SAC8: Press Release 2.0 - News Releases in the Social Media Era

[Intro Music]

Announcer: You’re listening to one in a series of presentations from the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference in Springfield, Missouri.

Matt Herzberger: So, presentation here is "Press Release 2.0 - News Releases in the Social Media Era". This is a presentation I've done a couple of times. And last night I decided to completely do away with everything I've been doing and redo it. So, the slides unfortunately are not the most polished slides. But I've got the information, which is what you'll need. I'm going to post this to my blog. I'm actually going to be posting two versions of the slides, the old version and the new version, because I cannot change it up a little bit.

OK. So, this is my version of an old school press release. You've got the name. You've got the clincher. You probably have the city and the date. Then you've got the basic further contact information page. This is how old school press people there were taught. This is how you do a press release. This is the proper format. I've got this joke with this guy at my university that most people, writers and whatnot at our campus think of press as showing up somewhere with a fedora and getting the scoop and stuff like that, which is not really the world that we're in anymore.

Things change really fast. It's all fast-paced. You need to get out there, especially when it's on the Web in formats that you can digest real quick. That's why we have bullets. That's why we have bold. All those great things that you don't see present in this one. And by the way, that's in old school.

So, this is where I started. This is a project that I've started. It's still ongoing. It's not done yet. But this is an example of what we had. It was just a long list of press releases. Most people still have them in this format. You've got the title. You've got a little paragraph about it. And you've got a picture associated with it and a long list. And that was our news section, previously the one that I'm going to be talking about how one did it.

So, pretty much a long list of press releases. We didn't have it in CMS . So, that was cool because I didn't have to update HTML pages and create new ones every time I did it. We already had RSS so that's cool. With news releases, one of the things with news in general is that you want to syndicate it. You want to get it all over the place. So, RSS is a great tool to do that. And I'll talk about a little more what you can do with that.

One of the things that was really lame about ours was it was this fixed size image that you had to use. That was the size and there was no if's and but's about that. That's the size your image is going to be. I'm not the back-end programmer of this thing but it was this huge, antiquated, Oracle-CMS type thing. And so, I would bang heads with them all the time. Finally, I was just like, "I'm not going to work with your system anymore." So, I went and did my own. And there was really no way to get any content other than a simple fixed size image that would show up on the right column no matter what. It was just very fixed. And I wanted to be able to do a little bit more than that.

So, what are my goals? I want to be able to migrate all of my old posts, have them in RSS. So, cool, I can just scrape them all and pull them in. I decided I wanted to move it to a blogging platform because for me, blogging the news releases equate to the same thing for me.

I'm a huge, huge fan and proponent of Wordpress. I talk about it all the time. I blog about it all the time. There's no piece of software other than Wordpress that I can say I actually love. I mean, I do all kinds of stuff with different tools. I use different CMS's. I use image gallery type things. But Wordpress I love and I will always cheerlead for. So, they've got me there. So, I work with Wordpress. There's lots of other things you can use. There's Movable Type. If you're not PHP, ASP.NET has them. There's lots of different ones that you can use.

OK, so the next thing. Again, I already mentioned I wanted to build that multimedia, whether it's photos, images, podcasts, whatever it is. There's lots of stuff out there that can make it a little bit more interesting than just a simple text press release. And also, I just wanted to make it easier to adjust. Again, I said on the Web we have bullets, we have bolds. We have things other than just simple paragraph text blocks. Hooking it up to different social media outlets, whether it's your StumbleUpon, your Digg, all kinds of different sites, I still don't feel like a lot of the press releases are going to be that exciting, that they're going to be like the number one on the Digg, but the ability to be able to get it out there, even if it's just interesting to maybe someone who wants to bookmark it on Delicious or something like that.

And then, one of the things that I'm going to talk about a lot is the relationship of how I work with my writers because my office is still a very print-focused office. I'm the bastard stepchild that sits in a separate office, both like figuratively and like for real. My office is off from the rest of everyone else that I work with. And it's a good metaphor for the way that I interact with everyone.

