Don’t Pay Good Money for Bog Standard PR Distribution. Do Social Online PR Instead
Here’s a thought… what do you pay for press release distribution and why?
There are two charges to take into account: your fixed distribution costs for ‘wire’ distribution services and your soft costs for agency ‘pitching’ services. Prices range from free to hundreds of pounds a pop for the former …and you’re probably paying hundreds or thousands a time if you’re doing the latter.
But what do these things really buy you???
As a line item on a PR campaign budget, I think ‘press release distribution’ is near-dead. Or, at least it should be.
Press release distribution doesn’t buy you news coverage or online buzz. Great PR execution gets you these things. It’s the PR-reporter relationship, a killer creative idea, ‘going social’ or ‘viral’ (yuk – sorry, hate that word!) or sheer chutzpah that gets you noticed, not three paragraphs of bla bla text in an email/web page and a follow-up call from a PR flack.
At best, when done sensibly some online press release distribution services will buy you a little (low value) Google-juice and link equity. They may also hook you into other media-community services, like those provided by the more interesting, community-style disti tools like Sourcewire (check these guys out – they’re good!). But otherwise, there’s no real point in paying services like PR Web around £300 for the privilege.
There are any number of alternatives that will offer you roughly the same service for free (ie, ‘premium services’ that guarantee distribution to Google News, etc… see this paper for a few ideas on how to do it more cost-effectively). Equally, I think there’s little value in paying a PR agency to harass people on your behalf unless you’re a certain style and size of company. (See here and here for why.)
In basic terms, I think that paying for distribution on the web is an anachronism. (Hell! It’s supposed to all be free isn’t it!!??)
Smart Online PR means getting your distribution for nothing. It’ll drive buzz, interest and media coverage, but it rarely involves a bog standard press release (and a battery of account execs hitting the phones).
A better way to do this stuff is by listening in, and understanding and participating in the online conversations that are most likely to drive your message home …and then building ‘socially relevant’ pieces of content that make it easy (and compelling) for audiences to ‘get it’ and then pass it around.
In other words, when you have something to say, forget about the traditional PR machine and start using Twitter, blog networks, forums and communities to spread the word and drive interest and traffic in new ways… (For an idea of the principles involved, check out this comment from Social Media star Robert Scoble in response to a fantastic post on the death of traditional PR mechanics from Techcrunch yesterday – just search the page for ‘scoble’ and you’ll get there …And if you’re in the PR business, please, please, please read the rest of the piece!)
So – no more crafting of wordy press releases and hitting ‘send’ or ‘publish’ (and getting deleted / ignored). DON’T PAY FOR PURELY MECHANICAL DISTRIBUTION. It’s ineffective. Instead you should be encouraging the brave new-fangled world of the social-media’ly Interweb to do your distribution on your behalf. Socially-centred Online PR is the way to go…
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