My initial impression of their platform was that it had a contemporary look-and-feel and I’ve also found their general approach to packaging (monthly recurring) to be inline with today’s expectations for hosted services.   From a strict product perspective, I never fully understood the difference between their offering and what someone would get from WordPress, Tumblr or a host of other general content management systems.

As the concept of an entirely differentiated “social media” release has lost steam and possibly to better target SMBs, PitchEngine seemed to shift direction and begin focusing more on search and positioning themselves as a more general content sharing tool.  In principal, this was a good decision however a few intrinsic attributes of their platform have created a dissonance between their messaging and product, which has been exacerbated by the algorithmic changes we’ve seen Google make through 2011.

First and foremost, the lack of consistent editorial oversight has created a mass of content on the domain that may be seen as “low quality” by Google and a quick glance at their traffic according to Compete.com, does seem to indicate a general decline in traffic over the past year.

PitchEngine recently announced a new release, which claims to focus on providing customers with the tools to create “better content.”  My initial reaction based on the messaging was that PitchEngine had engineered their content management system to better help users generate high quality content however my initial impression after poking around seems to be that most of the changes are design-focused.  The core feature-set seems comparable with the legacy platform.

Generally speaking, I am not convinced that PitchEngine has fully defined who their core user is and what fundamental problem they solve.  If the problem they are attempting to solve is creation and sharing of multimedia content, then the challenge becomes how to differentiate themselves from the existing platforms who are either better financed (e.g. Tumblr) or being collaboratively engineered by a community of developers (e.g. WordPress).

My two cents is that when it comes to content creation in today’s environment, focusing exclusively on the tool is simply an insurmountable task given the competitors in the market.  Focusing on helping users understand how they fit into the broader media ecosystem, what content to create and how to best create content for a specific target are the problems that remain unsolved and represent the best opportunity to deliver value.

Local results on Page 1 of Web search

There are a variety of great resources that discuss on-site considerations when it comes to optimizing for local search.  TopRank has a nice blog posting on optimizing for local search and running a query for optimizing AND “local search” will show you a number of other results (on a side note if a search marketer has figured out how to get their content at the top of Google for queries like optimizing AND “local search” then it’s probably worth reading the article).

I want to focus more on some external considerations for how to build online equity once you have your on-page ducks in a row.

Getting a seat at the table

To begin playing, you first need a seat at the table.  To show up in local search results, your site need to be recognized by the engines as being associated with a business in a given locale.  Google, Yahoo! and Bing all have processes in place to help businesses get get included in the local listings and associated with a given locale.  If you’re validated with Google and use Google Webmaster tools, you can also associated your site with a given location.

There are some who recommend submitting your business information to Acxiom or InfoUSA because a lot of the local engines and directories license data from these providers although I’m not entirely sold on whether there is much value in going through these middle-men.  For one, they will actually sell your information to marketers so you can expect your aggravation level to increase as you get more cold calls and direct mail.  For two, if you need to make changes to your business information you should know that the best way to make sure those updates are propagated on the search engines and directories is to to go directly to the source.

The other side of this is that Acxiom and InfoUSA will apparently get you onto more sites however after Google, Yahoo! and Bing I feel like you quickly get to the point of diminishing returns.

Raising the stakes

Once your site has been associated with a given locale, a lot of work needs to be done on-site.  As mentioned, there are a number of resources out there.  Basically, you should make sure to have local signals on your site so the engines realize that your site is more than just a little focused on the location you want to target.

From an external perspective, you need to start thinking about how to create authority in a localized fashion.  Here are some tactics to consider:

Localize your news release – (Disclaimer – I work for Vocus, product manage PRWeb, and will be more professionally and financially successful if you send out news releases with PRWeb) – Consider using local identifiers in your news release.  Instead of writing a headline like “Boutique Offers Tips for Spring,” make sure to include a local indicator: “Washington, DC Boutique Offers Tips for Spring.”  The local indicator will make it more likely that local audiences will see your release in localized alerts and queries in both the Web and News search engines.  The local indicators will also increase the likelihood that local third party publishers will pick-up your story and link back to your site.

