PR 2.0: Messaging using social media distro service
Posted by heatherrast on March 20th, 2009I’ve followed Jason Kintzler from PitchEngine for quite some time on Twitter, and always been interested in learning more about his solution. Now that I’m with a new organization and in a position to direct public relations strategies for the company, I thought I’d explore how it works. You can see the example (first attempt!) about me joining the company.
Net? I found the functionality of the solution easy to use, with nice features to save work in progress. I appreciate that the model includes a “freemium” type version, allowing me to try before committing (or needing) a more comprehensive news room. Clearly, releases are strongest when they include multimedia and social media links/embeds to add more dimension and context. I chose to limit the links used on my release to only LinkedIn and Twitter. Maybe I should have included my blog (What are your thoughts? This gets into that ‘personal presence’ and ‘corporate presence’ arena, definitely a stimulating and combustible topic).
I do, however, think that there’s some room for improving the user interface. Specifically, I found the screened-back (or light/small) font a little challenging to see, and the error message text (“You forgot to fill out the phone number field.”) less obvious than most.
Overall, a good experience with the solution. One I look forward to repeating as we prepare to share news about client growth and product enhancements. Speaking analytics, I’ll say that I was impressed with the relationship between issuing the release and the ensuing actions made by my Twitter stream. In just under 12 minutes of tweeting the URL, I had 29 views and two fistfulls of tweets from those I’m connected to. One such tweet made me aware of a tangential connection I didn’t know existed between me and another point-of-sale software marketer. We’ll see what develops.
Tags: PR, Relationships, SMPR
