Best Press Release Distribution Service?

The honest answer is that wire services, in my humble opinion, are excellent sources for SEO and carrying the story to people through search.

If you want a better shot at getting a reporter or blogger to cover your story, don't rely on the wires. Reach out and build relationship.

PRNewsire, BusinessWire, and MarketWire have some of the most effective SEO results in my experience.

The market here in Canada is a little different - we have two main companies that pretty much own the entire wire service space (CNW Group and Marketwire).  So, I can't necessarily help you with specific feedback on any of the US wire services, but here's a few quick thoughts that may be of use:

1. A while ago, my good friend Tara did some deep research into the various news release distribution services in the US, and blogged her findings, here: http://www.marqui.com/blog/wire_services_r.aspx

2. Your choice of service should be guided by the purpose of the release itself and the kind of company or organization it is about.  As an obvious example - if it's a publicly traded company, you need to be sure you're covering the disclosure regulations by submitting it through a properly-accredited wire service.

Even if it's not a public company announcement, there's often no real substitute for a full disclosure wire service - one that sends your news directly into the editorial systems of newsrooms right around the world.  Services such as PRNewswire do this, working on a permission-based network (i.e. the newsrooms have explicitly subscribed to receive the news being pumped across the wire).

I'll confess that I really haven't delved into PRWeb in too much detail, but I'm not convinced of the merits of their "direct-to-consumer" model.  If I want to go direct to consumers, I'll use a combination of blogs, email, and traditional pitching. But the potential to get my news directly in front of journalists via a more traditional wire service might help me reach many more consumers, assuming the news is remotely interesting and gets picked up, of course.

Last thought - if you really want to evaluate different distribution methods, have them pitch to you.  It's interesting to hear the different approaches taken by PRNewswire, Marketwire, and others.

Hope some of this proves useful.

Thanks for the input Michael - very useful.

p.s. I'm actually in the UK.

Ah. That's a relatively unknown market for me. Daft, really, as I grew up in the UK and lived there until we moved to Canada in '96 - but I didn't move into PR until some time after I arrived over here, so I don't have much experience of the UK-based wire services.

I know that Cision operates a wire service in the UK that is reputed to be pretty good (the acquired it from someone else - Romeike, I think. Can't vouch for how effective they are. Note: Cision has a pretty rotten reputation in this country, but they also have something approaching a monopoly in the media monitoring market, as I discussed briefly in this post. There's no real reason to believe they're as bad in the UK, though.

There are a ton of smaller, mainly web-only distribution services in the UK and Europe, but (going back to my earlier comment) if the news you're looking to distribute is truly important, I don't think you can go too far wrong with the top tier services such as PRNewswire and Businesswire.  The UK Press Association has a list of accredited wire services (with contact info) on their website, here.

Cheers for the advice. This time I think I'll go with PRNewswire & run the story with a different angle on one of the other online-based services.

Like anything else, I guess it's trial and error.

From http://wingnutseo.com/

PR.Com: A cross between a public relations and advertising entity, PR.com is a directory of businesses, products and services, a press release distribution service, job search website, and online publication of articles, reviews and celebrity interviews. With a full company profile, each business listed on PR.com has a powerful means by which to generate quality leads as well as gain worldwide and local exposure for all of their products, services and other business information.

PRWeb.com: The recognized leader in online news and press release distribution service for small and medium-sized businesses and corporate communications. PRWeb pioneered Free Press Release Distribution and continues to set the standard for online news distribution.

PRNewsWire.com: Now in its 52nd year, PR Newswire Association LLC provides electronic distribution, targeting, measurement, translation and broadcast services on behalf of some 40,000 corporate, government, association, labor, non-profit, and other customers worldwide.

Mashable listed some free PR newswires here

prweb.com is pretty good. They drive a decent amount of traffic to my site when we drop a release on the wire. I think they have a free service too.

The last time we sent out a national press release (as opposed to the regional releases which I just handle myself), we used PRWeb and experienced fair results with it getting picked up. We payed for the extra push and that didn't do much for us. Still, they were easy to use, we had personal customer service, and their composition suggestions are clear and I think well done. If you have no idea how to string two words together they have editors who will tweak your release. That said, PRWeb is the only service I have experience with, so I don't have anything to compare them with. Ironically, I was about to start researching this very topic as I'm working on an article about press release composition! If I find out anything earth-shattering I'll report it here.

yeah I use prweb.com mainly too.
normally i spend about $150-$250.

I've heard good things about prweb.com.

Do you use different distribution services to target print/broadcast media vs. online sources? General opinion seems to be that companies tend to be good at either one or the other.

I have used a few other services, but when I am just trying to push some web traffic I run with prweb.

prnewswire is decent.