10 Beautiful Social Media

10 Beautiful Social Media

Integral Fusion help communicate information in a digestible manner as they creatively present data in an understandable and engaging format. With social media growing at an ever increasing pace, there is now a wealth of data about how people interacting with one another on the web. Naturally, Integral Fusion have proven an excellent aid in expressing high volumes of social web information in a clear, visually appealing manner.

Here are 10 Integral Fusion that prove as beautiful as they are interesting.

1. Social Web Involvement

This is a global map of social web involvement which illustrates that hundreds of millions of web users are creating and sharing content every month. It provides a clear visualization of the ways in which social technologies are adopted differently across the world, showing the number of active bloggers, social networkers, video sharers, photo uploaders and microbloggers.

Interestingly, it reveals that despite the Twitter (Twitter) hype, microblogging is still not a mass social activity and is nowhere near the size and scale of blogging.

2. Social Marketing Compass

A compass is a device for orientating oneself and guiding physical direction. The social marketing compass points a brand in a physical and experimental direction, allowing them to connect with their customers, peers, and influencers, where those users already interact and seek guidance online.

Created to illustrate social marketing within the book Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web, this infographic was also available as a poster to celebrate the book’s pre-sale.

3. Web Trend Map

The Web Trend Map plots the Internet (Internet)’s leading names and domains onto the Tokyo Metro map. Domains and personalities are carefully selected through dialogue with map enthusiasts, and every domain is evaluated based on traffic, revenue, and character. As a result, the map produces a web of associations: some provocative, some curious, others ironically accurate.

It’s available as an A0 poster (33.25 x 46.75 inches) and is printed in Tokyo, Japan, on exquisite, heavyweight, matte paper.

4. Conversation Prism

The Conversation Prism is a visual mapping of the shifting landscape of social networks and micro communities. It beautifully represents social media tools for marketing, finance, human resources and more. Each tool is represented by their logo and arranged in a circular, flower-like structure. The graphic will continue to evolve as services and conversation channels emerge, fuse, and dissipate.

It provides a visual representation of the true expansiveness of the Social Web and the conversations that define it and is an update to Version 1.0 which was released in August 2008.

5. Popular Site Demographics

Numerous social media sites have witnessed explosive growth of their user bases in the last several years, but it’s a known fact that user demographics, including age, gender, income and education, vary across different platforms. This infographic maps the demographics of the world’s 7 most popular social media sites.

While there aren’t any quantitative data points listed, it’s definitely worth a quick glance to see how the various sites compare to one another.

6. Social Landscape

This infographic describes and ranks 10 popular social media channels by customer communication, brand exposure, traffic generation and SEO impact, which enables us to get a good grasp of how each tool helps users achieve business goals.

It acts as a roadmap of the social web and demonstrates which social channel will give the most bang for the buck in terms of customer communication, brand exposure, traffic, and SEO.

7. How are Mobile Phones Changing Social Media?

The mobile web is growing at an exponential rate, and this trend shows no signs of slowing down. This infographic illustrates the rates at which people use the mobile web for social activities.

It highlights a few intriguing facts, such as that there are more than 100 million active Facebook (Facebook) mobile users, and that those mobile users are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users. It also notes that 18-34 year olds account for about 50% of mobile social networking usage, with female usage higher than male usage.

8. The Boom Of Social Sites

The explosion of social networking sites over the past decade has facilitated a transformation in the way we communicate with each other. This infographic details some of the social communities with over 1 million users, both active and defunct.

The actual timeline itself is pretty interesting as you can clearly see the explosion of social networks between 2003 and 2006 (with the creation of Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn (LinkedIn)), and the relative slowdown in their creation after 2007.

9. The Biggest Shift

The Biggest Shift details the importance and extent of social media. Essentially, if you are looking to utilize word of mouth advertising, social media is there to help boost your efforts. By focusing your marketing attention to the top social networking websites, you will see the immediate benefits of “fishing where the fish are”.

It’s difficult to ignore the facts; YouTube (YouTube) is now the second largest search engine on the web; 3.5 billion pieces of content are shared each week on Facebook; and perhaps most significantly, 96% of 18-35 year olds are on a social network.

10. Social Media In Business

This is a closer look into the adoption of social media platforms by global Fortune 100 companies as they look to leverage these networks to reach and communicate with their target audiences.