Anyway, so I did a little bit of research. And I looked at what they wear for press release type things, what kind of people I had for newsrooms. I went to some great higher ed sites. I went to some great New York Times type sites. And then, I started reading right about the time that I was going to do this, a lot about social media press releases. They are a really, really new thing. It was a group of guys that were all communicators that pulled together and said, "Hey, press releases are getting kind of boring. Now that we've got all these different tools and different forms online for getting media out, let's change it up a little bit."

My old presentation, which I'm going to be linking to, is mainly focused almost 100% on social media press releases. And I'm going to stir a little bit from that, but you'll get the same content. So, I wanted to get some kind of a solid layout. And again, I did that through researching. When I was looking to do this, there were no Wordpress themes that were news themes. Since then, there's like a billion news plus premium themes that you can get. Back then, there were really none.

Last year at this conference, I didn't actually attend the session, but I got all this stuff from it. I believe it was one of the Concordia schools that did the presentation on Wordpress as a CMS and using Wordpress for all kinds of different stuff. Again, I was pretty well versed in that so I didn't go to the presentation. But I got a lot out of it even though I wasn't there. And they created this theme called Minnehaha. And I think they have a URL. It's like minnehaha.com or minnehahaproject.com, which is a Wordpress theme that they've created. Right now, the site is down, but they're supposed to be launching the project again. I emailed them a while ago.

So, again, social media press releases, they can be referred to as social media news release, multimedia news release. There's always acronyms that you can use for it. So, the social media press release was the thing created by Todd Defren at Shift Communication. He's kind of this thinker guy. And he drew up what's called this template. This is just a PDF template but he, again, was trying to change how press releases worked from the first example that I showed, the old school example. And this is the template that he came up with.

And a couple of times that I've talked about this, people get so caught in the "Oh, so content needs to be up at the top now. OK, so you need the bullets here." It's not so much that. It's just saying, "Hey, here's some of the things you might want to try and add into your press release that you might not have had previously."

And if you want to get more information about this, socialmediarelease.org is the governing body, the guys that thought it up and really took and ran with it, blogging and whatnot. I mean, it's a pretty new sight, though. Doing the social media press releases is not very old at all. It's probably less than a year ago in calling them, entitling them that actual format or whatnot.

OK, so we've got contact information. Usually, it was down in the footer but it's up here now. It's pulled out. It's really, really easy to get to. They still got the same headline, subhead type thing. But then, they've got some bullet points at the top. Three or four bullet points that say, "Hey, this is the bread and butter of the story. This is the meat," if you just want to come and you want to figure out what the story is about and whether or not you want to read it because that's the nature of how people view things on the Web. You use a feed reader. You scan through your things and you hit a couple and then you go to the next one if you don't find it important. So, they're putting up, "What is this about? Are you going to find it important?" You'll figure that out at the very top.

This part right here is just links to Delicious and RSS. Again, you should have RSS in your press releases and syndicate it. With RSS, you can pull it into other sites and stuff like that and use it as a syndication on your site.

So, some of the different things that we want to jazz this up from a normal press release, being able to use photos, podcasts, graphics and videos. I use YouTube to host all my videos. We can debate about that whether or not that's a good thing. But I use YouTube for hosting almost all my videos and that's how I pull my stuff in. When I do photos, all my photos from my college, I host them all in Flickr. And I can pull those into my site and just plop them all throughout the site. But I use Flickr for most almost all of my image hosting.

I don't do a lot of podcasting. We've got a podcast in my college but it's not like a news podcast. It's just like a general information podcast. So, it probably wouldn't apply into really many of the press releases.

Again, it just got some different blocks. You can check the stuff out later. You probably noticed in a lot of the new sites like CNN, newyorktimes.com, they've got those "Add here", "Share This" things, where it's got your links to Digg and Delicious and StumbleUpon and Technorati and all kinds of stuff, again, just making it a little bit easier. So, if they want to save it, if they want to syndicate it or need to use it elsewhere, they've got it all there. And you take as many steps to barriers to entry or steps that you can eliminate from them having to do stuff, the better.

