Question: If you don’t have a blog but you do have a web site, do you still need to include a list of tags on the release? 

Answer: This is a critical point that I need to blog about some more.  The purpose of adding Technorati tags is NOT to “post” your press release to T’rati.  T’rati does not even crawl the newswire sites!  No, the purpose of adding T’rati tags is to put your SMNR into CONTEXT; to give the SMNR reader a sense of tangential conversations around your topic, even if those conversations have nothing at all to do with your news release!

Here’s my take on it. If you don’t have a blog you should definitely set one up one to function as a media room, & for the purpose of archiving your press releases, news articles, and other media mentions. Every press release that goes out via Big Vision Media (the publisher of Beyond Katrina) is posted to my media room – and tagged prolifically. Technorati then crawls these pages – because they are on a blog – and voila – my press releases are tagged over there and picked up by interested folks in the blogosphere, not to mention other aggregators.

This is a surefire, bonafide way to bring the power of Technorati to the social media press release and to put it into action. Not to mention that the media room functions as a good public relations tool. I keep a prominent hot-linked button at the top of my siderail at Beyond Katrina so that folks can access my media room, and they do. If you want to see this in context go to the main page of my blog – look to the right sidebar & you’ll see the button above the fold. If you want to see how I’ve set up the media room & what it contains go here 

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to weigh in! This is great work you all are doing and it has been enormously helpful to me.

Margaret Saizan
Big Vision Media

Actually, something erroneous happened when the HTML code transferred into the comments section, so the code didn’t translate correctly.

Here’s a link to my post addressing this topic. Hope this helps clarify any issues.

http://www.digg.com/tools/integrate

The only things that can get difficult are integrating the blog-specific information into the code and placing the code on the page (you need to advance edit your blog templates).

Here are 2 quick examples on the code needed for TypePad and WordPress to add “Digg It” to your posts:

In TypePad, the complete code you need for the hyperlink is:

“&title=&topic=TOPIC>Digg It”

For WordPress, I use:
“&title=&topic=TOPIC>Digg It”

Just swap out TOPIC for whatever relevant topic you’re posts are about. Hope this helps and thanks for the information!