Back to school. It’s a “season” typically greeted with dread and anxiety by students; joy and pride by parents.  But if you’re a marketer, the dawning of a new semester is the perfect time to think about how your products and services can benefit college and university students.

Tap Into a Lucrative Market

The college population offers marketers a wealth of opportunities, especially because this year, student discretionary purchasing power is on the rise. The college years are also a great time to gain trust, because choices made during this stage of life tend to influence purchasing decisions for years to come. (more…)

You might know Marketwire as an all-inclusive communications tool for public relations, investor relations and marketing communications professionals. But, what you don’t know might surprise you. Below are a few facts — some more serious than others — about the company and the individuals who make up the company: (more…)

This article originally appeared in the Wednesday, August 25th edition of the Asian American Journalists Association’s newsletter.

At the recent AAJA conference in Los Angeles, a few members of Google’s communications team held impromptu presentations on how Google can help journalists, beyond the basic searches, email and directions we all use it for. Here are a few lesser-known tools that might make your information-gathering and research easier, faster and more targeted. (more…)

The last Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) conference that I went to was the one in San Francisco in the early ’00s, when the dot-com bubble had just burst and I was still a graduate student in Boston. Back then, online journalism was just starting to take shape and the roots of social media (i.e., Facebook) were being developed in a Harvard dorm room, minutes from where I lived. Little did I know…

Fast-forward to August 2010 to the most recent AAJA conference, “Back to the Future,” held in Los Angeles. Technology was a major theme throughout the conference. About half of the 35 workshops involved some sort of technological angle while the other half broadened the mind or provided career guidance. Workshop topics included: The Present & Future of Online Journalism, Media-centric Design and Building Your Brand, which included Marketwire’s Director, Content & Audience Development Jonathan Evans among the panelists. (more…)

Welcome to Marketwire’s collection of the some of the most interesting articles of June and July.  My top PR, SEO, and social media articles will surely get your mind going 100 miles an hour.

PR Articles:

1. PR Readers’ Choice Finalists and Winners
By: Arik Hanson

Arik publicly recognizes the top PR blogs in his second annual PR Readers’ Choice Awards.  Don’t just skip over to the winners, but take a look at the finalists.  There are a lot of gems in there as well.

Marketwire Advice: I recommend you subscribe to these blogs and follow them on Twitter.  It’s a great way to connect with thought leaders in the PR industry. (more…)

Note:  The following article is posted on GuideStar.com and was also featured in the August 2010 edition of its monthly newsletter. GuideStar seeks to revolutionize philanthropy and the nonprofit practice by providing information that advances transparency, enabling users to make better decisions and encouraging charitable giving.

Finding new volunteers and donors is one of the biggest challenges facing nonprofit organizations. For the past few years, more and more nonprofits have used social media to get people to embrace their causes, but getting the “social-media generation” behind your cause and then inspiring them to contribute in time and resources is another matter. (more…)

If you’ve never written a press release, much less read one, you might not know what a boilerplate is. So let’s take a look at the history, form and function of the boilerplate.

A Little History

In the mid-1800s, “boilerplates” were steel plates used to make steam boilers for ships. Fifty years later, the newspaper industry adopted the word, and its connotation of sturdiness and reusability, to refer to “a unit of writing that can be used over and over without change.”*

The Modern-day Boilerplate

Today, a boilerplate, in reference to news releases, is the last section of the release where you include general company information.  This chunk of text is usually reused for each news release and across other marketing channels so that messaging is consistent despite the type of communication that is being distributed.  (more…)

Blogging statistics are staggering.  June 2010 figures from WordPress (which powers the Marketwire blog) cite 11.4 million blogs hosted on their platform, with WordPress.com users publishing about 350,000 new posts on an average day (and their readers, in turn, leaving 400,000 new comments every day). With all that conversation, discussion, opinion, interjection and objection, it’s easy to see why many organizations think it’s best to avoid an already crowded arena. After all, their blog can’t possibly compete with all the rest.  It’s also easy to see why many choose Twitter and dismiss blogging (isn’t it just simpler and faster to say what you need to say with only 140 characters?). (more…)

Note:  The following article is posted on GuideStar.com and was also featured in the July 2010 edition of its monthly newsletter. GuideStar seeks to revolutionize philanthropy and the nonprofit practice by providing information that advances transparency, enabling users to make better decisions and encouraging charitable giving.

Today, marketing isn’t so much about the “big sell” as it is about the way in which you communicate with your audiences. Of course, big-budget ad campaigns for TV, radio, print, and, now, online will cease to go away entirely, but realistically, most nonprofit organizations do not have the budgets to invest in traditional advertising, let alone any other kind of costly marketing campaigns. (more…)

A challenge for today’s communicators is to keep pace with the new lingo that seemingly pops up out of nowhere. If we’re not paying attention, a whole new vocabulary appears overnight.

We can choose to ignore all of this and simply stick to the AP Stylebook and our handy Webster’s Dictionary, or we can go “whole hog” and pepper these buzzwords through our own communications. But even if we choose to stay with the tried and true, it pays to acquire an understanding of the more common terms since they have a nasty habit of migrating beyond their borders and popping up in places when we least expect them. (more…)