PR gurus, please hope me!

January 18, 2007 9:30 AM

Press release distribution services! About six years ago, I coordinated the development and delivery of weekly press releases for my then-employer. I recall looking at and evaluating a variety of online distribution services before eventually settling on a service that was either free or very inexpensive. [+]

I had good luck with the service, scoring national media guest shots for my boss on a couple of occasions. Sadly, I can't recall for the life of me what I used. Poking around online it looks as if the rise of SEO has made it really hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. However, it looks like businesswire.com and prnewswire.com are the services with the greatest reach and credibility. Alas, they do not publish their rates. PRNewsire also appears to have gone on a consolidation binge; additionally, it is commonly offerred via third-party sites as a distribution channel, as seen at PR Web Soooo....

A) Is there a decent free or low-cost release distribution service with both credibility and reach?

B) What are the unpublished rates for the services cited above?

posted by mwhybark to media & arts (7 comments total)

It's worth looking at PR Newswires rates by calling them. They occasionally do deals with small companies. The other thing I would consider doing is looking for PR companies that cater to your commercial category and whether this is a public release (to the media) or a release to drum up business for your company. That makes the difference in finding a PR agency to handle your releases.
posted by parmanparman at 11:23 AM on January 18, 2007

Good observations. We are not looking to get into an agency relationship, but are expecting to add releases to our regular slate of weekly duties. The objective of the releases is to increase visibility for the business and consequently to help lift revenues.
posted by mwhybark at 12:02 PM on January 18, 2007

Then I would suggest that you look at your current and upcoming product line-up and see whether it's something you're trying to get into the media of the mainstream or trying to get to the attention of people who would buy from your company.

You could also contact the most important media you want and put them in touch with a media intranet that would provide them with graphics, sources, and maybe entire drag-and-drop articles outlining the products for their reference. We send out an e-mail each week that goes straight to inboxes and gets us a lot of attention, including over 3.000 downloads of our show.
posted by parmanparman at 12:15 PM on January 18, 2007

OK, here's the objective. We want to bring our products to the attention of the interested parties, which is the general public, globally. Hopefully the releases will create bloglinks as well as media attention due to targeted topics and promos.

In terms of internal resources, we are looking at turning a release or two every week.

My annual budget for distribution is probably nearly $100 ;). My time budget for distribution, not including copywriting, is the length of time it takes me to post the releases to a company blog and to enter them into a distribution mechanism. The bells-and-whistles media net thing you mention would be total overkill for this project.

I did fill out the RFI stuff at prnewswire but I HATE dealing with vendors that won't provide upfront pricing.
posted by mwhybark at 12:48 PM on January 18, 2007

i-Newswire is free. They used to be indexed by Google News, but I'm not sure if they still are.
posted by Otis at 12:53 PM on January 18, 2007

businesswire.com and prnewswire.com are the only news wires that I, as a journalist, give any credence to. I get a lot of e-mails from wire services that are of such consistently low quality (badly written, wrong for our publication, sent to the wrong reporter, spelling mistakes, factual mistakes, etc.), that I delete many of them as soon as they arrive in my in box. When I get e-mails from those two, however, there's almost always some obvious reason why I was a targeted recipient of the press release. I often don't respond, for a number of reasons, but I always look.
posted by croutonsupafreak at 2:16 PM on January 18, 2007

prnewswire got back to me with pricing: $150 annual membership, per-release charges from $680 @ 400 words for full-geo distribution, dropping to $380 for any one (of four) US regions. National industry-targeted releases also run $680. International distribution pushes the release cost up to around $1k; selecting state-level-only distribution drops the price to $180.

As a businessperson I admire the pricing structure; it's designed to drive a client to a minimum annual expenditure of at least $1k. As a prospect, looks as though they are missing the low end of the market.
posted by mwhybark at 12:42 PM on January 19, 2007