The antiquated wire services and their magical distribution
The antiquated wire services and their magical distribution

                        
                                
                                    

                                        

                                        I didn’t formally study PR, I learned it entirely through doing it. When I graduated from Syracuse, I began working with my father at a PR agency we started together, which focused on tech startups in NYC; a true passion of ours. When it came time to make the first pitch for our clients, something I had never done before, I came in all dressed up and ready to call every media outlet… I was so naïve.It was during this time that my client asked for my opinion on whether they should use “the wires” for a relatively big announcement they were making. I had only heard about the wires but never used them so I had to kind of deflect the question until I learned more about them. I began doing research and had to ask my dad about them, as he was one of the largest users of the wires with his previous agency back in the 90’s. What I discovered blew me away.If you paid a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, this company would blast your news out via email to their lists and also get it ‘published’ on other high regarded, top tier sites. The first company I started (Brandyourself.com) taught me all about SEO, reputation management, content marketing and social media, so I was completely baffled by the use of wires. Duplicate content is one of the biggest no-nos when it comes to Google’s Algorithm – they give you some leeway if you post it on a few sites but definitely not all the places the wires promised. And if I can’t send out mass emails to the media, why can they? And I don’t even get the media’s emails, just a list of names, which I could have done myself.I went back to my client later that week with my analysis and basically said I couldn’t justify the price with the perceived results – you pay me to do what the wire supposedly does. And since then I have never used the wires for any of my clients; and that was almost three years ago to date.Now if you look at them, nothing has changed over the past few decades – if anything they are all in price wars because their margins are decreasing (based on their 10k) and traffic is steadily declining as well.The reasons for this are pretty apparent, thanks to social media and our always-connected 2.0 world.First off, I have never met anyone who said, “I go to XYZ newswire to find news to cover/read.”Blogging platforms like wordpress, reddit, tumblr, facebook, pinterest and the other thousands have allowed us to directly communicate with our customersEmail software allows us to create our own lists and reach out to the press ourselves.We can now pitch anyone via relationships we’ve createdNews can be published on your own websiteWe have analytics that track engagement through all of these different platformsThey’re expensive as compared to every other network mentioned aboveThey also all almost offer the same suite of tools so they basically cannibalize each other and are shrinking the market

                                        
                                        
                                        
                                        

                                            

                                                
                                                
                                                

                                            

                                        
                                    
                                
                        
                        

                        
                            
                                
                                
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