As YouTube would say, 'broadcast yourself.'

My social media professor has provided my class with two sites to study that help with press releases and communications campaigns that I thought I'd share. PRNewsWire definitely has a lot of offer, for a price, while some of PRWebDirect is free.

From PRNewsWire's official website:

PR Newswire provides our customers with the greatest opportunity to engage their target audiences through:

1. the largest network of media, bloggers, and Web sites
2. the highest-trafficked and most search-engine referred Web site in the industry
3. the most comprehensive social media sharing capabilities and search engine optimization for all press releases
4. unparalleled multimedia production and distribution capabilities

From PRWebDirect's official website:

For a fraction of the cost of traditional press releases or internet advertising, you can send your news release through PRWeb and accomplish the following:

1. See your news on top-tier news sites like Yahoo! News
2. Increase your visibility and rankings in search engines like Google
3. Get your news to top journalists and media outlets
4. Drive qualified, ready-to-buy traffic to your Web site

If I had enough money and I was writing a press release and wanted to make sure it got out to everyone, I'd get the most expensive package because the offers on these sites are great. If I had to write a press release right now as an undergrad in college, I'd click the "free publicity" link on PrWebDirect.

A press release how-to

Do you know how to write a press release?

If you ever need to write a press release and have no idea where to begin, check this site out. Brian Solis uses simple directions (and provides examples) of how to compose a direct, thorough, and to the point press release. I love how he covered all bases of a press release and provided the links to help.

Another site that offers tips as well as another how-to is PRWebDirect. This site gives great advice and describes how a press release should be formatted.

What's the trend?

What The Trend's Week in Review show Twitter's top 100 trends. The trends on the website are ranked, have points, the time they were trending is shown as well as their peak index, category, and description. According to the site's notes on the top 20 list, "this list includes both the top 10 regular and hashtag trends, plus a few extra this week. Thus, you can derive a full list of hashtag-related trends, and a full list of non-hashtag-related trends from this chart." The picture below shows the top 5 trends.
I found this site very interesting. It is great to see what the trending topics on Twitter are, why they are trending topics, and how long they have been trending topics. As a Twitter user, this is definitely going to be a site that I frequent.