A question that comes up frequently among clients is, “Which wire service should we be using?” The query is not necessarily re: the best wire service for Social Media Releases (which we’ve covered, and hope to revisit); they just want some advice on the wire services in general.
We tend to be resolutely neutral with our answers. There are pros and cons to each of the major services, across areas ranging from Price to Ease of Doing Business to Reporting, etc.
When it comes to Press Releases that lead to INK, though, the answer has been nebulous. First of all, a badly-written release (of which there are too many!) almost never leads to a write-up. And depending on a press release to generate articles is a fool’s game, anyway – but, it does happen sometimes. And it’s a sign of the tightening race between PRNewswire, BusinessWire and MarketWire that one of them finally decided to invest some real money in finding the answer.
According to a release issued today by PRN:
“Press releases distributed by PR Newswire get used by media more often than copy from competing services and generate more clips when they are picked up…
“Press releases transmitted by PR Newswire were used 55% of the time, versus Marketwire’s 43% pickup rate, Business Wire’s rate of 38% and a rate of 37% by PrimeNewswire, according to the study.”
It’s too easy to say, “PRN paid for the survey, no surprise they won the contest.” There have been cases where I’ve counseled a client – who “just knows” that they lead the market – to “prove it” via 3rd party validation.
I would have included some of the multimedia assets in the PRN release, e.g., the video from the independent analyst, but they were not posted with embed code (which means PRN still gets a “FAIL” in terms of making their own releases Social Media friendly – sorry, gang). UPDATE: they posted embed code – good job with the “listening” thing.
I didn’t have an opportunity to call the other wire services for comment. (“Dammit, Jim, I’m a blogger, not a journalist!”) … I welcome their replies in the Comments field below, though!
Meanwhile, the twitterati are not impressed:
And, of course, there’s the old “it’s about the content” line. 
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Looks like a pretty interesting study to me and one I’ll be looking at closer, perhaps referring to. Thanks for the link, I think knee jerk cynicism isn’t justified here.
Ok, so after reading the release about the study one big thing stands out to me:
“A pick-up was defined as any reference to the release subject matter in media published after the date and time of the release. ”
So that presumes that no other outreach is being done and gives all credit to the press release itself. I believe that’s a logical fallacy called “post hoc ergo propter hoc” - after the fact, therefor because of the fact.
Some of the other stuff, like delicious links and Wikipedia and pagerank and website traffic all sounds more valid. When it comes down to direct impact, as the above criteria is trying to measure, it clearly remains unknown.
I notice that VOCUS is conspicuous by its absence. While I’ve had solid successes with Business Wire, virtually ALL of the wire/circuit distribution services (Business Wire, PR Newswire, etc.) beat VOCUS’s must-opt-out e-mail model hands down, in my experience.
It’s noteworthy that VOCUS attempts to have its PR cake and eat it too: Before buying, you’re assured that it’s the best way to distribute releases…but, you know, you really *should* consider supplementing your distributions with (wait for it…) PR Web, VOCUS’ own wire/circuit distro service.
Todd - Good catch re video code. It’s part of the multimedia release now, and should have been earlier.
Jim Fong, president of Diagnostics Plus:
Brett Simon, media relations manager, PR Newswire:
Marshall K. is right: knee-jerk cynicism isn’t necessarily justified. But I want to be clear — my cynicism (or maybe “criticism”) isn’t knee-jerk.
I’ve spent time with each of the Big 3 newswire companies — PRN, BW and MW — and my findings match what Todd’s earlier post about the “best” wire services: Marketwire meets my needs best.
I could go on for days about why, and I might later on my own blog. For now, Marketwire meets my needs in terms of functionality, good price, and ease of use. PRN — based on *my own* research and my own findings — does not.
Here’s another thing that’s not addressed is the issue of quality vs. quantity. PRN assumes more is better — that the more sites that picked up my news release means my “PR is better.” But what sites are these? Do they actually have a significant, interested audience?
Do these sites have a strong Google Page Rank, therefore giving me an SEO boost from the links my in my news release (BTW: Last time I checked, PRN didn’t even offer hyperlinked anchor text — a key part of SEO — outside of its grossly overpriced “multimedia news release” product)?
OK, I had better give this rant a rest before I get carpel tunnel.
Marshall, you’re dead on.
There are some very big flaws in this survey, mainly that it’s a giant hasty generalization.