So, again, making the news sexy. It's a press release. I mean, come on, it's really not all that great. To some people, video speaks to them better than words or pictures with something that's a really amazing thing. I work in an engineering college. And so, we've got things that do things. And they're really interesting if you see them in person. We've got this thing called the "rotary star engine" that this professor created. It's this big engine that you just really, really need to see. But describing that in words, it's really not that neat. But you see it in person, you're like "Woh!" So, again, it's just adding a little bit more to what your old press release was. I guess Paris Hilton is another way to do it. I don't know. I just added it in there. I was finishing this up 5:00 this morning.

So, again, what's involved in this? The plumbing that pulls all this stuff together is RSS, someone who decides whether you're pulling your images from Flickr, you're pulling your videos from YouTube. You've got all these things. And it's RSS that's just the plumbing behind all of it. And again, even if you try to use a different format and you just want to have your same old press releases, you need to have RSS. It's very, very helpful.

All right, so my problems, a.k.a. the writers. In my office, again, the writers are very slow to change. They're not looking to do any cool, new thing that's hip and trendy. They want to keep doing it the same old way. And so, it was this battle when I was wanting to do this. They saw that I was doing this cool redesign that was going to change it up. Other than that, they really could care less to do all this neat stuff and change the way that they write their press release and were taught to write a press release. So, I just went out there, threw it out there in the format that it was. And I was like, "Hey, just do your press releases in here." And we've had this back and forth of trying to figure out how things would work. And I'll touch on that again a little bit.

Comments. OK, it's a blogging platform so you have comments on blogging platforms. We've left our comments open on the site. So, when there's a press release about something, they can write back to us. It hasn't done anything drastic or that cool. We haven't got any great results out of it. It seems like so far, most of the things that get comments are awards. Professor Such-and-Such gets an award and all these people that have been his friends or colleagues or whatnot, they're like, "Congratulations, that's really great."

So, again, nothing groundbreaking as far as what I'm getting from feedback out of that. But I think it can help to decrease those barriers of entry to create a conversation, which in the long run, that's what doing all the social media stuff is about. It's about having a conversation, being authentic and being out there. And I've had to put it all over the page. I'm like, "Leave a comment. Leave a comment. Leave a comment." And now, I've got it with with a big bold color behind it and stuff. If you have a reaction to the story, if you have some kind of a feeling about it, tell us. Tell us what you think. And I still think people are kind of apprehensive to write something on the page. They feel weird about it. But it's out there so people can do it if they want to.

Consistency is one of the things that I've had an issue with because I'm real anal about standards-based, that everything validates and stuff like that. We use Wordpress as our publishing platform on it. And there's the "Paste from Word" thing that will clean out some of the coding stuff. But still, I always had to go back every once in a while. I'm like, "No, they did that again. I just told them that two weeks ago." And they forgot it. So, I still have to babysit a little bit. But it has freed them up from the old platform that we were in. It's so much more open and they're able to do what they want.

Another one of the huge problems is getting multimedia. I'm saying get video, get pictures and all the stuff. But I'm the only technical person in my office. I can't just run around all day long with a camera and videotape things. I can't run around. We don't have a photographer so I'm the photographer and the Web person and 20 other things. So, it's really hard to get the stuff. I think the next thing that I'm going to do is having a student worker to just go do all the stuff for me because I don't have the time to do it.

Again, the writers don't really care. They're just like, "Matt, hey, do you want to do this cool thing or whatever? We don't care. We're just doing our press release because Professor Such-and-Such said we needed to get some media on this." It's just the way that they do it. It's the way that they think.

So, I've kept working on it, though, because I'm not going to give up. I'm going to make this project succeed. So, it's cool because there have been these cycles where every couple of weeks they come back to me and they're like, "Hey, Matt, I was poking on a Wordpress. I found this thing and you can do blah, blah, blah..." And I'm like, "Yeah, I was going to tell you about that but I thought I'd just let you figure it out on your own." Like I already knew everything that I'm expecting to hear from them and have them want to build out into it. And we've just been going back and forth. And so, they push into it and they feel like, "Hey, I can get dangerous with this. I'm going to do something cool."

