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About 2 years ago, Kevin Dill issued a press release on a major newswire and was disappointed to find that much of the original formatting was lost, including the hyperlinks.  As most entrepreneurial efforts start, Kevin’s reaction –  “Isn’t there a better way?” – led to action.

After a year spent talking to agencies and experimenting, he came up with the Press Release News Network, or PRNN.  The concept was, “Open Source PR.”  Basically, according to Kevin, “this means we let the agencies and clients dictate to us how they wanted a press release distribution network built.”  If the BusinessWires of the world could start-over from scratch, according to Kevin, they might look a whole lot like PRNN. 

In a recent note to me, Kevin noted that PRNN has already turned down buyout offers and startup money, to stay small and responsive.  The advantage to keeping it small is that PRNN can offer a multimedia/social media press releases with a built-in social media newsroom for $25 ($500 per month for unlimited release distribution for agencies).  PRNN will even host the images, video, and audio files as a standard feature.  

“PRNN’s unlimited monthly program is about the cost of just one press release on a major newswire.  We are not tied to corporate earnings and pricing pressures, we are all about providing clients with as much bang for their buck as possible,” Kevin told me. 

PRNN.com is coming out of beta.  Here are some of the key features and services of PRNN, according to Mr. Dill: 

1. “Press Release distribution options at the City, State, Regional, National, and Global level.  This is not a cookie cutter network by design.  We will have Global distribution to 92 country sites and 1,052 International city sites.  
2. “Quick and easy press release input via our PRWizard™ press release input system.
3. “We are fully PRX and Social Media Press Release ready and can format and distribute any other additional flavors of press releases.
4. “A free Social Media Newsroom is provided to every client. 
5. “Social tagging is available in every release for easy book-marking.
6. “Yahoo and Google Stats via our PRStats™ are embedded into every release for a quick birds-eye view of search engine cataloging.
7. “Every site will have a 10 language translation option.  Many international country/city sites will display in their native language as default.
8. “Podcasts and audio segments automatically get distributed to our iTunes channel.
9. “Every release gets Twittered and delivered to many RSS aggregators.
10. “PRNN is the first news service to tap the subculture of Second Life and provide the means to distribute their news to the “real world.”  Second Life citizens can create their own free press release by teleporting to the Virtual PRNN office at: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Ess/21/53/172.” 

Please note that SHIFT has not used PRNN (yet), nor am I recommending PRNN’s services.  All of this info comes courtesy of Kevin Dill and his team.  Having said that, a lot of what Kevin tells me about PRNN makes sense.  If you try out PRNN, please report back to me on your experiences; I’ll publish your reactions here…