This is a great tool for larger size companies that will have a lot of media tracking they need to do. It appeals to stakeholders involved in PR, data analytics, and helps decision makers know what will have the most impact and where their marketing dollars should go!
PR Newswire is a terrific solution for ensuring that news is distributed in a way that is findable and searchable. It also automatically ties the news to ticker symbols. It's not a useful or meaningful solution for actually securing news coverage. It still requires picking up the phone and pitching media.
User-friendly - PR Newswire has a very user-friendly website that makes it simple and easy to get a news release set up for a distribution relatively quickly. You can also save your selections from a previous distribution to make it go even faster. Since I am pretty much always sending out my releases to the same distribution list, all I have to do is check that box.
Customer support - When you submit a release via the web portal, you have several options about when it will be released. I typically want my releases to go out as quickly as possible, but even then I know an account representative will take a look at my release and accompanying multimedia materials and give me a quick call to confirm and make sure everything is set before officially sending it out. It's a helpful step without making the process cumbersome.
Reports - PR Newswire provides timely and comprehensive reports, so it's easy to tell the where the news release went.
Personally I didn't see any. Though I know my boss had a few calls with their team to get the daily reports formatted and presented just the way she wanted them. The team took a few tries to get into the swing of what she was asking for, but they were more than willing to put in the time and effort to customize the reports for her.
The pricing structure is comprehensive, depending on how far you want your release to go.
Adding multi-media, such as photos, increases visibility quite a bit but PR Newswire charges extra for photos.
PR Newswire also charges an annual fee for storing your logo, which I think should be free for organizations that already have an account (and pay a membership fee).
PR Newswire is an industry leader and gives the user the ability to send out a press release, to a wide audience, very quickly and easily. The pricing is on par with other companies (perhaps they are a bit higher) but they do send useful "visibility" reports after a release is distributed, which is helpful when trying to explain ROI to C suite leaders. You also can email or fax your own distribution list, which is helpful and reduces the need for a media monitoring service
Honestly this is probably the absolute worst part of the company. I had maybe 5 different emails from 5 different people when attempting to use this service, and I never knew who my account manager was and who the other people were.
PR Newswire and Businesswire are familiar, similar products in terms of newswire distribution services. Many times it comes down to client familiarity with one service over the other, the cost per distribution, the reach of distribution, as well as other related fees, i.e., you have to be a member of PR Newswire to use the service and then pay fees on top of that for individual distributions.
I wasn't at the top of these discussions but, I did help make monthly reports that went directly to the CFO and CEO that used these analytics to show how our corporate communications office was doing and all the work we had done for the past month. This is a way to cover yourself and show that we had done a lot of work and good work at that.
