Make it Easy for Online Readers to Spread the Word

Nothing's more powerful than having your audiences spread the word about your program, organization or new leadership. Such "viral marketing" is far more powerful than your organization telling its own story as friends tend to listen to friends, and believe what they say.

To generate viral marketing, make it as easy as possible for your audiences to spread the word. here are two great ways to do so:

1) Include a 'forward to a friend' link in your e-news and e-advocacy campaigns.

2)Enable your audiences to spread the word more broadly, via social networking tools. Here's how: 

• Crafted to double as direct communications with your target audiences. They have to be engaging, succinct and formatted for easy digestion (lots of bullets, white space and short paragraphs).
• Integrate key tools to link to spokesperson bio and contact info, related resources and more. They'll make a world of difference.
• Feature the single keyword for the release in the page title tag, the primary content heading (in your list of releases, or in your site) and the text at the top of the release (ideally in the first sentence of the first paragraph).
• One click buttons to Share the Story (more engaging than Forward to a Friend):
  • Add the site to reader's bookmarks via Delicious
  • Rate the site via DIGG.

Calvin College's release on its Sushi Theatre is a great example. Note the prompt to Share the Story, and the easy-to-use links to do so. Also, as higher ed marketing guru Bob Johnson points out, "the topic of the press release, 'Sushi Theatre' is included in the title tag for the page, making it more likely that a search engine 'spyders' will find and index it. The keyword in the title tag is then repeated in the major text heading (the headline in this case) on the page, and again early in the text itself."

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