And so, we've had this nice discussion since this happened. Every couple of weeks we sit down and say, "Hey, what have you guys noticed? What do you guys want to do further? Let's keep working on this." And they're now where they're looking into changing and doing the bullets at the top of the stories type thing and again hitting them with the meat. They're still doing the old school press release format for a lot of the stuff. I finally got them to quit using the city and the date on it because, well, of course it's in that city and the date is going to be all over the place because it's published.

So, let's see. Again, all the multimedia stuff. I'm going to have to get a student worker because it has just been really difficult to do that with what I'm stressed with. But the cool thing is we've got flip video cameras. I have one in my bag and I'll show it to you guys.

So, I guess a little barrier to entry. I've been able to do a lot of the stuff. Most offices have at least a camera camera for taking regular pictures. But this is our video camera that we use and we run around campus with. It was about $150. So, I mean, you don't have to have like the awesome Canon GL2. I mean, if you have the money, great. Those things rock. But this is a little tiny camera that we use for all of our video stuff, pretty much everything that we tape. And again, I only put the videos on YouTube. So, this is about as good a quality as you're going to get on YouTube anyway.

And we've actually got this other project that we're doing. We've got a student blogging, a video blogging project. If you're interested in that, Todd is doing a presentation on it later today. So, you should go to that.

Anyway, we've got this video blogger site. And we've got so many of these cameras that I can't even keep track of them anymore. We've got about 10 of these little cameras. And we just loan them out to people, short-term loans, and let them tape whatever it is they tape and they give it to us and we put it up on YouTube. It's really cool. If you want to, again, get into using just a little bit more multimedia, whether it's for student things or for whatever it is that you're wanting to do in your press release, just take a quick little video of it. It might add something that just being there and writing about it might not get.

So, I'm going to go and show some examples of some stuff. Again, I said my old presentation had a lot more to do with social media press releases. But I took some away from it and changed it up a little bit. So, I'm going to do this quick video about social media press releases. So, this quick video I'm going to show is just talking about social media press releases.

[Video]

Matt Herzberger: Great product in case of the music. I don't know if anybody uses anything like PRWeb and stuff like that. There are some services that will pretty much out of the box do this for you if you're looking and you don't want to have to set up a Wordpress site or go through the whole spiel of doing this. It will be like a form and it'll say, "Title, text, add video, add the photos, whatever." And then they'll spit them out for you. And they'll create this whole thing with very little effort for you.

Sorry, does anybody have any questions because I've been rolling? Whatever, go ahead.

Audience: Hi. The first thing that comes to mind if I take these ideas back to my news director or news service and say that this will really excite our online readership, the first response is small and newspapers. In the way the press release is designed and the big thing is we are a big rural state, so a lot of our readership is actually going to these smaller time newspapers just because it is a big network communication tool for our needs. Would you recommend maintaining the old-style press release and just adding the multimedia content, or is it just the reorganization of the story?

Matt Herzberger: OK, that was one of the things that I said. His question was "Do you recommend using the old school format?" because for his, he is trying to hit smaller city newspapers and stuff like that. And "What do you recommend as the way they'll approach that?"

The thing that I did was I sat down with my writers. I don't know anything about why people do press releases in the format that they do. And I just talk to them. I was like, "Who do you guys actually hit with your stories? Who are you trying to get with?" And a lot of it is like the local newspaper, exactly like you say and like all just actually in the pretty small town. And it's a local newspaper that carries lots of your stories. And I'm like, "Why do you have it in that format? Is that definitely what they expect it in? Are they going to freak out if that's not the format?" And if you know these people directly, ask them. Say, "Hey, if I already changed it up a little bit, what would you guys think?"

One of the conversations that I got started with my writers is the fact that our local newspaper tends not to use the story verbatim, just a reprint of it. They take bits and pieces from your story and rewrite it themselves. So, if you're giving it to them in little bits and digestible chunks, great. They can do that. Again, the social media press release templates don't get really caught up in the fact that this is here and this is here. It's whatever you want to do with it.

Again, my site is in a transition. The site has only been live for about a month or two now. So, we're still in the process of really working in the multimedia stuff. So, it's still ongoing.

