@eric3000 I agree, sending out a press release to every email address you can find/buy is death. That practice only fills spam boxes and the pockets of companies like BusinessNewswire and PRNewsWire. But don't you think the way you communicate with the press is different from the way you communicate with the general public?

@eric3000 I disagree the press release is dead, but I do think most people are using them in the wrong way. If you think writing a press release and 'distributing' via news wires is all you have to do, then no it doesn't work like @dennisvdvliet points out. Where I still see a great value however, and how I've successfully used it, is as a vehicle to include all the relevant information a journalist might need in a way that's as accessible as possible. The easier you can make it for a journalist to write an article about your news, the better chance you have. So that's what I do. I write a personal email to relevant journalists and include the press release as an additional resource with all the images, videos, quotes, stats, data and other background information they might want to know, but you wouldn't include in your email message. Disclosure: I'm one of founders of pr.co's original incarnation back when it was called PressDoc. @dennisvdvliet: I'm curious to hear how the email distribution functionality is being used. As you know it's something we originally didn't implement, because we had a hard time designing it in a way we felt aligned with our vision of how modern press releases should be used. Care to share some numbers of how many people are generally emailed, what the response rates are, etc? Would be interesting to compare the response rate (and succeeding coverage) of the users emailing few journalists with personalized messages versus those sending emails in bulk.

@marckohlbrugge I checked the last 100 campaigns and found the following stats: - 37/100 of the campaigns go to 100 people or less - open rates for campaigns going to 100 people or less are rarely below 20% (just in 2 out of the 37 cases) - 63/100 campaigns go to over 100 people - open rates for campaigns going to over 100 people are below 20% for 43 out the 63 campaigns So the majority of users use the email distribution in a way it was not really intended to be used (to send large volumes of emails). But people using it in the way we intended to be used get way better results. Keep an eye on our blog (http://blog.pr.co) where we shall more stats about this soon.

@dennisvdvliet Cool. Thanks for sharing! Haven't used the distribution functionality yet, so not sure how it works exactly, but might make sense to give people a heads up when they enter e.g. 50 contacts. Educate them how personalized message convert better (share those same stats), etc. Looking forward to the blog posts!

@jamesepember The main reason we love building it :-)

@jamesepember what other alternatives have you tried and passed on?

@patrick Should be http://inside.thenextweb.com I think :)

@dennisvdvliet yep correct, edited it in my comment as well now. Thanks for noticing

@MaxTB well said. I've gotten much better results via blog posts (guest and company posted) over press releases.

@MaxTB pr.co helps you create a good looking press release with all the relevant information and attachments (high res etc) in less time. So instead of spending time on tinkering with Tumblr and DropBox to create a glossy press release we enable users to spend time on what really matters: content, story telling and building press relations. Email tracking functionality like Yesware is part of our offering btw.

@dennisvdvliet Hi Dennis -- and (despite my rant) congratulations with the business so far. Sounds like your team, including Boris who I notice founded The Next Web, is doing well, especially since the relaunch from PressDoc. I'm not suggesting people tinker around to create a press release template, I'm saying the opportunity is to find a better way to tell your actual story. I think there's a risk that formats like press releases and blogs lumber startups with the baggage of their definitions and cause people who don't live and breathe Comms to pump out more generic fodder, through little fault of their own. I don't think really great, professional PR is as easy as signing up to a service like this -- I think the bigger and more likely risk is that innocent companies will sign up, thinking that they are doing the right thing and looking the part, when in fact they are just spamming journalists with more elegant-looking chaff.

@MaxTB Hey Max, thanks for sharing your thoughts here. What PR innovations do you find interesting at the moment?

@daveying99 I'm actually writing this up at the moment as the second in a series of three posts that define my communications agency, Augur (http://itsaugur.com). The first post was all about how editors are more important than content (http://mxtb.co/1skZ6yH) and this second post is about how good PR requires better engineering. Off the top of my head, tools I'll be talking about include: Yesware for email Import.io for sucking in data to do smart things with it Twitter API for everything from populating details in media lists to identifying second rounds of influential targets based on our initial lists Asana for all project management + communication, also hoping to build apps that generate reports etc from it. Obviously stuff like Google Drive, Docs, Hangouts, Analytics etc. You get the gist.

@hardaway Hi Francine, what is it that you want?

@hardaway Definitely with you in the sense that every company should find somewhere to tell their story to the people who matter and make it easy to understand who they are. I sort of wish more companies would spruce up their /about/ page with this kind of stuff.

@MrJosiahT Impressive number of clippings you collected. Did you use the browser extension or did you add the manually?

@dennisvdvliet I went through all of our referral links and Google News stories and manually added them using the browser extension. Took quite a while! The extension is helpful, but something really automated would be cool too.

@mrcunsolo Thanks for the kind words! "Pretty good" is cool ;-), but how can we make it "awesome" for you?

@dennisvdvliet I'm British so "pretty good" is roughly the same thing : ) We don't really do enough press to warrant using the CRM functions but if we did I imagine a plugin for Gmail would be useful i.e. I can continue using Gmail to send msgs to Journalists and Bloggers but can review open rates etc...