Today’s how-to comes from a client who wants to know how to display and publicize news about an article that’s just been published about his company.
He asks: “How do I refer to this article on my web page and in social media posts?”
It’s easy enough to establish an online newsroom or “press” section at a website. Just create a new page devoted exclusively to your company’s press coverage. But linking to, and displaying the articles, takes a bit of tech know-how.
First, don’t assume you can permanently link to the news story if it’s running online. News stories toggle through very quickly and story positions and urls change over time. In some cases, they are removed. If you link to the story, be sure to check the link often to make sure it’s still active. As a backup, we always advise clients to take a screen shot of the story as it’s running online.
Here’s a quick way to grab the story and prep it for your website.
1) Use your favorite browser to navigate to the news story. Expand the browser to the largest setting to fill the screen with as much of the story that will fit. Press the “Print Screen” button on your keyboard to grab the image.
2) Next, you’ll need to open a photo editing program to crop and perhaps patch together the story (if it’s more than one screen). Windows often includes a photo editing program called Paint with its operating system. To access Paint, click the Start button>navigate to All Programs>then Accessories and finally>choose Paint from the drop-down menu.
3) After launching Paint, navigate to Edit>Paste and the software will automatically copy the screen shot into the application. Next, use the crop tool (rectangle formed with dotted lines) to select only the area you want to display. Close the original file, and open anothernew file where you will paste just the image section you want into a new file. Save the file as a .jpg for use later on a web page or in a .pdf document that you’ll create. Of course you can use Photoshop or other image editing software as available.
4) Once you’ve a solid image file or PDF version of the story (you can place the image in a PDF document) it’s just a matter of adding some code to your website that will display the article.
How to code the story at your website.
To embed a .pdf file that launches in a new window at your site, insert the following code into the html or source code of your page
<a href=”http://www.yoursitehere.com/nameofpdfhere.pdf”> Click here to read about us in the Local Business Journal.</a>
To embed a .jpg file that launches in a new window at your site, insert the following code
<a href=”http://www.yoursitehere.com/nameofpdfhere.jpg”> Click here to read about us in the Local Business Journal.</a>
(The links above don’t actually launch but you should get the idea. You need the closing “a” tag at the end or this won’t work.)
This is the “ten cent” method for capturing the news story online. You’ll also want to buy or print hard copies of the article for use in other marketing materials. Many print publications also offer options that allow featured individuals or companies to purchase framed or laminated copies of their story.
To promote the story through social media applications it’s mostly a matter of shortening the url.
Our client’s story ran at the Nashville Business Journal here:
http://nashville.bizjournals.com/nashville/stories/2010/02/15/smallb3.html
You’ll notice that the story link is a very long website address. We suggested our client use the website http://www.tinyurl.com to make the address shorter so he could insert it into Twitter posts.
The original website address was 74 characters (about half of what Twitter allows)
The shortened URL is here:
This shortened website address is only 26 characters leaving plenty of room for mentioning what the link is about when posting to social media sites.
If you have tips and technology you use for building an online newsroom, please send them along.
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