Jeff Esposito's Blog » money

Cartoon of the Day part 2

Espo — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 13:45:41 +0000

I saw this one on the Gaping Void this morning and couldn’t help sharing it as a second cartoon for today.

The results are in…well sort of

Espo — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 14:07:32 +0000

Image: Wiley Miller's Non Sequitur

Well yesterday I noted that I’d give the results that may begin to offer some insight into the value of PR and a press release.

Well hear are the results from the release for my company’s small business marketing blog.

Unique Visitors: 362 (91 this morning)
Placements on Google: 173
Placements on MSN: No reporting
Placements on Yahoo: 68
Most Refered Site: CNN Money

So what do these results really tell you? To me it shows that Marketwire’s Social Media 2.0 releases can really drive traffic. The question does remain as to what the real value to the company was.

While I may have promised an answer, I really don’t know more than when I started aside from the initial traffic to the site.

The real question that we will be tasked with is keeping the traffic coming to the page and following us through RSS, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

How would you categorize the test?

Placing a value on a press release

Espo — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 02:41:09 +0000

Working for a large company, we are always hearing: how does this contribute to the business? As a flack its always tough to defend what PR does, especially when not many people realize what a PR team actually does.

Our search team has valued our releases, search enhanced via Marketwire between $2,000 – $5,000, but it is just on an educated guess or hypothesis. Trying to apply publications’ ad rates is equally skewered when looking for results.

So how can one expect to answer the age old question mentioned above?

Typically I would say that you can’t gague the impact of PR or a press release outside of social media. That will be until around 5:30 pm today.

We are sending out a press release around the open of the market announcing our small business marketing blog as a Social Media 2.0 release over Marketwire.

In the past we have seen typical releases average 331 pickups on Google, however our most recent social release we saw over 1,500 placements on Google alone.

The blog is hosted on WordPress and has gained traffic of around 50 visitors/day through our viral efforts on Twitter and a few small plugs in a targeted, but small email campaign.

I am hoping that via the strength of the press release, we can finally put a number or get a better understanding of what that “value” may be.

I’ll update later in the day with a number. My pie in the sky guess is that the release will generate 1,000 visitors to the site tomorrow.