PRNewswire And Technorati
January 18, 2007 Posted by Al Castle
trackback
Categories: Insider, PRWeb, Picture of the Day, gnash-teeth
Dave Armon and I have met on several occasions on both sides of the continent. He is really a cool guy I don’t care if he is the competition or however you want to view him/PRNewswire. (Technically we’re not competitors, PRWeb doesn’t do disclosure releases, we’re also in the cheese moving business.)
That being said, I agree with The Founders post about their recent press release and of course about their delicious release. PRWebs trackback technology goes one better, allowing the reader of the press release to comment and view existing blog posts that left trackbacks, all while never leaving the press release. Much like how PRWeb releases allow the reader to view your website without leaving the press release. This methodology actually drives traffic to your website, a direct contradiction of Dominic Jones ramblings.
My only addition to the argument is best presented via this fine art.
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Let’s just be upfront here. The trackbacks are on PRWeb’s website. The blogs leaving them are linking to PRWeb’s website. People are bookmarking the PRWeb release. And all of this is driving traffic to the PRWeb website.
All of those links and options PRWeb provides do one thing, distract users from going to the client’s website and then linking to the client’s website in the blog posts or bookmarking the client’s website, which in turn will increase the ranking of the client’s website in search results.
And so this is a good thing?
Sure, for PRWeb it’s a good thing.
Google is not ignorant of second level links. Links to things that link to the customer’s website are cumulative in value. Likewise, blogspace conversation about a topic can be a valuable and authentic method of leading readers to a customers website. If readers are interested, they’re smart enough to google for the company even if there’s not a link.
For the record, Mr. Jones is overlooking the value of *meaningful interconnectedness* in his response. To be sure, this sort of interconnectivity is good for PRWeb — we get links to our release pages from a wide range of third party web sites. Our release pages, in turn, link to both client provided resources (i.e., websites, file attachments, white papers, etc.), third party content-management systems like Digg, Yahoo, Technorati, as well as in-house search mechanisms. Mr. Jones seems to be asserting that these mechanisms work unidirectionally, when in fact they dramatically increase the choices available to readers. They are perfectly welcome to follow the links to PRWeb. They are equally welcome to visit our clients’ websites, or to dive into the blogosphere, never to return.
The entire notion of “controlling” what a reader sees on our site is antiquated — the age of the Search Engine is here and going strong. Faced with the choice to control user experience or expand the users’ ability to choose it themselves, we have wholeheartedly embraced the latter path.
It’s ironic that this conversation is happening here because PRWeb really wasn’t the target of my original post — the disclosure wires like PRN, BW, Prime, MarkeWire were.
However, since you’ve drawn attention to yourselves, PRWeb is the worst example of how social media wire releases undermine the client.
I’m all for social media releases, just not sending them out over a proprietary network or having them posted on a website of a vendor I’m paying to distribute my information. I want a conversation to happen around my news, I want to engage with bloggers and others, I want them to criticize and compliment my company, say whatever they want.
But I don’t want it to happen on PRWeb’s website. There’s little benefit to me when that happens.
Essentially, I’m paying to boost PRWeb’s traffic and search engine rankings. I’m paying to have people presented with a multitude of options that distract or suck them away from my company’s website, the single best place where I can present my products and services to them.
If you want to reinvent the news release, throw it out and start again. That’s what I said in the post on my site. I’m not sure why what I’m proposing would hurt PRWeb since your fees are not based on release length.
The only legitimate argument against my proposal was Joe’s comment that my approach doesn’t work if the company doesn’t of a social media-enabled website. 100% valid, but increasingly sites are becoming social media conscious and they don’t need wire services to get in their way.
I know what I’m saying scares some people, but there’s a huge opportunity here for someone with an open mind.
I just realized the crux of Dominic’s concerns, “I want a conversation to happen around my news, I want to engage with bloggers and others, I want them to criticize and compliment my company, say whatever they want. But I don’t want it to happen on PRWeb’s website.”
When the conversation hubs on the release page on PRWeb, it stands to reason that the page will contain distractions to other PRWeb hosted releases, advertising, PRWeb value-adds, etc. But that just doesn’t happen because the PRWeb release page has been designed to focus on the company, its message and its Web site. There is not “a multitude of options that distract or suck them away.” Even our social media links open to a new window/tab so the reader will return to the release page. And, most notably, the company’s Web site actually appears in a window on the release page.
So rather than being the “worst example”, I have to think PRWeb provides the next best thing to being on the company’s Web site.
I recommend viewing a PRWeb release. Save for the PRWeb logo and news navigation links above the headline, everything else is relevant to the company, its site and its message.
People presented with a multitude of options? I can scarcely believe it. The poor consumers will surely be paralyzed by the number of choices presented to them.
Mr. Jones’ perspective makes much more sense after reading his article in more detail — far from the “ramblings” this post labeled them, they are a very focused attack on the idea of information middleman-ship for corporate news. I happily confess this makes a lot of sense for many people.
However, I don’t think centralized information trunks (like newswires) will be disappearing anytime soon — they bring together too much useful information into too condensed a space to be discarded entirely. That’s why Alexa rates prweb.com at 1,929 and http://www.irwebreport.com at 336,511 in terms of traffic ranking — information density. Also, there are huge swaths of our market for whom a fully administerable website is out of reach. The world is in a constant state of flux, of course, and none of these conditions are constant — but I believe it is still a little premature to declare the obsolescence of the newswire.
Finally, I was under the impression that part of the purpose, the underlying thrust, of social media features was to make it possible for readers to interact with the work of web authors. Based on this premise, I don’t believe a service with a professed Web 2.0 mentality should apologize for the fact that all of its links do not lead to its clients’ product catalog.
>That’s why Alexa rates prweb.com at 1,929 and http://www.irwebreport.com at 336,511 in terms of traffic ranking — information density
Proves my point. PRWeb reaps traffic at its clients’ expense. Nice business that, getting other people to provide and pay for your linkbait.
Nice to see I’m not alone in calling social media releases bogus. These just today:
Stowe Boyd: Enough Already: Getting Social Media All Wrong
Robert Scoble: Stowe’s right: kill the social media press release idea now
Alexa’s traffic rankings for various wire services
1,929 — PRWeb
3,310 — PR Newswire
3,572 — Marketwire
3,797 — BusinessWire
52,011 — Primezone
See, PRWeb has a ranking disproportionate to its importance and size. And that’s because it’s social media efforts are all driving traffic to PRWeb.
Makes you think, doesn’t it?