This survey does not take into account the newswire distribution ordered by the client (according to their parent company’s earnings relases PR Newswire clients use their US1 distribution. Meanwhile Business Wire clients tend to use more customized local circuits)
This survey does not take into consideration the media relations done by the client or their agency - who is to say that the newswire is responsible for the pick up?
This survey does not take into account whether the client desired pick up or not. Some companies use newswires to meet disclosure requirements and as such, are not written to engage the average reporter but rather to provide key corporate information to the financial community/disclosure outlets.
The last part is that the number of pickups is irrelevant to the number of eyeballs. Without the qualifications, I could get picked-up by 500 blogs with 3 readers, or I could get picked up by 4 blogs with 500,000 readers. According to the study, I would only have been successful had I attained coverage on the 500 blogs.
So, what would provide the better ROI? Obviously it’s something this study assumes is total coverage, regardless of outlet and article quality, and not the complete campaign effort from a PR team, in-house outreach. Instead it should have looked at combined campaigns, agency/in-house team outreach, and qualified the number of eyeballs.
Therefore the study begs the question, has PR Newswire now alienated the entire community of PR professionals by claiming to do their work?
In reply to Marshall Kirkpatrick’s questions about whether articles might have been the result of a PR person’s personal outreach to the press, the answer — for all the services and releases measured — is, yes. But the data is still accurate and the content that ran over PR Newswire still resulted in more news coverage.
The concept of this study was relatively simple – compare the pick-up rate of the four major newswire services and determine if there are any significant differences among the group in rate and frequency of pick-up.
The design of the study, however, presented some challenges because anybody who understands the dynamics of news distribution and media coverage knows that the cause-and-effect is not necessarily “black and white.” There are many factors that contribute to a press release generating media pick-up, from the newsworthiness of what is being announced, to the notoriety of the company, to the strength and reputation of the wire service, to the ability to target the release to the appropriate outlet and reporter.
The goal for Diagnostics Plus was to create a level playing field that stripped out as much of subjectivity as possible, allowing for an apples-to-apples, statistical analysis of newswire pick-up. They accomplished this by utilizing a large, randomly selected sample size - 1,200 press releases - an extended time horizon – three months – and industry-proven data sources – Factiva and Lexis/Nexis. In doing so, the margin of error for the study was plus or minus 3% at 95% confidence.
A brief review of the methodology: On each business day from April 1 to June 30, 20 press releases – five per wire service – were randomly selected and tracked using the online content libraries Lexis/Nexis and Factiva for media pickup over a two-week period. A pickup was defined as any reference to the release subject matter in media published after the date and time of the release. Republication of the release without alteration was not counted as pickup.
Todd:
Thanks for publishing my initial Twitter response to the study. @daveyarmon contacted me via Twitter and informed me that the study only counted stories developed by media, bloggers and others. I stand corrected.
However, I still wonder how and whether PR Newswire controlled for media outreach by PR pros. . . . This is a significant issue that I’d love to get an answer on.
Fard
Michael Russell has an accurate take on the Vocus service. Diagnostics Plus did them a favor by not including them in the measurement, as the content has to be compelling for the media to care.
I am sorry that we played any part in inflaming Mike Keliher’s carpal tunnel.
Today’s announcement went out over PR Newswire as a normal release, with anchor text linking to Quantcast and Compare.com data. You can see this XHTML rendered on 900+ sites out of the 5,000 that display PRN content. Of course, the biggies are included, and some industry-specific sites as well.
The multimedia news release also included the anchor text, along with video clips, PPT, PDFs, FAQs, social media toolbar, etc.
Rest that wrist.
And you are dead on, too, Chris Michaels. There is no way the researcher could have known what kind of distribution was ordered by customers of MW, PRN, BW and PZ. The random sample simply measured lots and lots of releases — more than 1,200 over three months — to see which generated reporter-written articles. The content sent over PR Newswire was written about more.
You are also right that some releases are sent out solely for compliance reasons. If you don’t want anyone to see your news, PR Newswire is probably not the best service to use. Save us for the occasions you want to drive your stock price, sell more stuff, build your brand, etc.
