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We issued our latest press release just over a week ago - it went out on Cambridge Network, PRWeb and a bunch of free sites. I was interested to see how the PR would fare in terms of news coverage and value for money.

Remember:

• Releasing unlimited news items on the Cambridge Network site is free for members. Corporate membership subscription rates depend on the number of staff in the organisation - the entry level for a 1-5 person company is £115 incl. VAT per annum.

• Each press release has a separate cost on PRWeb, with the cheapest at $80 (£51.88 incl. bank charges).

• The freemium PR syndication sites carry no cost at all for the free version, although you can pay for premium services. I was interested to see what $0 got me.

Some freemium sites were hard to manage in terms of setting the press release date. In some cases I had to delay my entry to avoid premature release. This added a degree of tangible extra effort and some intangible time cost.

A few hours after the release embargo I had a look at Google News, Yahoo News and MSN Live. The Cambridge Network release was on Google news within minutes of release. The PRWeb one was on Yahoo! news a few hours later. Nothing showed up on MSN Live. I looked at a few news aggregation sites such as Newsnow and they soon had the Yahoo! feed.

The freemium sites were non-existent on the news pages, and it was around 80:20 whether it even showed up on their web sites! For reasons from PR entry to clarity of presentation now, I'd give my 'best in show' award to Online PR News. I still don't understand what goes on at openPR.com, as this is my second time watching a news item disappear into the ether!

Today I had a follow-up email from PRWeb which told me how many page impressions and reads the article had received. Their site has a news management console that gives you access to various analytics. It also gave me a search link to view the online pick-up of the press release using Google. It didn't tell me how long readers lingered over each read, which is arguably the only meaningful measure.

I'm not a PR or SEO expert, and my scope is limited to what happens when you use different web services rather than practice PR in the large, but the subjective conclusion has to be that you get a good ROI from a Cambridge Network membership. They have clearly put some work into ensuring that Googlebot regularly crawls the site, and because people post new articles on the site throughout the day, the crawl process is frequent and items appear on Google News quickly. If the Cambridge Network site also provided some analytics to help you understand the performance of your news item, it would be even more impressive.

Of course, this blog entry isn't very useful if you are outside the Cambridge area. In which case, the moral is to get your local business network to support news entry and for them to register with services such as Google and Yahoo news. It's another way to save money as a startup.

Update added 19-Jun-2009: I've had sight of some data about who actually subscribes to Cambridge Network services. Only half of the membership falls within the central CB postcodes and subscriptions for newsletters, etc are equally distributed around the world. That reinforces the point that Business networks such as this are a cost effective PR solution for startups.

A short time ago we agreed to do a joint press release with another company, and I offered to do the logistics. I thought it would be a good chance to try out some of the free press release syndication services I'd been reading about, especially in this blog from the company behind the LEADSExplorer service.

It would be slightly different for me, because I would default to using my membership of the Cambridge Network and their facility to post news. So that was where I started. Once you have your member login, it's a matter of using their web-based form. Nothing difficult - a title for your PR, a summary, the body of the PR and any (optional) graphics that you wanted up to a maximum size of 70MB. It allowed me to set a date for the release - I wanted a release early in the following week. It all took at most 10 mins to enter my PR using cut/paste from a text file. Most of that time went on re-sizing my image file to fit.

After that baseline was established, I tried some of the free services. I had already registered for the ones I wanted.

I started with PRZoom. It has a fairly clean user interface but the process of getting from what I thought was a successful registration complete email to Submit a Press Release was more fraught than I'd imagined. Some of the user interface terminology was loose - "post", "submit" and "edit" used in less than obvious ways. It turned out I had to check a box acknowledging I'd read a note. Entering the actual PR wasn't too bad but the summary was limited to 250 characters so that required a bit of re-work. I couldn't upload images without a Premium account ($120-$399 apparently)and you need that also for RSS feeds. Impressions of this site overall not good - despite the San Francisco contact address, poor use of English.

Next up was PRLog. Again, a fairly clean interface but not hugely elegant. The user interaction seemed much simpler. It encouraged me to enter a business profile first, which was good apart from the brevity of the field. That allowed me to upload a Company logo. Then on to submit the PR itself. Again a limit of 250 characters on the summary but at least I could re-use what I'd done for PRZoom. It also allowed me to upload an image, with a maximum size limit of 100MB. It was possible to set a release date in the future (and it gave me a password that I could use to see it before then).

I then tried Online PR News. This has much more of a Web 2.0 feel. It offers a free submit and a $6 SEO service. I was tempted by the SEO offer but noticed that PayPal was the only payment method on offer . It was easy enough to complete and it allows image sizes up to 100MB. I had issues with it forgetting my news category whenever I navigated back but not that hard to re-select. You can also download free and useful collateral on writing PR from here. So far, best of the bunch.

Next, I tried PRMac. This was never going to work, because it is moderated to refuse non Apple/Mac news, but in the interests of research for you I went ahead. First problem was the title limit of 70 characters - too short. Also, couldn't set links or add images. It talked about a way to set release date but I could not find it - I think it's a human intervention thing when you embargo it on the PR itself. It offered me extended distribution for $18.75.

I next tried PR-USA.net. It took me a while to find where to login - scroll right down to the bottom left corner, but after that the Submit a Press Release was easy to find. I noticed in passing when the PR entry form was displayed that the site was built using Joomla!, and so what happened next came as something of a surprise. I should mention I'd been using Firefox 3 up to now. It wouldn't let me cut/paste into the summary and body fields unless I changed my user_prefs first. I switched to IE and it worked (well, after I allowed it to access my clipboard each time). I couldn't see any way to upload an image.