One of the other colleges in my university, their writer saw my presentation. And unfortunately, they've jumped into it more than my office has since they saw my presentation. I'm like, "Awesome, thanks, coworkers." Anyway, so they latched onto it. They've started doing the little bullets at the top that get to the middle of the story. And they've loved doing the format. Their writer just got so into it and was like, "This is awesome. We need to do this." And so, they've had pretty good success with it. And they instead of embedding the videos on it, they just linked the video. It doesn't matter, same difference.

So, I think if you come to your boss and try and cram it down his throat, he's probably going to be like, "This is the way we do it when I change the way we do it. And this is the way people like to receive it." Start the dialogue because the best way to get places is to approach them. And you can make him think that he thought of the idea or something like that. It always seems to work out best.

I'm like the Web designer or whatnot person. So, the way that I work at my office and what I always tell them is, "I provide the tools for you to do your job better. I don't want to write the press releases. I'm not going to input them into this." I taught each of them how to use Wordpress. Wordpress is pretty easy to work with. So, I sat down, designed the site and said, "What do you guys need here? What would work for you guys?" They do all the input. I just come back and have a little refresher sessions with them. But they run the site now. It's out of my hands. And I just keep an eye on it to make sure they don't do anything horribly wrong while working.

Audience: So what is the advantage for you to do this obviously-uncomfortable-for-you

Matt Herzberger: Her question was, "Well, why then do you care if they do this format or not?" Again, a picture is worth a thousand words. Again, it goes back to the thing yesterday, something that might be conveyed better visually than through reading it. They might be conveyed better in video. And so, I want us to get the best press coverage we can. If we do that through having the medium be a video, that's what I want. And I'm able to provide some tools.

I mean, in general the old news site that I showed you was just a long list of stuff. And I was like, "That just isn't going to cut it for me." I need something that's going to work a little bit better for us. So, that's why I chose that format. What's your question?

Audience: I have a question to the audience too. I love to get comments on a story but that's a bit scary. So how many people are fine with the comments on their site?

Matt Herzberger: Well, it's a question for everyone, not just me. But her question was, "How many people are OK with and/or how many people in their universities have comments on their site?" Anyone? OK, and what has your experience with it been so far?

Audience: We review all the comments before they go up. So, if anybody writes something completely obnoxious, we just don't post that. But for the most part, it has been very popular.

Matt Herzberger: Do you want to add anything? I'll be down here and run around. OK, cool.

Yeah. I mean, that was one of the things I deal with my boss. They were very apprehensive about it. It took some convincing. Most of the things that I do with pushing the boundaries of stuff, my catchphrase is "Just do it. Do it first and ask for forgiveness later." But the thing is, you don't have to worry about this because everything is moderated. Like she said, every comment that's going to go up there goes through me before it goes up. So, if it's something bad, take it down. But even with that, I haven't had a bad comment that I've had to take down yet. Even if I left it wide open, so far nothing bad has happened.

And one other thing, we don't write it. My boss wanted me to add this statement before the comments saying, "These were reviewed to be sure it's not bad or anything." People get that like, "Duh". I didn't want to have to go and do the obvious because most people there are going to probably comment and get that they're not going to just be able to make some horrible comment and have it go directly out there.

That answers that one? Anyone else? Yeah.

Audience: Why did you choose Wordpress?

Matt Herzberger: She asked why did I choose Wordpress. When I was in my research phase, I decided I wanted to use a blogging platform. I knew nothing other than Wordpress because I think pretty much exactly what I was wanting to do with Wordpress is they have a title, they have some texts. I wanted to add comments. Wordpress has already got comments. I mean, you could do this all. Just have a developer code this on their own and do it. Or you could do the old school method of just making your own HTML page every time.

But this platform does everything I needed. It's in a nice, secure login like everything. I can do user permissions down to each person. So, it pretty much met everything that I was wanting to do with it. I have some plugins, too, and I was meant to add in what plugins I use. I'll check that in a little bit and I'll mention it. But did that answer it?

Audience: Yes, but is Movable Type the same?