Engage local mainstream influencers – It’s pretty important to find out who the local influencers are in your community – the journalists who create stories and have audiences.  Most people have a good sense for who the mainstream local influencers are – reaching them is the challenge.  However these days, most of them are active on Twitter and/or Facebook.  It’s not a bad idea to be diplomatic and engage them in these mediums as a way to ease your way into a relationship with them.

Engage local online influencers – Mainstream influencers shouldn’t be the sole focus of your efforts.  For example, I live in DC and our local food guy is Tom Sietsema.  Everyone in the restaurant business in DC is preoccupied with Sietsema but at the end of the day he is going to write what he is going to write with little regard for your business.  Often times, online influencers are going to be much easier to develop and maintain relationships with and you can be sure that you are going to get link value from the articles they write about your business.  Find out who the local bloggers are that are relevant to your business and embrace them, comp them, do whatever it takes to create a relationship because collectively, they can shoot you to the top.

Use localized ad tools – These days, you can microtarget your advertising efforts via Facebook.  These are good ways to get more mileage out of link building campaigns actually because you can not only localize your audience but you can also focus on keywords that are likely to hit influencers.  For example, there are 1,180 people in the DC area who list ‘blogging’ as one of their interests.  How is that for targeted advertising?

1,180 blogging aficionados in DC

Have some fun – It’s one thing to chat with influencers and ask them to write about you.  It’s a completely different thing to hold an event,  invite them out and make them your guests of honor.  A few years back, a local area promoter Laura Carlson invited me out to an event with a bunch of local bloggers and journalists at a club downtown.  Guess what?  We all wrote about the event and venue beforehand, to invite our “tribes” to come, and then of course afterward as well.  Not only was the club able to reach new audiences through us but there was also a windfall of links that came from the event.

Recently it has come to our attention that a Web site called Hao-Odnla has been scraping our content and syndicating it while removing attribution to PRWeb as well as customer hyperlinks.  What makes the situation even more suspect is that they have blocked our IP range so the only way we know about it is through our customers.

I’m just posting this to let all customers know that Hao-Odnla is not a trusted site and is most certainly not a PRWeb partner.  We will be looking into how we can get our content removed from their site but in the mean time, I would highly recommend that everyone who might be thinking about signing up for Hao-Odnla to not do so.

Bookmarking is a vestige of the Mosaic browser (circa 1993) and has subsequently emerged into a persistent feature of Web browsers.  Bookmarks aren’t rocket science:

• There are a lot of pages on the Internet.
• Some of these pages are interesting.
• It might be handy to have a tool to help remember the interesting pages.

Pre-bust, a number of venture-backed startups tacked on an additional step in this progression:

• It might be handy to have an easy way to share interesting pages with others.

Of course, this was all pre-bust and all the companies that were working on implementing this last point flamed out because there was no financial model behind these startups.

Post-bust, a new wave of startups (most notably Delicious) began exploring this question once again and some of them achieved a modicum of financial success (i.e. Digg).  Although there has been limited financial achievement from social bookmarking sites, the general usage has been more significant and at this point in time the marketers enter the progression and add another point:

• There are a lot of bookmarking sites with a lot of eyeballs so it would be good to share our message with that audience.

And predictably, the service providers enter the equation with:

• There are a lot of marketers spending a lot of time posting business messages to social bookmark sites so let’s create a tool that helps them streamline the process.

Enter OnlyWire and a few others.

So at any rate, OnlyWire is a tool that makes it easier for marketers to post their business messages to multiple sharing sites without having to spend the time and individually share their message.  In fact, the one-off nature of other sharing tools like ShareThis and AddThis is a differentiator that they point to in the brief introductory video on their home page.

‘Saving people time’ is a great benefit prop for online applications however in general I ask the question ‘What is the act that is streamlined.’  For instance, if a tool helps people save time involved with monitoring social media sites (i.e. Radian6) then that is a good thing.  Monitoring and analysis of online conversations is good.

If a tool helps people save time interacting within various social media sites that is also good.

