Working in technology PR requires you to constantly be learning about services that can help clients. That’s why I was glad to have some folks from Business Wire visit Strategic Communications Group’s offices and catch us up on improvements to their distribution services.
Business Wire is very well established and has been around since the 1960’s. The company is owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway company, so stability and internal investments can’t be questioned. I think of them as one of the two “incumbents” in the press release distribution business, the other being PR Newswire. But the market has changed dramatically in the past few years and there are a large number of new competitors, both traditional and online only. So I was interested in hearing what BW was up to.
We spent most of the time talking about two things — their Enhanced Online News (EON) offering, and BW’s move into mobile. EON isn’t new but sounds new and improved, and getting into mobile is very exciting.
Originally built in partnership with PR Web, EON is most easily understood as an alternative (or complimentary) online distribution channel. It includes all the usual online and social media distributions, along with some really cool features for PR types. One feature is a totally customizable URL, in which you can include your critical keyword or term.
There is also the ability to create a totally customized meta description of the release, which according to BW Google uses when gauging relevance. There is a limit of 200 characters, and BW told us way too many customers fail to take advantage of this feature. An EON release is forever — it never goes away, and the content is refreshed every 30 days so that search engines continue to view it as relevant.
Business Wire Mobile is much newer and by BW’s admission a work in progress. BW makes its news available across a wide range of platforms, including their own mobile optimized site, a BW mobile app for iPhone, Viigo for Blackberry and distribution via the mobile apps for AP, Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters and Yahoo Finance. Sure there are issues with audience fragmentation, and the excellent reporting BW provides for traditional distribution isn’t available yet. But they are building audience at around 100K per month according to our rep, and I’m impressed they are moving so quickly to respond to their audience increasingly going mobile.
All in all it was pretty impressive. BW is definitely not resting on its laurels and is moving aggressively to protect market share. If you haven’t looked at them in a while, check these features out, especially if your client is public and has a reasonable PR budget.
For all different kinds of companies including startups and those that have no interest in traditional news coverage, here’s a good read on competing distribution services from Steve Mullen at EndGame PR. It does a good job of laying out the full spectrum.