To your point about eyeballs, Chris, here are some good third-party web analytics to review. http://tinyurl.com/3nfrjz
Hi Todd
I have held off commenting for a few days as I wanted to see if anyone else noticed the implicit finding of this research i.e. that over half of releases sent over the big wire services never get written about - not a statistic I would have thought they would want to draw attention to. I have done some analysis on my blog http://www.showmenumbers.com/news-release-distribution/54-per-cent-of-press-releases-never-get-written-about that suggests this equates to circa 280,000 releases a year at a likely cost of tens of millions of $ in fees and pose the question “at what threshold of pickup, or lack of it, are you just spamming people?”.
Adam
Hi Todd, as a long-term Business Wire veteran (20 years) I feel compelled to respond. To paraphrase from a past presidential debate, “There they go again”.
A truly objective survey would firstly not be funded by one of the subjects of the survey. The control content being analyzed would need to have a number of factors considered. For example, and as stated in an earlier comment, we know that PRN pushes their clients to use their high-cost US1, their largest US media distribution.
Business Wire has fewer clients using National, our largest US distribution, because we take a consultative approach to each client and recommend geographic distribution based on specific needs.
Why does that matter? Because if you are picking a random sampling of releases to analyze media coverage, the distribution circuits of those releases matters, and it is not equal or statistically similar.
I know that’s contrary to what Dave Armon has indicated and if he really believes that the size of the distribution circuit doesn’t matter, maybe he should instruct his customers to use smaller, less expensive options. An apples-to-apples comparison on that front wasn’t done.
There are many other factors that likely affect pickup for any given release, from the subject of the release vs. the day’s news cycle, how the release was pitched (was an agency involved), the size and reputation of the companies, and on and on.
As for the web statistics, there are countless flaws in the study. For one, BW’s goal has always been to drive traffic to a client’s news, where ever it resides - their homepage, our site, Yahoo! Finance and so on.
So we keep contact information and embed hyperlinks so that the stories we push out are complete on all the platforms we serve. PRN, on the other hand, strips out contact information on many of the sites it sends news to, forcing users back to PRN’s website to get that information.
A difference in tactic that affects page counts, links and thus statistics. Either way, we’re proud of our 45 million monthly page views. Surveys can and are designed to achieve a desired outcome quite easily…stats 101.
The real deal behind this “survey” is not that PRN is looking to better the industry by providing useful insights. Rather, it appears that PRN is doing what many political campaigns do when they don’t have the goods on their side - they create smoke screens and confuse.
They may attempt to dress this marketing tool as unbiased research, but clearly it was designed to have a predetermined outcome so that it could be used as a sales tool - with a promotional offer attached in fact.
PR Newswire is desperately looking for something positive to say to try and stem the steady flow of bad news and missteps by their management. They have made a serious of strategic blunders that is costing them market share.
These include the closing of their local newsrooms, their laying off of senior staff, lack of investment in technology and on and on.
Evidence of these failings are in the financial reports of their own parent company, UBM (go to http://www.unitedbusinessmedia.com/ubm/media/releases/2008/2008-02-29/2008-02-29.pdf
for 2/29/08 report, see p. 6; go to http://www.unitedbusinessmedia.com/ubm/media/releases/2008/2008-07-29c/2008-07-29c.pdf for 7/29/08 report, see p. 9 and note stronger language).
Independent research analysis (from 9/11/08) done by Citi (which follows UBM) references major client losses due to their restructuring. Key words in the report are “client defections,” “self-inflicted,” “protracted process.” In short, they had to do something to stem the losses and shake the perception in the marketplace.
A comparison of press releases as they appear on http://www.BusinessWire.com and http://www.PRNewswire.com (or http://www.Marketwire.com for that matter) shows a stark difference in quality let alone back-end technology.
Business Wire’s advanced content and visually appealing releases speak for themselves, plus our patented NX systems that deliver this content provides to-the-second simultaneous delivery of rich XHTML content, including spreadsheet functional earnings tables, to media, disclosure destinations, individuals and other content redistributors.
And our just relaunched EON: Enhanced Online News service (http://eon.businesswire.com) further shows our commitment to building tools that enable communicators to build and present press releases using a wide range of tools and formats, with guides to help them enhance SEO, and embeds/links to make sharing easy.
At the end of the day, PRN paid Diagnostics Plus to conduct a survey for reasons cited above. We prefer to build meaningful products and services for our clients while continuing to support them by local bureaus staffed with knowledgeable, long-term account reps, managers and newsroom personnel - substance over style.