January 18th, 2007 by Wendy McAuliffe
Earlier this week blog search engine Technorati and press release distribution agency PR Newswire, announced a partnership to put a Technorati button into press releases distributed through the PR Newswire services.
This morning I’ve had time to check it out, and what I’ve noticed is the minimal number of bloggers discussing and linking to PR Newswire press releases. For example, a Coca-Cola announcement was top story on PR Newswire at the time of writing this post, but Technorati was only registering one blog linking to it. The same appears to be true of other big-brand stories that I clicked through to.
It’s no secret that press releases are not the best way for PRs to reach the blogging community, but I had expected big brands to still be able to get away with it. For example, had Apple decided to release its iPhone by press release, there would have been criticism, but I’m sure it would ultimately have been picked up by the bloggersphere.
However my quick ‘uncontrolled’ experiment reveals that this might not be the case.
We’ll certainly be experimenting with this service for our own clients, and it will be interesting to see what this tells us about the online impact of press releases.
