Are you driving the conversation or are you letting go of control?

This morning I attended PR Newswires "Work that Content! Tactics and Tools to Make Your Message Resonate" by Michael Pranikoff, Global Director - Emerging Media, PR Newswire. I have seen him speak in the past and I always enjoy his point of view on the space.

You can follow him on Twitter @mpranikoff
The hashtag for the event #prnedu

I'm always a bit skeptical when a vendor does a presentation and I don't want to hear them pitch their services, but PR Newswire does a good job of not pitching.

The biggest takeaway from the presentation is the title of this post, "Are you driving the conversation or are you letting go of control?" Most presentations I go to you hear, your brand is now owned by your consumers, Google is your homepage and what Google and user generated content says about you is who you are. I believe all of this to a point, but if you are sitting around and thinking you can't do anything about it, then you have given up control. Every brand and company are now in the media business and should be creating content. You have no control over what your stakeholders do with this content, but you can drive the conversations around your brand by adding value to the conversation. When you are creating content think about making it directional. Where do you want to drive readers of your content? Trust will continue to replace attention as the currency of the web and businesses need to
stop "pushing" content and start producing content that consumers want to "pull".

Another great point brought up was, is your content embeddable? Are you allowing visitors to embed your videos, newsfeeds, RSS, images, etc. into their websites and social media assets? If not, why not? Let people grab your content and use it and share it. The days of expecting someone to just visit your website to learn about you are over.

I like to tell my staff that if I learn one thing in a presentation then it was successful for me. The biggest thing I learned was to link to your press release on PR Newswire instead of to your website version of the release. This seems counterintuitive, but chances are PR Newswire has a higher page rank then your website does, so leverage their page rank to drive SEO results.

A good reminder regarding tweetable headlines is that they should be 65-80 characters to ensure that when your tweet is picked up in search engines, the title is not getting cut off in the description.

Also don't worry about always creating original content. Yahoo News and Google News are the largest news sites yet they don't create any original content

@jaredroy