Distributing Free Press Release and Twittering to journalists

Distributing a Press Release

We have released a press release on “Cold Calling on Warm Companies – Taking Away the Rejection Fear of Cold Calling” and distributed it using several free press release website services.
The goal is to appeal to a broad audience as cold calling is widely used in many businesses. However the main hope is that a journalist or a blogger picks up the content and distributes the story further beyond our reach.

We used our three languages: English, French and German to distribute the press release with different free services (See list below), each language demanding between two-and-a-half and three hours of time even as we had already registered as user. This is due to the fact that each of these free press release websites have different requirements and different layouts.

Several times the Press release reached Google Alerts.
The question is: was it actually read by people?

Twitter – Micro Pitch

In order to reach real people and not computers, and as our previous press releases didn’t get any traction or media attention, we decided to use Twitter Micro Pitching.
To pitch the press release twittering a to selection of about 20 journalists on Twitter, spread over two accounts in order not to get brand marked as a spammer.

We clearly were stating at the beginning of the Twitpitch it concerns a PR.
Included was a Bit.ly http://bit.ly/RMUP link in order to track the clicks.
If we post a link to one of our blog posts we get between 20 and 60 clicks according to Bit.Ly.
This time within two hours we achieved over 250 clicks.
Thus the Twitter community seems to be interested in a “Cold call” related subject.

Free Press Release List

English:
www.prlog.org
www.free-press-release.com
www.pr.com
www.theopenpress.com
www.przoom.com
www.1888pressrelease.com
www.freepressreleases.co.uk
i-newswire.com
www.pr-inside.com
www.live-pr.com
www.clickpress.com
www.pressmethod.com
www.24-7pressrelease.com
www.prfree.com
www.businessportal24.com
mediapitch.ning.com
pitchengine.com
www.betanews.com/submit
www.npr.org/about/pitch/story.html
www.free-press-release-center.info
www.freshnews.com/index.shtml
www.pressbox.co.uk
www.openpr.com
ecommwire.com
www.prcompass.com
prurgent.com
pressabout.com
www.pressreleasepoint.com
www.media-press-release.com
www.newswiretoday.com
www.bizeurope.com/pressrelease.htm

French:
www.presse-fr.com
www.pme-multimedia.com
www.generalite.com
www.generalite.com
www.mediaslibres.com
www.BusinessPortal24.com
www.big-presse.com
www.buzzibuzz.com/fr
www.categorynet.com
www.communiques-de-presse.fr
www.news-eco.com
presse.himselfprod.com/referencement-naturel.html
www.sitepresse.com
www.webactusnet.com
www.nuouz.com
www.pro-liens.com

German
www.openpr.de
www.news4press.com
www.businessportal24.com/de
www.presseecho.de/meldung_veroeffentlichen.php
pressemitteilung.ws
www.presseanzeiger.de/insert-news.php
www.prcenter.de
www.pressemeldung.org
www.presse-kostenlos.de
www.youpress.de
www.offenes-presseportal.de
www.deutsche-nachrichten-agentur.de
www.online-artikel.de
www.firmenpresse.de
www.news4press.com
www.portalderwirtschaft.de
www.pressbot.net
www.presse-kostenlos.de
www.news-eintrag.de

It takes time to distribute using free press release web services.
Still wondering how effective this method is.
Will using Twitter have more effect?