to follow up with you. Include all of your contact information (phone number, email, Twitter, Skype, etc.), and suggest a clear next step with a date, time and place (a phone call or a quick chat in person, for example).

Don’t take the process of crafting pitch emails lightly. A good pitch email can open new doors and rapidly increase your exposure, while a bad one can alienate you from key influencers forever.

Next week, we’ll cover a few ways to reach out to influencers that don’t involve sending pitch emails, and that might even be more effective.

In the meantime, what are your tips for writing pitch emails that garner responses?

Here are three tools to help you find the hidden influencers in your niche:

1. Klout. Love it or hate it, Klout is a great starting point in any search for influencers. It’s free to use and easy to search by influencers according to selected topics. One thing to keep in mind: Klout only measures online influence. It won’t tell you anything about the valuable offline connections that your influencers may have, which is why you should treat it as a starting point, not the final point.
2. Follower Wonk. Follower Wonk is a fun and geeky little application that helps you uncover hidden influencers in your own network and those of your Twitter followers. You can search on Twitter profile data, compare different users, analyze your followers’ followers and overlay your own social graph on top of it all. Give it a try, but we warn you, it can get addicting.
3. Muck Rack. Muck Rack is a service that aggregates the tweets of journalists and organizes them according to beat, geography, and news source. We’ve written about them before, but the company has made updated their business model since then – most notably, you can no longer hunt for journalists by beat for free. With a bit more legwork, the free version of Muck Rack can still help you uncover potential influencers in your niche. The paid version is also affordable for most businesses and will save you a lot of time.

While you probably won’t read about them in Mashable anytime soon, these “hidden” influencers can still offer you valuable coverage, especially if they have a trusted following. It’s all about quality over quantity.

What tools do you use to find your influencers? Please share in the comments.

• Follow the rules of the game. Do not send emails to addresses unless you have permission to. ISPs will often set up spam-catcher addresses, which look like ordinary email addresses, in order to lure spammers. Once you send an email to that address, your IP will be blacklisted.
• Keep your email list clean. Regularly filter out and remove bounced email addresses from your email list. Sending to a lot of invalid addresses is marked as suspicious behavior by ISPs.
• Keep your unsubscribed addresses in Prezly. We don’t count people who have unsubscribed as part of your total contacts. Keeping them in our system ensures that you won’t email them again by accident, and if you reïmport them by accident, they’ll stay unsubscribed. If you have other lists (such as in Excel or another tool), be sure to remove your unsubscribed contacts from those lists, as well.
• Use a clear subject line. Vague or overly promotional subject lines increase your risk of ending up in in the spam folder. Make sure your subject lines are clear, direct and preferably brief. If you’re a brand or working for a brand, be sure to use your brand name in the email’s subject line, too.
• Keep your sender name consistent. Send emails from the same sender as much as possible. Inconsistent sender names are a red flag for ISPs.
• Let us know if you have delivery problems. If you’ve followed all the steps above and are still having trouble with email deliverability, give us a call. We’ll do everything we can to help make sure your emails get delivered.

Taking these steps will improve your overall deliverability rate and dramatically increase your chances of ending up in your media contacts’ inboxes, rather than their spam folders.

What steps do you take to improve your email deliverability? Anything we left out?

• We use SendGrid: a professional and proven email delivery system.
• We have a dedicated IP address to ensure optimal delivery of every email.
• We continually monitor blacklist services.
• We get notified every time we receive a spam report (it doesn’t happen very often!), so we can take appropriate action immediately.
• Our email layout is professional, clean and can’t be customized, reducing the potential for spammers to take advantage of our templates.
• Only paying customers get access to the email functionality. This is the absolute best way to keep spammers out.
• We have a clear unsubscribe link, so anyone can opt out at any time and for any reason. This keeps us compliant with spam and email privacy laws and helps minimize spam complaints.
• You can only use our email tool for sending out press releases. This prevents anyone from trying to abuse our system – not that any of our wonderful customers would do such a thing!

That’s how we approach email deliverability. There are steps that you can take, too, the most important of which is to build a good reputation by following certain email best practices (i.e. don’t spam your contacts!) We’ll dive into this in greater detail next week.

