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.

Who to follow on Twitter

Whether you're new to Twitter or just looking for more people to follow, there are two sites you can check out for influential tweeters.

Twinfluence

Twinfluence is a website that allows you to measure the combined influence of a twitter user and their followers. According to the website, as of right now, 243,700 twitterers have had profiles analyzed. Unsure of how influential someone your following is? Type their name into the search bar and find out!

WeFollow

Unlike Twinfluence, WeFollow is a Twitter directory and search tool. Twitter users are separated into different categories such as Celebrity, Music, Entrepreneur, Social Media, and News. Top Twitter Users as well as Top Tags and Top Cities are also featured.

Both sites are very helpful when searching for people to follow on Twitter.

Wikipedia: Server Not Found

Though Wikipedia is working now, it was not working earlier today. People on Twitter were producing dozens of tweets per minute on the uncommon error message they were getting when trying to access the site. According to the Wikipedia Tech Blog, "overheating in the European data center and broken DNL resolution" caused the unexpected outage. They were then forced to move user traffic to the "Florida cluster" but shortly after, the Wikimedia sites stopped working globally. The problem was eventually resolved, but it was a major inconvenience for the people that needed it at the time it was down.

If I needed Wikipedia and found out that the "server was not found," I would probably fall into a state of panic for a minute but then remember that I can still Google search anything and everything I need to find at the click of a mouse button.

Lady Gaga breaks another record

Lady Gaga, social media genius, broke a new record this week. The controversial music artist has been a regular on the "100 Million Views Club," a list of videos put together by a company called Visible Measures. Updated monthly, the "100 Million Views Club" contains the most watched viral videos of all time. If you think that is noteworthy, try being the first and, as of now, only artist to reach one billion online video views. Three of her music video views, including "Poker Face" (374,606,128), "Just Dance" (272,941,674) and "Bad Romance" (360,020,327) add up to over one billion.

As a fan of Lady Gaga, I think her music video views are well deserved. While many people may not like her music or persona, there is no denying that her music videos are creative and interesting to watch.

Google's new experiement

Google Bookmarks is experimenting with a feature called, Lists, currently being used by its English users. Lists allows people to privately save links in buckets, share them, or publicly post them around the web. According to Mashable, some features include "list comments, in-line Youtube and content previews, as well as recommended links and location features." If Google detects that you search the same kind of topics frequently, it will automatically save the search in your bookmarks - into Lists. For people who research and use Google often, this can be a huge timesaver.

I think this new feature is very convenient and will become a very useful tool in everyday life. Using Google Lists, I will be able to save searches for one topic specifically in one place. I will not need to search through my browser history, but rather click on one link and have all the information I need at the tip of my fingers.