The issue for products like OnlyWire is that I’m not sure if they are a tool that helps people save time engaging within social media or spamming online communities.  My initial impression is that in the spam-engage continuum, OnlyWire falls further on the ‘spam’ side and that is fine – as long as their roadmap is eventually focused on moving customers from spam to engagement.

From a realistic perpsective, posting a bunch of messages (without engaging) is a short term proposition.  You will probably drive traffic at the outset but over time if you are just posting and not engaging you will be either tuned out by the community or banished.

Now I know that since their acquisition they have attempted to place filters in place to prevent spam practices but if I were PM’ing OnlyWire I would seriously be thinking about how to solve the following problems:

1. How to help customers be selective about the community sites where they are going to be active (instead of providing them with a big page of community sites where they enter credentials);
2. How to help customers listen to conversations going on in those communities so they are actually plugging-in.  This doesn’t mean offering a full blown monitoring solution like Radian6 but it may mean helping them aggregate and organize feeds;
3. How to help customers engage beyond their own posts -

My guess is that a use case where one customer signs up for two or three sites and spends time engaging is going to result in greater longterm tangible benefits (SEO, traffic, business, etc.) than spending the same allotment of time autoposting to thirty sites.

What other people are saying about OnlyWire:

• OnlyWire, the Automated Bookmarketing System that Almost Died
• OnlyWire Under New Management

Note to self: Remember to take off that ridiculously large event badge next time.

When it comes to ranking, some of the more important variables include:

• Recency - Fresher stories are going to be ranked higher.
• Originality - No brainer.
• Locality – I was unclear how this would impact relevancy unless GN was considering the IP of the searcher when displaying results.
• Quality of source - I’ve written about how Google News considers quality of source in the past.  Their 2003 patent application (which was recently approved) explains in depth the variables that make up “quality of source” in Google’s eyes.
• Aggregate editorial interest - This is of particular interest.  I equate this somewhat to content clustering.  Basically, when Google News is analyzing a news story, it is going to run some content analysis script on the article.  GN is then going to compare the content in the article to the aggregate index.  If the article’s content shares an affinity with prominent content appearing in the aggregate then it will be ranked higher.

I don’t recall Ohye specifically mentioning this but I find it hard to believe that they don’t look carefully at click-through rates of stories as well. Ohye finished up by running through some basic best practices for news search, which the TopRank blog does a good job explaining.

Social Media Portal (SMP): What is your full job title and role at PRWeb.com?

Jiyan Wei (JW): I’m the Director of Product Management – I drive product platform strategy and roadmap execution for PRWeb and support strategic business planning, partnerships, marketing and sales. It is sort of like being the Sous Chef at a restaurant. You work closely with your developers (cooks in the kitchen) to create a product and then support the waiters and waitresses (marketing & sales) who go out and sell the product. Ultimately you report to the head chef (a CMO or CTO) and the owners of the restaurant (executive team, investors).

SMP: Briefly, tell us about PRWeb.com and its target audience

JW: PRWeb.com takes an old tool in the PR toolkit – the press release – and turns it upside down.  Old PR is trying to hit journalists and media hoping they will write a story about you; PRWeb is about helping our clients get their message directly to the audience through the Internet.

Because we primarily leverage Internet channels (instead of closed, proprietary networks) we are able to deliver a product at a significantly lower cost than many other “traditional” newswires.  This means our audience ranges from technically innovative global companies all the way down to your Main Street mom-and-pop shops, like plumbers, wedding-planners and retail stores.

SMP: What was the most challenging part of building the service (and after the acquisition)?

JW: Vocus (PRWeb’s parent company, NASDAQ: VOCS) a leading provider of on-demand software for public relations management, and tends to have some very polished clients  but the majority of PRWeb customers actually are small business owners and marketers.  These segments all have different requirements and determine ROI in different ways.  Developing a depth of understanding for these new segments and then building a product that would satisfy everyone was and continues to be one of the most challenging – and exciting – parts of building the service.

Read the full interview

Direct Distribution

Direct distribution means that a news release is pushed directly to an individual or group of individuals with little or no intermediary.  E-mail is the most common form of direct distribution because the content is moving directly from sender to recipient.  Fax, postal mail delivery and RSS delivery to a recipient’s RSS reader would also qualify as forms of of direct distribution.