In the meantime, please share any tips you have to improve email deliverability in the comments.

1. They have the wrong singular focus, which is on the company issuing the release.
2. They are full of marketing-speak that inherently engenders mistrust in the eyes of the social media audience.
3. They don’t have a specific audience in mind, and are written broadly and presented blandly.

Luckily, the author doesn’t stop with what’s wrong. He offers the following 5 strategies to help you put your readers first and write a release that delivers real value (and therefore, real returns for your brand):

1. The headline is optimized for all three kinds of readers.
2. The post is perfect for diagonal readers.
3. The text formatting is attractive, unlike the bland press releases everywhere else.
4. It’s to the point. There are no words wasted.
5. It creates value by including a step-by-step methodology for others to follow.

Do you follow the strategies listed above? What else would you add to this list?

This week, we offer you 9 questions to ask yourself to help ensure that your press releases aren’t just well-written, but also editor-friendly.

• Will this story make a real difference for the people who read it?
• Does this story have a compelling hook?
• Is a press release the right format, or would another format, such as a blog post or email announcement, tell this story better?
• Is this story legitimate news as opposed to just marketing speak?
• Would I tell a friend about this story if I saw it in the news?
• Would I read this story if it appeared in the newspaper?
• Do I understand exactly who my intended audience for this story is, and does this story address the things they care about?
• Is this story integrated into my marketing campaigns and my overall brand story?
• Does this story give editors everything they need to publish it, including solid facts and a media contact?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, your press release isn’t ready. It’s not easy to capture the attention of editors and bloggers – put in the extra effort, and they’ll reward you with the coverage you deserve.

What questions do you ask yourself as you’re preparing a release for the wire?

What the presentation is about:
As a startup, how do you find customers? How do you go from your initial idea that you love so much to a viable product that people want to pay to use?

The book ’The entrepreneur’s guide to customer development’ describes this process. Being visually oriented I couldn’t make much sense of it, so I decided to draw the book, creating 8 visual steps to customer discovery.

Download the visual 8 steps as PDF

It’s a very visual presentation without many words. To get the point, feel free to download the presentation PDF containing speaker notes.

Thx bizcamp!

Update:
Here is a video from after the presentation:

We’ve got a few tips to help you write better social releases, but before we share them, let’s revisit the textbook definition of a social media press release and why it’s different from a traditional release:

“A social media release should contain everything necessary to share and discover a story in a way that is complementary to your original intent; but, the difference is, how they find it and the tools they use to share and broadcast. Social media is one big extension to the web, except it promotes voices, along with content, in a way that focuses on people and their social networks.”
source: The Definitive Guide to Social Media Releases, Brian Solis

With that in mind, here are three tips for creating better social media press releases:

1. Make your release easy to share. A shareable release will, first and foremost, tell a great story, the kind your readers will want to share. Make it easy for them to share with well-placed (but not intrusive!) “Share” buttons, retweetable phrases, multimedia links and maybe even a hashtag. Remember that the social elements of your release should always enhance your storytelling, not detract from it.
2. Use statistics to back up your story. Of course you want your release to tell a great story, but don’t forget to include a few facts to back up your statements (unless you want to set yourself up for embarrassment!). A great story will make readers want to share your release. Solid facts will make that story credible and protect you from embarrassing statistical snafus.
3. Don’t slack on the headline. A good headline takes a lot of thought, and we know it’s tempting to spend your limited time on other things (we’ve been there!). But all the hours you devote to telling a great story, selecting the perfect videos and crafting the perfect retweetable phrases for your release won’t mean anything if your headline doesn’t grab people’s attention first.

Do you have any tips to write better social releases? Please share them in the comments.

Overall, the findings are very much in line with our own analytics at Prezly, but there are a couple of interesting data points we’d like to add.

In addition to including photos, video and audio with your press release, we’ve found that showing the twitter conversation about your release will also increase engagement. When others can see the discussion happening in real time, they’ll naturally be more inclined to jump in.

We’re also seeing a much higher view rate for each Twitter share, on average, than the 2.2 views shown in the infographic. Our highest performing press release generated an impressive 7 views per tweet!

Do these findings ring true for you? What else would you add?