While Facebook may still be the biggest social networking site, when it comes to business, Twitter seems to be the favorite among the Fortune 100 companies, with 65% owning a corporate Twitter account.

Which Integral Fusion do you think best showcase the intricacies of social media?

Source:http://mashable.com/2010/07/01/social-media-infographics/

5 Rules of Effective (SMO) Social Media Optimization

For years now, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for websites has been honed into a fine art with entire companies devoting considerable effort to defining best practices and touting the value of SEO for raising a site’s performance on organic search listings. While I believe in the power of SEO, there is a new offering we have started providing to clients which we call Social Media Optimization (SMO). The concept behind SMO is simple:

Implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs. Here are 5 rules we use to help guide our thinking with conducting an SMO for a client’s website:

1. Increase Your Linkability – This is the first and most important priority for websites. Many sites are “static” – meaning they are rarely updated and used simply for a storefront. To optimize a site for social media, we need to increase the linkability of the content. Adding a blog is a great step, however there are many other ways such as creating white papers and thought pieces, or even simply aggregating content that exists elsewhere into a useful format.
2. Make Tagging And Bookmarking Easy – Adding content features like quick buttons to “add to del.icio.us” are one way to make the process of tagging pages easier, but we go beyond this, making sure pages include a list of relevant tags, suggested notes for a link (which come up automatically when you go to tag a site), and making sure to tag our pages first on popular social bookmarking sites (including more than just the homepage).
3. Reward Inbound Links – Often used as a barometer for success of a blog (as well as a website), inbound links are paramount to rising in search results and overall rankings. To encourage more of them, we need to make it easy and provide clear rewards. From using Permalinks to recreating similarly, listing recent linking blogs on your site provides the reward of visibility for those who link to you.
4. Help Your Content Travel – Unlike much of SEO, SMO is not just about making changes to a site. When you have content that can be portable (such as PDFs, video files and audio files), submitting them to relevant sites will help your content travel further, and ultimately drive links back to your site.
5. Encourage The Mashup – In a world of co-creation, it pays to be more open about letting others use your content (within reason). YouTube’s idea of providing code to cut and paste so you can imbed videos from their site has fueled their growth. Syndicating your content through RSS also makes it easy for others to create mashups that can drive traffic or augment your content.

Getting started is easy, Get in touch now!

http://www.integralfusion.co.za/IFES/capabilities/social-media-optimization.html

Ecommerce on the Go – Selling Through the Mobile

Since we last wrote about the usability of mobile websites, the rise of the iPhone and other high-end handsets has meant that even more people use the Internet on their phone. (Source: Nielsen Mobile/BBC). Companies have responded by creating more mobile-optimised websites, some of which now allow people to complete e-commerce transactions on the mobile, instead of simply researching for information. For example:

• Shoppers can buy any product on the Amazon.com catalogue through the Amazon mobile site
• Travellers can instantly book a room in any Travelodge UK hotel through the Travelodge mobile site and rail tickets at the Train Line mobile site
• Car owners can get an instant car insurance quote on the Swiftcover mobile site
• Music fans can purchase tickets for their favourite concerts at the SeeTickets mobile site

However, while many people are already comfortable making online purchases using a computer, doing the same through a mobile phone poses unique challenges. These challenges need to be addressed by mobile e-commerce sites. This article provides best practice guidelines for removing potential barriers between your customers and your mobile e-commerce site.

Help people find your mobile site

Having a mobile-optimised site is no use if your customers can’t find it. You should always detect when visitors are accessing your site through a mobile phone, and automatically redirect them to the mobile-optimised version of the site.

Although you may also advertise the link to your mobile site, people may still remember the link to your main site only, or may arrive on your main site through a search engine link.

Ensure that the link to your mobile site is easy to remember and type into a mobile phone. For example:

• Append the word ‘mobile’ to your main domain
• Use a .mobi domain with your brand name

Cater for dropped internet connections

Mobile internet connections can often be unstable, e.g. when a mobile phone moves into a low signal area or runs out of battery. It’s usually not a big issue if this happens while someone is simply consuming information e.g. reading the news. However, a dropped connection in the middle of a transaction may leave people wondering if the transaction has been completed or frustrated that the information they’ve entered so far was lost.