Matt Herzberger: No. That's another good one, too. It really is another good one. I just really like Wordpress. So, I mean, Movable Type is the same thing for all intents so it's great.

Audience: Also, Wordpress has a lot of releases and is certainly helpful and you can also download it as a content management system and not only as a blog. It's a great platform cause they are always moving and pay attention to how we are developing.

Matt Herzberger: Yeah. Her comment was that Wordpress is a great platform, also is a general CMS, which is true. It also has great SCL, which is one of the things that throughout the conference overarching. It has been obviously an important thing. Not all. There are some really bad Wordpress templates that really are not that search engine friendly. But just find a good template. Find someone that's reputable. I use this one guy for every single theme. I don't write themes from scratch because I can just take a good base theme and build themes for it.

But for me, I think Wordpress is a great platform. Last year there was a session, "Wordpress is a CMS". You can use it as a video site. You can use it for anything. So, again, Movable Type can do all that stuff, too, though. But I love Wordpress because it's open source and it's got a great community around it.

Audience: I was going to ask for some regular templates.

Matt Herzberger: Yeah. I've written like tons and tons of Wordpress templates. I love it. Template tags are my thing.

Audience: I was just going to add to that is that it is constantly updated. You have every couple of months some new stock and it's so simple to update.

Matt Herzberger: Yeah. I mean, I've had everyone in my office from the student workers to my boss to writers, I mean everyone in my office is now using Wordpress. And I've walked them all through it. And really I'm like, "Can you use Word? OK, you can use Wordpress." It works more or less the same.

Right now we have categories. And again, there was that thing where I said I keep talking about writers every once in a while. And we're planning on working in tags now. OK, let's say I talked to your professor in mechanical engineering. But he's got a certain project that is about bridges. Even though the overarching is mechanical engineering, he is talking about bridges and he's a professor with this name. You can tag it as a secondary vehicle of finding stuff and aggregating it later.

Any other questions? OK.

Audience: Another question on how you can get picked up by the mainstream? How easy is it to get the media out?

Matt Herzberger: Right, yeah. Sorry, the question was, "How do you get your media out? What type of mediums do you use to get your press releases out?" As I mentioned here, we still do at the local newspapers in our city. I mean, we're close to Houston so we do a lot of the stuff like the Houston Chronicle. We use lots of different ways and they seem to be fine. I mean, we haven't had any complaints.

But one of the things when I was talking about writers is as you said, you know these people that are PR. It goes to "Let's talk to them". So, we're working on doing this survey and talking to them again to see, "Are you OK with this? Is it cool?" We're working on the format for the survey and what to do exactly with them. But it's always good to maybe every couple of years reach out and talk to your PR people again and say, "Hey, how are things changing? What do you want now?"

I know in a lot of places, PR people don't want you to email them your press releases anymore. They just want to subscribe to your RSS and be done with it and not have to worry about all the stuff. So, I think it's always good to have the dialogue with the people that you're trying to reach. And it's a little bit different than your normal life. This is your student audience. These are people that you can know pretty well who they are because you know who your contact is at your local paper. You know who your contact is in an overarching university like press group or whatnot. So, that's a good place to check.

What is your question?

Audience: I'm going to be living in a small town. I'm wondering if you have already talked to these big city newspapers and how do they feel about this? Press releases is on our art based studio.

Matt Herzberger: OK. Right. So, her question was, she lives in the big city. So, she's talking to small-town Joe from said newspaper. She talks to people in larger newspapers. Like I said, I live near Houston. And we get coverage from them all the time. And my writer and PR person in my office knows the actual writers in Houston and talks to them. And we've got lots of different tools that we use. Like he does this focused report. So, we get these good news clippings of everything everywhere that we get listed elsewhere, where our stuff gets republished and stuff like that.

So, we try to keep pretty good tabs in everywhere that we're published. And it's through our press releases that we're using this format. They were getting picked up elsewhere.

