Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

What’s the point of this story?

First — as you know by now — that there is only value in content if it “moves.” If my article had not received any attention from my readers, it’s unlikely the reporter would have found it on search.

There was no inherent SEO value in my original post — I had invented the term social scoring — so the web activity alone led the reporter to me.

But there is a bigger lesson here.

Would I have been found by the New York Times reporter if I had only posted my ideas about social scoring on Facebook? Twitter? LinkedIn?

The answer is obvious – no.

To have the opportunity for real authority on the web and vast reach, you need a certain type of content that has depth and breadth. Every organization active on the social web needs at least one source of “rich content....

Content marketing can be a great way to gain exposure for your company, but getting the media to care about your brand's news is difficult. Unless you're a Fortune 500 company, mainstream media, and even industry publications, probably won't cover your news.

You can try newsjacking—inserting your ideas and commentary into breaking news in the hopes of being quoted. Journalists get a ton of such press releases, though, and yours is usually just another needle in the haystack.

So how can you use content marketing to break into popular news stories?

We recently got in on a story that generated a massive amount of exposure and valuable citations for my company, WordStream. Our blog post on the effect that Google's Panda 4.0 algorithm had on eBay's organic search rankings ended up earning...