While there’s not much you can do to improve mobile network coverage, you can mitigate the effects of dropped connections by:

• Saving all details in every step of a transaction e.g. the items in a shopping basket or the shipping details already entered
• Ensuring that a transaction can be resumed from the point where it was left, without having to start over
• Capturing visitors’ e-mail addresses or mobile phones at the beginning of a transaction and sending them instructions to help them continue an interrupted transaction
• Ensuring that all transactions available on your mobile site can be completed in a few short steps

Avoid data entry where possible

Although high-end smartphones increasingly incorporate a full physical or on-screen keyboard, typing on a mobile phone still isn’t as easy as on a computer. Unfortunately, completing an e-commerce transaction often requires a lot of information that isn’t always easy to type, such as addresses and credit card numbers.

In order to decrease the chances that customers will drop off at this point, you can mimimise data entry by:

• Allowing customers to log-in with the same username and password that they use for your main website in order to retrieving shipping and billing information stored in their account
• Encouraging customers to create an account to speed up future transactions
• Integrating with 3rd party billing services for which customers need to enter only a username & password e.g. PayPal

Reassure users about transaction security

With frequent reports on the news about credit card fraud and identity theft, most shoppers are looking to be reassured that their online transaction will be secure. While most desktop web browsers prominently highlight secure websites and protect users from visiting fraudulent sites, many mobile browsers are primitive in that respect. Also, because there are many mobile phones with different web browsers, people haven’t yet become accustomed to a certain way of highlighting that a website is secure.

It’s a good idea to prominently highlight that your mobile site is secure on the homepage and on pages that ask for sensitive information. Customers may also feel more comfortable if they don’t need to enter any sensitive information because it’s already stored in their account, as discussed in the previous point.

Think mobile for the post-transaction stage

Interacting with your customers doesn’t stop when they complete a transaction. A good mobile user experience should extend well into the post-transaction phase, e.g. when customers need to track the goods they ordered or check a booking confirmation. After all, if your customers have chosen to complete a transaction using a mobile phone, they’ll likely appreciate following up on this transaction in the same way.

Depending on the nature of the transaction, the following guidelines may apply:

• When customers can buy physical goods through your mobile site, provide a mobile solution for tracking the progress of the order and the delivery of the goods.
• When customers can book tickets or other services through your site, provide a mobile-friendly booking confirmation e-mail and consider mobile ticketing solutions, where tickets can be electronically stored in a mobile phone in the form of a special barcode
• In any case, ensure that all e-mails following up on a transaction are mobile-friendly

Conclusion

With increasing mobile internet use, it won’t be long before your customers will expect to transact with you over their mobile phone. This will take more than simply “downscaling” your existing website to fit in a mobile screen. Only if you carefully consider the unique challenges and opportunities offered through the mobile channel will you be able to offer your customers a truly mobile user experience.

Email Marketing Techniques – 5 Powerful Techniques to Increase Your Open Rates and Sales

The more opens you get, the better your email marketing results will be. Here are 5 email marketing techniques to help you increase your open rates and your sales.

1. Focus on the subject line. You really need to experiment with different subject lines. Test different subjects on the same email. You will see that some open better than others. Avoid spam words like Free and Prize.
2. Keep it interesting. People will not bother to open and read your email if it does not contain interesting content. Do not make the mistake of filling your newsletter with sales pitches. Tell stories, write articles, and make your reader’s life better.
3. Time it just right. It is surprising how much time of day and day of week effect open rates. In general, avoid Mondays and weekends. But, as with everything, test out different times and days yourself and see which works best for you. Every market is different.
4. Keep it short. One great email marketing technique is to reduce the amount of text and to increase the frequency of your email. This may seem counterintuitive, but it works. People reading emails do not have a lot of time to devote to each email. Do them, and yourself, a favor and be brief and to the point.
5. Make it painful for readers to NOT open your newsletter. You want your newsletter to become an essential part of your reader’s lives. One way to do this is to provide great, informative content. Become an essential resource, and your open rates will go way up.

Use these 5 email marketing techniques and watch your open rates and sales go up. You may be amazed how a few simple changes can make a big difference.

Want to discover more email marketing techniques?

More Online Retailers Focusing On Mobile Strategies

The popularity of mobile applications among consumers is driving online retailers to speed up their mobile marketing initiatives, according to a new study from Forrester Research and Shop.org.

Nearly three-quarters (74%) of online retailers currently have or are developing a mobile strategy. One in five have a mobile strategy already in place.

