Public or Private, companies love press releases. If you are public company and you have to put up with day trading mud pit that is stockhouse.com ( or .ca) , you know that press releases are a drug to some of these folks. For private companies, it is a good way to get some notice, get the name out there, and hopefully raise some corporate profile.
Most companies blast -n– pray, never really understanding exactly what is going on. PRWeb is the newswire service that is used by companies big and small to get the message out. You’ve seen the “via PRWeb” thing before. Sometime if you hit Google news or some such, you will see the same exact words because lots of publications use the press release as is and republish it.
Lots of new companies don’t know that PRWeb is a great source of metrics and help especially after the press release has gone out.
At one of my start companies, Predixis, our young marketing intern took on the task of getting a couple of releases out via PRWeb and then, as great interns typically do, dug in to find out what else there is to know about the release, tracking, metrics, etc. Below you will find a base camp report she did as sort of an explanation for the whole team. It was well done, showed some excellent initiative, should help you know what to look for and, it’s an excellent piece of work that might be of value to start ups. It was good to see, at the end of her posting, she asked the right question!
Well done, Rachel.
* Disclaimer: I know Rachel’s grandparents really really well.
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Conversation: Message posted: PRWEB Numbers: What do they mean?
Subject: Message posted: PRWEB Numbers: What do they mean?
So, I know I’m not the only one who’s been kind of wondering “wow, those numbers sound awesome; how does that compare to other press releases going out?”
Here are the numbers for our 2 press releases as of 10:30 today:
Predixis Announces MusicMagic 1.1.6, Revolutionary Software for Music Enjoyment and Discovery
(released September 22, 2005)
Reads: 117,939
Estimated Pickup: 495
Prints: 19
PDF Downloads: 18
New Winamp Player Unveils Breakthrough MusicMagic Playlist and Recommendation Technology From Predixis Helping Fans Find the Right Music for any Mood
Reads: 79,582
Estimated Pickup: 828
Prints: 22
PDF Downloads: 37
So, I phoned PRWeb and spoke with one of their customer service reps, Pablo. I told him how much I’m enjoying the service but I was just curious about how best to contextualize those numbers. Here’s the main things to keep in mind:
-For the technoloy sector we’re right on par with many of the bigger players that use their service.
-They get a lot of mom and pop businesses too, which are really happy with 20-30,000 reads.
-They rarely get over 100,000 reads on a press release, so that’s REALLY GOOD.
-The second number is representative of all the journalists/editors who have given them permission to track their useage of PRWeb materials…this doesn’t mean they intend to do a story on us or not, it just means they’ve clicked through and checked out the press release.
Getting over 100,000 views in less than two days is amazing. Did that translate into any increase in downloads/sales?
Sure am proud to see my grand-daughter doing such great work during her internship, but then she has always exceeded at anything she undertakes.
Posted by: Rachel's Grandmother | September 24, 2005 at 15:34