I was going to try and get through some more of my actual stuff. If there's no question, I'll just keep it going. OK, I'm going to keep going for a little bit then. If you have anything, feel free to interrupt because I'll just cruise through. Anyway, so again, my old site was just a list, a long running list. There is no category. There is no anything. It was just a long, long list. So, I was like "All right". I started going through lots of different websites. And I noticed they all had categories or whatever you want to call it. They had some tabs or navigation. Like CNN, it's like world, U.S. news, politics, sports, economy, all that depressing stuff.

So, I came up with what are my main things that we would be writing about on a regular basis? And these are these. And we had this whole separate section like our communications, meaning our marketing group on the old site, that was just like weird and awkward. Most people are going to probably want all that information in the media page because if they want to contact you, that's where they're going to find it.

So, I've got my main categories here. All news, which if you just want to get everything, go for it. Faculty research, they give you inter-development group. I've got a little AJAX thing that drops down. Students are broken into former or undergraduate and graduate. And then, I've got all my departments under my college listed there. And then, since I have Wordpress, there's all these cool little things I can do with it. I've got this plugin called the "popularity" plugin, I believe it is. They've got like this algorithm thing. But it will take the post to get lots of comments or the post to get lots of hits. And it does some crunching on it. It says, "Hey, these are the year's most popular stories right now."

So, sometimes people just want to come in. They have what section or top stories or whatever. This was a Wordpress plugin called the "popularity" plugin that will do just that. And I don't have to worry about getting real feedback. It just does it for me. And then, I said I've got comments enabled. There's probably really nothing at all that exciting in the recent comments. A lot of you are saying "Congratulations" because some professor did something great. And his family, friends and whatnot wanted to say, "Hey, great job, Greg" and stuff like that. But it's, again, just a little indicator. I've got this in all the pages so you can follow it.

I wanted to do this but this is one of those back and forth things with the writers again. A lot of news sites, their stories that are here will have the little picture of the story, a picture that is associated with it. I really, really wanted to do that. And when I was designing I was like, "I know my writers are going to be way too lazy to do this." And that was one of the things that I was excited about. It was like again pumping it up, getting some more pictures because I think if the headline doesn't catch you, maybe the image will or something like that. That's one of the things I'm working on with the writers, getting them to do that with every story so I can integrate that into the site.

We've got this feature category here that pulls in like the recent story. And we pull in lots of different events stuff. We've got our Flickr photos here and everything. So, again, our news seems to be spreading against a bunch of different pages. And I pulled them together in a newsroom or a portal type thing. I've got some great stuff that I'm going to be writing a blog post like a follow-up to this that I'll be linking to all the stuff.

There's a great blog post written a couple of months ago by this guy on his blog called "Pebble Road". And I wrote into his post. I was like, "Hey, that's really cool." I had some insight to it. I'm like, "I just finished this site." He's like, "Man, that's awesome. You guys are university and you are like a kickass newsroom or something." It's whatever. But there's some really great stuff to follow on it.

So, I'm going to throw out a couple of other universities that I'm loving their news sites. University of Missouri or Mizzou has the Mizzou Wire. If you google for Mizzou Wire, it will come up. Really, really great stuff. Again, just regular press release type stuff. There's this other thing called "soundslides". If you google for "soundslides", you have pictures and you have podcasts in it. They build them together into a little slideshow thing. So again, you might not have video but you've got some pictures and you've got some podcasts from an event or performance or something on your campus. So, that's what these are called, "soundslides". And they've used them really well throughout their site. So, I believe this was an opera performer.

[Music]

That one wasn't a soundslide. I lied. Anyway, what soundslides are, they'll have the podcasts and then they'll have images from the performance or whatnot, just go into it. But Mizzou Wire is a great example of integrating some stuff into your site.

I also found Boston University. BU Today is really, really cool. It's bu.edu/today. And they've got all kinds of different multimedia integrated into their site.

Ford Motor Company has really latched onto this social media press release idea. See, I was reading on one of my Mustangs last night. Like all the other cool new hip cars, they've started doing this social media press releases. Again, they use that really, really traditional rigid format of that template that I showed you at the beginning. And they talk about the social media press release format and that's what they use. And they do it exactly pretty much to how that boils down as a template.

