Radically Transparent

Susan Bratton’s Podcast Interview with Andy Beal

Andy Beal discussed online reputation management tips with Susan Bratton, host of the DishyMix podcast. You can listen to the podcast or read the entire transcript.

Here’s an extract:

SUSAN BRATTON: Well, you’ve given me the perfect segue. Before we go to the break, I want to briefly talk about social media press releases and then we’ll come back and explore that some more and talk about finding top bloggers in our space. I’ll give you a minute..I’m just going to put you under the gun Andy, and ask you for an example of how a social media press release might work in this situation. I have three new shows that are coming on to the Personal Life media network. One is called the New Man, one is called Conscious Business, and the third is called Buddhist Geeks. And I want to make an announcement that these three existing shows with over 100 episodes of archived content are coming onto my network. So, in the past I could have written a press release and put it over the wire and maybe called a few of the people I know in the industry and ask them if they’d consider writing about it. What should I do now? That’s the old way, what’s the new way?

ANDY BEAL: Well, maybe I can kind of give you some ideas from my own personal experience with my…with my own software, which is Trackur, that I’ve just…we’ve just recently rolled out a huge upgrade to the service and it was a pretty significant announcement. But I decided that instead of sending out a press release that may or may not get in front of journalists, who may or may not be my target audience, what I did was I went directly to a couple of top bloggers that are in the Technorati top 100 and …and provided them detailed information, gave one of them the actual scoop on it. So I said to them, “Look, if you can write about this, I’ll give you the scoop, I won’t even send a press release out.” And honestly, that’s done more in terms of spreading the buzz and getting people talking about Trackur than if I had just sent a press release out and kept my fingers crossed. And so, by tapping into the conversation, by finding the audience that goes to these blogs that is highly relevant to the Trackur service, I was able to generate a lot more buzz for the service than if I’d issued a press release. So I definitely think that either issue a press release just so that you cover the bases. And then focus on some blogger outreach and some social media outreach or just ignore the press release and go straight for the blogger outreach. Um…I think the worst thing to do would be just to issue the press release and go down the old road because even if you make a press release social media optimized, which we are going to talk about, it’s still not necessarily going to get in front of all of your target audience.