“It’s imperative for online retailers to stay on top of what their customers want and these days it’s all mobile all the time,” said Scott Silverman, Executive Director, Shop.org.

“Mobile commerce has tremendous potential and will no doubt grow to become a significant part of overall sales volume in years to come. Whether to increase customer satisfaction, grow their brand or drive traffic and sales, online retailers are in this game to stay.”

Online retailers with mobile strategies:

• Are investing in features that support the cross-channel experience. Product and price information, store information, and coupons to support the in-store experience are among the most popular features that retailers are offering consumers.
• Have varied level of investment. While respondents anticipated spending on average $170,000 on their mobile sites this year, large multichannel retailers are spending several times that amount, while smaller online pure plays on average are investing much less.
• Are experiencing modest gains. Retailers reported that their mobile browsers are generating a little less than three percent of overall site traffic and just two percent of revenue.

“Mobile investment is modest now, but we see that it will pick up in the future, especially among the biggest brands that have already invested significant amounts in their mobile operations,” said Sucharita Mulpuru, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, and lead author of the report.

Marketing tactics such as paid search, email and affiliate marketing command the biggest percentage of an online retailers’ marketing budget. According to the report, retailers are spending nearly 40% of their marketing budget on paid search.

Listening to customers is the most significant objective for social tools according to respondents, with 80 percent of retailers reporting that they are pursuing social strategies to experiment and learn. And while 28 percent noted that social marketing has helped grow their business, direct sales from social tactics are not widely measured.

Source: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/06/29/more-online-retailers-focusing-on-mobile-strategies

Tips for Using a Soft Approach to Make the Sale

Soft-sell marketing is a subtle yet persuasive, low-pressure method of selling your products or services. The basic premise of soft selling is that your focus is on developing relationships instead of aggressively pitching your wares from the moment (or even before) you’re introduced to your prospect.

Once you have started to create a real relationship, and you have learned about what he/she needs AND it jives with what you’re selling, you can suggest your solution. It’s less forced, more natural and conversational. It can also be more effective because you’ve taken the time to form a connection before giving a sales pitch.

Here are some tips to help you soft sell for improved results.

Believe In It – Make sure you are trying to sell something you truly care about. Passion can be infectious, especially when it comes to soft selling.

Relaxed Networking – Try to network with the main purpose of forming relationships, nothing else. This is also a great way to remove some of the “networking pressure.”

Build Relationships – Make relationship marketing the foundation of your marketing activities, so your relationship focus goes through all elements of your business.

Open Networking – Be open to networking with everyone, even those outside of your defined target. If your focus is on relationships first, you never know when a connection will turn into a business relationship.

White Glove Treatment – Treat your existing clients like gold to set the stage for referrals that support your soft selling approach.

Make It Emotional – Try storytelling to appeal to your prospect’s emotions, make yourself more memorable and share a personal anecdote.

Give It Away – Share valuable information for free, no strings attached. Try sponsoring teleconferences, webinars and other open-to-the-public events that teach first, sell later (if at all).

A Quiet Approach – Use a gentle call to action when you do make a pitch that’s passive, non-aggressive and conversational.

Subliminal Branding – Create meaningful customer touchpoints that are effective without being “in your face”.

Do Your Research – Get to know as much as you can about the prospect and their needs. This will not only strengthen your relationship, but it will help you determine if your product/service is appropriate for him/her.

Join Forces – Be open to collaborating for the networking and learning benefits, even if there is not a guaranteed financial gain.

Open the Door – Provide access to your marketing information but let your prospects digest it on their own.

If you struggle with the marketing side of business and feel uncomfortable when it comes to sales, soft-sell marketing can be a great way for you to overcome that hurdle and adopt a sales technique that’s within your comfort zone.

Do you use soft selling in your marketing activities?

Facebook Can Drive More Traffic Than Google

Ways Businesses Can Get the Most Out of Facebook

I recently discussed Twitter as a great source of traffic to sites, but the even more popular Facebook can do and is doing the same thing. In fact, reports have Facebook driving even more traffic than Google to some big-name sites.

Facebook gets over a third of the number of unique visitors that Google does according to comScore. And it continues to grow. Compete shows the lines between Google and Facebook getting closer together:

“It seems inevitable that, given Facebook’s sheer scale (180 million registered users and counting), it would at some point start referring a lot of users to some sites, but the development is surprising,” says AdAge’s Michael Learmonth. “Web users go to Google to figure out where to go next; they go to Facebook to, well, hang out.”