Direct Distribution

When it comes to news releases, direct distribution facilitated by a wire system was the original method for distribution and still profoundly impacts the way that traditional wire services (PRNewswire, Business Wire) think about distribution.  It is also a component of the PRWeb approach to distribution, evidenced by our 30K media subscribers who receive e-mails and 250K subscribers who receive our content via RSS.

Indexing

Indexing refers to the practice of making news content available to searchers through various indexes and databases.  Unlike direct distribution, which can be classified as a push method, indexing is classified as a pull method because it involves getting the content placed so it can be found and retrieved by the end user. distribution/consumption process.

Indexing

It is funny to think about indexing as distribution but it is a primary driver of the recalibration of the overall news cycle because of the rapid adoption of search engines.  Today, over 150 million Americans use search engines every day and a significant percentage of this population are looking for news.  Getting news releases placed into this flow of online eyeballs is what differentiated PRWeb from other news distribution services and although most have begun looking at search as a key component, traditional wire services are still figuring out how to integrate search into their distribution strategies.

Syndication

Traditionally, syndication refers to the process in which an article (or sometimes a cartoon) is published in a number of magazines or newspapers at the same time.  When it comes to news releases, syndication means that your news release will be published on additional Web sites when it goes live, in addition to the news release site itself.

Syndication

Syndication is one of the ways that PRWeb is differentiated from free online distribution services because free services rarely any syndication of note (while PRWeb releases are syndicated on leading News sites).  By leveraging RSS and providing tools that make it easy for publishers to syndicate our content we have managed to build the industry’s leading syndication network with over 30K Web sites in total.

Hopefully, this has provided a general framework for how online news distribution works and when you are selecting a news distribution provider you should consider these various methods.

It was comical in a sense but also interesting in that it served a hyperbolic function: it symbolized the process through which free press release services come to market.

Essentially, the process goes something like this:

1. Someone decides they want to create a press release distribution service;
2. They build a content management system that allows users to construct a document;
3. They get the domain indexed in Google News;
4. They start marketing themselves as a “free press release service”

Over the years, there have been countless free press release services spring up and some of them have evolved into pay models.  Some have even developed customer bases and brand equity.

I want spend a few minutes outlining what prospective customers should understand about these services and in order to do so I will first provide a framework for thinking about what it is a press release distribution service actually provides:

• Construction - All services provide a means through which a press release is transferred into a form that can be easily hosted and transferred via the Web.  This can take several forms.  Wire services will often allow a user to transmit a word document that will then be reviewed and uploaded via a back-end CMS.  Many of the newer services provide the user with direct access to a CMS where they can construct a release themselves.
• Distribution - Once the release has been constructed into a structured format it will then be distributed through a variety of channels.  What ‘distribution’ actually means is probably a separate post all together but for now we’ll just acknowledge that it has to go somewhere – to journalists, search engines, syndicate sites, etc.
• Analysis - Once the release has been distributed through the Web, the end user should have some sort of system that provides them with a sense of how much traction the release received.  Again, ‘traction’ is an entirely separate discussion that we will for the time being reserve for a later discussion.

So essentially, all press release distribution services come down to these three components.  Staying within this framework, the question then becomes, what is the difference between a free service and a pay service?

The answer brings us back to the example that sparked this post: anyone can theoretically build a CMS that allows someone to create a Web document.  A slightly more difficult task involves providing a user with some sort of analytics on traction of that document.  What differentiates free services from entrenched services is in the distribution of that document.  The development of a broad distribution network takes significant time and resources.

So the question that a customer should ask when choosing a service is “Where does my press release go?”  With the majority of free services, the release doesn’t go very far and that is because the distribution networks associated with these services are not very significant.  Now if the story has viral potential placement on a Web site and getting indexed in Google News may be sufficient for it to gain significant traction online however the truth of the matter is that the majority of news releases are not breaking Watergate and need to be distributed to the right audiences and that is where services like PRWeb come into play.