I recently heard about a website www.helpareporter.com. HARO is an acronym for Help A Reporter Out. Journalists and bloggers can submit story ideas the HARO community. I decided to register and test it out. Each day I receive several emails from HARO with a list of stories from journalists looking for experts. After a few responses to enquiries from journalists with no response I thought perhaps it was a load of hooey. But then in the last week I have had three responses from journalists one to write an excerpt for a book and today I had my first interview. This is definitely a good way to get more reach.
The rules used to be: Get an agency. But alas I remember my days of working with Burson Marsteller and the enormous figure that kept eating away at the marketing budget. And were we getting PR? It seemed not. Any coverage tended to be from our Earnings Statements. Eventually my infamous “boss” KVR as we called him, gave BM the boot. Unfortunately the economic climate in 2001 makes it difficult to say if hanging on to BM would have made anything better.
So the question remains, what do you expect to gain from your PR activities and how much are you willing to spend? Which distribution service gets you the most?
PRWeb? PR Newswire? There are fans of both. Some say to use both.
PR Newswire says that they target media outlets based on the news-worthiness of a press release, meaning if you send a lame story, they won’t pass it along to the media. PRWeb just targets general areas whereas it seems PR Newswire actually has relationships with journalists along with HUMANS who will read push your worthy press releases to journalists and trade pubs that would be interested in the story.
I can’t say that I’m in love with PRWeb. The process of uploading press releases, selecting advanced features, tagging, adding keywords etc is all very time consuming. Perhaps this is part of the reason there is so much of a price differential with PR Newswire? Just pass along some of the work to end-user? Pr Newswire says they have full time coders that will make sure we are ahead of the other services in google.com etc 95% of the time.
Thoughts anyone? Experience to share?
That said, congratulations and welcome to Dominic Fino, Oshyn’s new Director of Human Capital!
Breaking the Marketing Rules 