Undoubtedly one of the companies that has had a major impact on the convergence of public relations and search engine optimization is David McInnis and his talented team have created more innovations surrounding press release distribution than any other wire service. While I've used PRWeb in one way or another since 1999, it wasn't until 2003 that my company impelemented Tell us about your background and how did you start PRWeb.com? I completed my BA in International Business from Texas State University in 1995, but my career experience comes from the marketing and database technology industries. Having a background in marketing has given me unique insights into the world of public relations and has helped me to identify areas where the marketing and public relations disciplines should converge online. Having the technology background has been a great advantage to PRWeb because the marketing side of my brain can conceive things that the technical side can build. I founded PRWeb in the early days of Internet chiefly as a disappointment I experienced with one of the larger wire services. I spent a lot of money to get my message out to the media and, apart from a few online places that picked up the wire feed, I did not see any results. No media coverage. No increased visibility. Just disappointment. While I was out mowing my lawn one day, it came to me: There must be a way to market press releases on the Internet and monetize that traffic through advertising; remember the $40 CPM rates? I did the math and got really excited. I could create a free service and take in tons of corporate and organizational news, and market that content through a search engine optimization strategy. Okay, we did not call it SEO back then and Google wasn't even on the radar yet, but the final idea was to make this news content highly visible online and capture the ad revenue. We have remained constant in PRWeb's goals and mission from our early days. Our goal was, as it is today, to help our users get the maximum visibility for their press releases and corporate news. The idea was that by driving traffic to our users' news releases, we would serve their needs (increased visibility for their press releases) and our needs (the need to drive page views and associated advertising revenue). Here is what we found: We were only successful on the first half of that equation. While we drove tons of traffic to online press releases, we were never successful in monetizing that traffic using advertising revenue. In 2000 and 2001, I decided to build on our success and continue to build a toolset for maximizing our users' press release visibility online. We dropped our advertising-based revenue model in favor of something completely new, especially to corporate America; voluntary financial contributions. Essentially, we asked our users to contribute financially to the service while we continued to build our suite of visibility services. The response from our user base was overwhelmingly positive. We reinvested every available dollar to build the very first online visibility platform for corporate news content. I first started sending out press releases through PRWeb in 2001and a lot has changed with PRWeb in that time, especially in the past year. What's your plan for PRWeb and how do you plan on leveraging the Web 2.0 types of features you've been adding? You were an early adopter. I guess you saw early PRWeb firsthand as we struggled to keep the idea alive. Now, about Web 2.0. We are really pleased with our position in the industry. Since the early days of the Internet, we have expanded our staff to include a top notch development team, which is now headed by our Chief Technical Officer, Al Castle, and we have recently established ourselves as the only Web 2.0 enabled wire service. Of everything that we have released in the past six months, I am most excited about our inclusion of What are some of the resources you rely on for information on web 2.0 and online marketing? Best practices, news, industry information. That is a loaded question. I really pay attention to what is happening in the blogosphere. This is where things are happening first. I do think that there is a lot of intentional misdirection in the search space. It takes common sense to weed through it all. What's the weirdest press release you've ever seen submitted to PRWeb? The craziest ones never make distribution, and there are simply too many. Needless to say, our editors are kept entertained. (Come to think about it, maybe I should charge them to work here.) We have had everything from alien abductions to Andy Kaufman is Alive releases. I like catchy headlines the best. The problem with headlines that get too clever is that they tend to lose SEO value. Thanks David! Lee Odden is President and Founder of Online Marketing Blog offering daily news, interviews and best practices.
Interview with CEO of PRWeb David McInnis
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