The blog referenced at the beginning of this article came down in favour of The Open Press. Currently, they have a security problem with their Forum software which is preventing on-line registration. I registered by email and entered my PR text. Nothing difficult here, but nothing stood out either. One problem was I couldn't find a way to embargo the PR until the required date.

I had used openPR.com once before and not been impressed by the results, but it was worth another go. The entry procedure was easy and intuitive, and I was able to upload an image. The choice of news categories was a bit limited. The preview feature was better here than on others.

Finally, I tried a paid-for service. In a previous company I had used PRWeb and liked it. It was donations-driven back in 2006, when it entered the market as a competitor for BusinessWire, but it has become more corporate since then. As I'd started with a paid-for service in the Cambridge Network, it seemed like a good idea to finish with one.Their cheapest option is called Standard Visibility, and it costs $80 per PR. It was easy to enter the PR and set a release date as I wanted. I couldn't do Anchor text at this price level - that would take SEO Visibility at $200. It told me at the end that I was position 107 in their rankings.

So that's stage 1 - using these sites to enter the PR.

Now, the whole point of using these PR services in the first place is to see what happens when the release date falls and the PR is released. I'm not hugely bothered where I end up on their individual web page listings, but I will be interested to see what happens on the search engines.

More on that when I have it.

 

For years now I've been reading how companies could be reducing their travel costs by investing in better remote training technology.

Yet, even when I was obliged some years back to run a technology transfer project from 30 engineers in the UK to 50+ engineers in India, we still bought the plane tickets and set up an elaborate project plan for face-to-face training. 

I came back to this topic when considering quick-yet-effective ways for making screencasts of CogniDox functions in action and managing them from within CogniDox itself.

Starting with a search of the options available (and drawing on other people's research, such as this) we concluded the shortlist for us was Wink, Camtasia or Jing Project. The last two come from the same company (TechSmith).

The crux of the decision was that we were willing to trade off sophisticated editing features if it was easy-to-use and simple-to-learn. Jing came out best. You can record what you want to show and say, then save the SWF Flash video to a directory in CogniDox (via your PC). Very fast, very easy.

You can upgrade to a Pro license if you really want no watermarks, or need H.264 video formats, but we were happy with it as-is. You can also use their sister company (Screencast) if you want to host it, or export it to YouTube if you have the Pro version.

One thing - do take the time and effort to write your presentation out in long form. So much easier to read than to try to recall.

So, we got a tool that allows us to make and stream SWF Flash files with the minimum of effort and expense. 

Maybe that solution to remote training isn't so distant after all?

I wanted to make a short video - like a movie trailer - that would introduce the company and yet be lighter than most of the other content on the website.

I'd been reading about services worth paying for as a startup (which also raised discussion on Hacker News). One of the services mentioned was making a video and the recommendation was Animoto.

Now, I'm not convinced that making a video is such an essential service for a startup but then again I found it was so quick and easy to do that it isn't really worth a long debate. Some parts of doing a startup are just fun, and this ought to be one of them.

So, Animoto is a video creation platform that lets users create professional-quality videos from their own images and music. You can supply both the images and the music, one or the other, or work with their library. A simple way to start would be to save a Powerpoint presentation as individual images (e.g. Save As > Other Formats > JPEG File Interchange Format). You then upload all these images to the Animoto site.This is a low-res solution that is quick to upload, but if you want higher-res take the longer approach.

You can then either choose music from their library or upload an MP3 from your own collection. Obviously, it's not a good idea to violate copyright when you do that. There's a limit of 10MB on file size (or 10 minutes, but that is less likely to affect you).

It's possible to make short demos for free, but I decided quickly to sign up for the  All-Access Pass ($30/yr) so that I could make a longer sample. Needless to say, you can pay more for additional services.

I didn't much like the music on offer in their library. I wanted the video to be slow and measured, taking time over the key points. I like ambient music and listen to many net labels. One in particular is the Breathe label, and I was especially impressed with contributions from a musician called Dimitris Diavatis, whom I believe is based in Croatia these days. So, I emailed and asked if I could use one piece ("Toxic") - it was issued under a Creative Commons license with attribution, non-commercial and non-derivative terms and this website is commerical, so I needed permission. Very graciously, he said "yes".

Going back to the video, you need to think about your Powerpoint in a different way. The old rule about 2-3 mins per slide does not apply so you effectively need to see the slide deck as a cartoon flipbook - lots of repeat images, one simple message on each and definitely a 'billboard' approach to the messages on each image.

My All-Access pass gave me the option to make a 1/2 speed video (i.e. pause longer before transition to next image). This seemed to fit really well with the ambient music so that's the way I went. Animoto meshes the images with the music (so rock music would produce more jerky image transitions) and each 'take' is different. You have little control over it all (but do use the highlight option for key images) and you may need several takes before you find the one that works.

As I say, making a video isn't an essential to-do for a startup. But it falls into the same category of advice as refining your elevator pitch or re-working parts of your business plan. It brings your attention to the essentials of the business. Just like a movie trailer brings audiences to the movie.

We've given the cognidox.com website something of a facelift, and, since we can, we're using our own CogniDox Joomla integration to publish content from our CogniDox systems to the site. The most obvious are our tutorial videos, which we script, review and publish out of CogniDox.

We've also started using Flowplayer as the player of hosted flash videos.