But I think the thing to think about overall with this is that it's just adding a little bit more to what your presentation is. I don't know if I'm going to have time to show this video. I'll skip on it because that will eat up the rest of the time.

If you have any other questions right now so far or not? Yeah.

Audience: What are the results have you seen moving from one of less interaction on this?

Matt Herzberger: OK, well, I am keeping stats on stuff. But again, I just started this like really, really, really recently. So, I don't have any great stats to say, "Oh, we've increased tenfold or anything like that" because we really just moved in to it. Google is still catching up to the fact that I completely redesigned the site and we worked on it. So, I don't have any great results, unfortunately.

Audience: Do the sites have anything like headlines you can share with us, likes this or gets this from this special website or we got it from the front page of that.

Matt Herzberger: Well, OK, this is separate but it's along the same lines. We have these students and they had the Guitar Hero thing last night. We have these students in our campus that created this thing called "Slashbot". And it's a robot that can play Guitar Hero on its own. It's got this thing that it will watch the screen. And it sees the color indicators coming across the screen, like the red, blue, green type thing. This robot reads the visuals. And then, it's got a thing that actually hits the keypad of Guitar Hero. And it pretty much aces it. It gets 98% on accuracy or expert every single time.

So, it was really, really cool. And it was back a little while ago, closer to when Guitar Hero launched. And so, we were working with the students. And we had these videos out on YouTube. They did them but we started using them and are preaching stuff about it. So, we wrote some press releases and we used those videos in our stuff. And the videos, they made like three or four of them. And it was engineering students so they're a little geeky. But they did their technical spiel about what it was that they created. But even just that, they had like millions and millions of views on YouTube.

And again, we didn't create this but I use media that students created for a lot of my stuff. If students created a great video and I had nothing to do with it, I don't care. I'm still going to use it. I'm not saying I'm stealing it from them. I'm saying I'm going to use it. With YouTube, it's open permission. They give you embed codes.When I do Facebook marketing, I'll use student videos. I didn't talk to them. I had nothing to do with creating it. But one way or another, it's great marketing for us when students do something cool. And this YouTube video got way more hits than anything I've produced. But one way or another, it's great marketing for us. And it had literally millions of hits. So, again, I can't take 100% credit but it was a great indicator that social media did something that got a lot of popularity from my school.

Any other questions? Yeah?

Audience: Do you have a solution to migrate the backlog you have?

Matt Herzberger: I had like 3,000 or 4,000 press releases to integrate. So, yeah, it was long.

Yeah, it didn't fall into actual categories. They just went into the general category in Wordpress. We talked about making a really mean project for some student workers and just making them go through all that. But I'm just not that mean. My boss wanted to and I was just like, "You know what?" And so, what we did was we wrote this comment down here at the bottom of the site. It says if you're looking for things prior to May 2004, just search because they're fully integrated and they're in Wordpress. It's just they're not in a category. So, if you search for Professor Such-and-Such, even the old one from years ago will still show up.

Yeah?

Audience: Just on that, the other day I was migrating some stuff. There is a really auto tagger that's out there. You have to look for it a bit but it will be a bit faster.

Matt Herzberger: Yeah, Wordpress will import. You go to this import tab on Wordpress and it has like 20 to 30 different formats, including Movable Type, if I convinced you to switch. I don't know. Anyway, yeah, Wordpress really is pretty cool. Do I have time for one last? OK.

Audience: If you have something like...

Matt Herzberger: Yeah, we work at them quite a bit. We're the largest college on campus. Just our college alone on our campus is like 20,000 students. So, we're a pretty big contingent of the university. And yeah, we work very well with them. We work back and forth. They know that we use all these different formats and they're cool with it. I've been pushing on using social media stuff for years now. And they're just starting to get into it now. So, I'm able to work with them and really help them out with, "Hey, this is what we've tried. This is what we've worked on." So, we have a pretty good relationship on working with that.

Otherwise, thank you very much. I appreciate it.

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Announcer: For more presentations from the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference visit HighEdWeb.org/2008 or sign up for our podcast and feed at HighEdWeb.org/podcast.xml

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