Response Source take note
I wonder what the folks behind Response Source think about Peter Shankman’s ‘Help A Reporter Out’ (HARO) service that is having a strong impact in the US PR industry. Basically Peter has devised a completely free-to-use service to link reporters with PRs and other sources. It started out as a Facebook page but soon outgrew the confines of that social network and now boast 16,000 members.
Profnet is a service I used when I was working in Washington DC, as do most PR agencies. You pay a fee and they feed you questions and requests for comments from journalists via email. I had quite a bit of success using the service and rated it as value for money. But now Peter has cut them down by the knees but performing the service for free.
I subscribed to HARO a few months ago and think Peter does a good job. The Industry Standard agrees.
But Peter is not alone in his endeavour to hook reporters and sources up. Over here in the UK, Sally Whittle has created Getting Ink Requests under a similar model to HARO. It’s free to subcribe online and Sally also seeds requests via Twitter.
We subscribe to the UK version of Profnet, called Response Source and frankly, it’s a pretty darn good service. Again, I’d say deffo ‘value for money’. But surely the folks at Daryl Willcox must be watching the US market with interest.
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I think its a great idea to link reporters with PR professionals. With people’s lives so busy today, I think the idea will be adopted and more free services will be created.
I think you are correct Rachel. It will be interesting to see how the media database providers cope with this new access.
I think what Peter Shankman has achieved with HARO is fantastic and I’ve been watching the growth of his service with great admiration. If only social media was more established when we launched Response Source in 1998!
Having a range of services like this open to journalists and PR professionals is a good thing as it helps legitimise the concept. And given the huge number articles being written online as well as offline there is clearly room for a range of services each with its own style.
Response Source’s subscription-based model provides our customers with peace of mind as it ebables us to invest in our media user base, customer support and product development. I think this model has a lot going for it for professional PRs.
Just a point of clarfication, describing Response Source as the ‘UK version of ProfNet’ implies we are connected but just to be clear, Daryl Willcox Publishing is entirely independent and has nothing at all to do with ProfNet.
Thanks for commenting Daryl; I appreciate you taking the time. I didn’t mean to imply that you were part of Profnet; I know you are not. Thanks for providing such a great service. Are you and Sally friends?
Thanks for the comments about Response Source – we work hard to make it a good service. Yes – Sally is a friend of mine, I love her blog Getting Ink.
I was sure you didn’t think we were anything to do with ProfNet, but I just wanted to make sure it was clear to your readers, because culturally and operationally we’re very different to ProfNet.