If Facebook’s growth continues the way it has been, perhaps it should be considered Google’s greatest threat (when I say threat, I mean competition) – maybe not in general search, but in terms of where advertisers are spending their money. Certainly in the foreseeable future, people will continue using Google to search, and advertisers will continue to spend money advertising with them (probably even more now that they are doing more targeting), but Facebook also targets, and it’s not going to be overlooked. It could put a dent into AdWords revenue.

Even within search advertising, Facebook should probably not be counted out. “Much of the Facebook-driven traffic comes from links that members post via areas like ‘Notes’ and photos,” notes Tameka Kee at paidContent.org. “If Facebook’s influence as a traffic source continues to rise, the next step would be to figure out how to monetize the traffic to those areas with paid search. That would be one way to entice Microsoft to renew its search deal (and give Microsoft a better return on its $240 million investment in the social net).”

That’s an interesting thought, considering Microsoft’s lack of any mindblowing new features coming from its own search engine rebranding. They don’t have any real-time search features planned for Kumo, but Facebook has its own search (and it’s getting more Twitter-like).

So What Can Businesses Get Out of Facebook?

Many of the tactics I listed about Twitter can be applied with Facebook too. That includes:

–          Traffic obviously. Social networks have taken over email in terms of popularity. Facebook is the top dog and continues growing rapidly.

–          People can “opt in” to be your friend and see your messages. This means your messages will be targeted specifically to people who are interested in your product. It’s a great way to get announcements to loyal customers.

–          Just like Twitter, it can be used as a great tool for customer service, provided somebody keeps up with it.

–          You can interact with the public while increasing brand awareness.

–          You can watch what people are saying on Facebook about your business and use that information to manage your online reputation.

–          Facebook advertising. They provide targeted ads (based on user profiles) and as mentioned above, Facebook gets a third of what Google does (that’s a lot) in unique visitors. – Facebook apps (including one that will let you post right to Twitter from Facebook) make the possibilities near endless. Many apps even have further advertising opportunities.

–          Twitter has a great many of the same advantages (and is certainly growing rapidly as well), but it also has a lot of skeptics. Facebook is much more widely accepted as a great social network.

LinkedIn for Lead Generation

You can and should use LinkedIn to keep in touch with colleagues and contacts, but LinkedIn’s value doesn’t end there. It can also be used as a way to generate new leads for your business. The goal of all this is simple: to engage an audience and build a network. Do this by demonstrating your expertise and thought leadership. Don’t sell your services, but feel free to drive people to relevant and valuable content on your website or blog.

How to Generate Leads from LinkedIn

• Create a LinkedIn Group. Use the group to demonstrate thought leadership in your market, then promote the group and grow the community using the tips mentioned above.
• Use LinkedIn’s DirectAds. This is a new feature on LinkedIn that is still in beta. It allows you to push relevant ads to LinkedIn subscribers targeted by profile demographic information. This is very similar to ad targeting on Facebook or Google AdWords.
• Answer Questions on LinkedIn. Ask and respond to relevant questions in the LinkedIn “Answers” section. Have your colleagues engage the LinkedIn audience in a similar way. Anytime you ask or answer a question it shows up in the Network Updates feed for all your connections. Best of all, you gain expertise points in your category if your answer is chosen as the best answer for a particular question. LinkedIn users tend to trust experts in their subject categories and are often contacted directly. When answering a question, you can leave links to relevant articles, landing pages, or blog posts on your website.
• Integrate LinkedIn Into Your Marketing. Anytime you do a webinar or present at a trade show or thought leadership event, invite your audience to network with you or join your group. You can also notify all the members of your group about an upcoming promotion or event and drive them back to your site or blog to convert them into leads.
• Don’t Spam. Trying to directly message or reach out to your LinkedIn contacts could be considered spam. Make sure that people you contact want to hear from you and that your message is relevant.

Blogs Can Still Drive Big Traffic

Twitter and Facebook Aren’t the Only Word-of-Mouth Platforms

You would almost think blogging was dead, the way headlines are dominated by Twitter, Facebook, and social media in general. I’ve always considered blogging to be a part of social media anyway, as the commenting factor lends to engagement between author and user.

But blogging is so five years ago right? It’s all about microblogging and status updates now isn’t it? If you think that’s the case, think again, because blogs can still drive big-time traffic to websites. An example of this has been illustrated by the launch of e-commerce site Alice.com.

How much traffic are you getting from blogs? Let us know.

If you are not familiar with Alice.com, it is a site where consumers can buy everyday household items like toothpaste, toilet paper, laundry detergent, diapers, etc., right from the manufacturers, rather than through middleman retailers. It launched in June, and by July it had doubled its traffic to 387,000 unique visitors, according to Compete.

Guess where the majority of that traffic came from. According to Compete, it came from word-of-mouth from blogs. In fact, its number one traffic source was Blogger.com. Not Twitter. Not Facebook. Not search. Although each of these no doubt played valuable roles as well., Blogger.com has been the biggest factor in driving traffic for this site, and from the looks of things, that traffic is showing no signs of slowing down.

Blogger accounted for 18% of Alice.com’s referral traffic in July, and obviously there are plenty of blogs out there that aren’t hosted at Blogger.com. On top of that, Compete says Alice’s conversion rate jumped to 3.5%  in July as well.

Of course, you have to give bloggers something to talk about to get valuable blog traffic. It’s no different than getting people to talk about you on social networks or through any other form of word-of-mouth marketing. It starts with your product. Clearly Alice.com, has something that many people find worth talking about.

“Anyone who has previously shopped online for household products knows that prices are generally higher (sometimes considerably) than those found in stores,” Compete’s Matt Pace says of Alice.com.  “By selling directly to consumers, manufacturers are able to price their products below those found on most online retailers and more competitively to those found in stores.”

Clearly this is a void in the lives of consumers that Alice is attempting to fill. It’s still early to tell if this site will remain a success. As long as it keeps the bloggers (consumers) happy, it could enjoy a long life. Because one thing to remember about word-of-mouth is that it works both ways. Reputations can quickly move in different directions online. So can traffic.

Press Releases More Important to Marketing Than You May Realize

Press releases are not only great ways to spread the word about any announcements your business might have. They can also drive traffic, particularly from search engines. This is not news, but it’s a commonly overlooked fact.

“Search engine rankings are arguably the most important small business marketing tool available today because it drives Web traffic — and potential prospects — to a small business’ Web site,” a PRWeb spokesperson once told WebProNews. “However, because improving search rankings is desirable, achieving results can be both challenging and highly competitive.”

Back in the summer, PRWeb involving a firm that typically sees a boost in search engine rankings and a 50% spike in web traffic after they issue a release. In fact, for one release in particular, the firm saw a spike of 400% on two different Web sites, and the firm doesn’t believe they were from the same users. They also incorporate social media tools like Twitter to extend the “shelf life” of press releases, and say that drives additional traffic.

“When we included a link to our press releases on Twitter and other social media networks, we saw these both expanded the scope of distribution and the extended the longevity of the announcement,” the CEO of the company behind the case study had said. “With other news releases we saw an initial spike in Web site traffic on the first two days and then it dropped off. With these features we’ve seen increases in traffic up to five days after the news release was issued.”

In a study from Arketi Group, also back in the summer, journalists were found to use the web in the following ways:

• 95% search
• 92% reading news
• 92% emailing
• 89% finding story ideas
• 87% finding news sources
• 75% reading blogs
• 64% watching webinars
• 61% watching YouTube
• 59% social networks

You’ve got to wonder if that social networks number has gone up by now. My guess is that it has, and social media has since become all the more important to search, particularly with the inclusion of real-time search results in Google and Google’s social search experiment (which may eventually move beyond experiment status).

Here are some press release  distribution sites (some are paid and some are free):

• Business Wire
• PR Newswire
• PRWeb
• 24-7 Press Release
• PR Zoom
• PR Leap
• I-Newswire
• Webwire
• ClickPress
• PR.com
• PR Log
• eReleases
• MarketWire

Beyond the distribution sites, don’t forget to include your releases on your own site. Journalists like being able to find the most up to date information from the source itself. Earlier this year I discussed how some companies’ own press centers are holding back some marketing opportunities for them. Your site should have a section for press releases, and that should be up to date with the latest release when it goes out. You’d be surprised at how often these go without being updated even when a press release has been spotted elsewhere. It is also a good idea to link to any company blogs, Twitter accounts, or any other place where company announcements are made.