Launched in 2010 by serial entrepreneur Thibaud Elzière (Fotolia, Mailjet, Textmaster) with the goal of offering the same quality of service of a traditional PR agency but at 1/10th the price, PressKing has already made its mark on the PR world having enabled 25,000 press releases to date. Today they’re stepping it up a notch by launching a complete rehaul of their online media relations management platform based on the feedback of their 15,000 users.
This rehaul enables them get a lot closer to their overall vision of bringing some much-needed disruption to the PR space. Elzière underscores this vision and gives additional context to their platform revamp adding: “The challenge for an online platform such as ours is to obtain the quality and customization offered by traditional PR agencies, while allowing companies to self-manage their media relations like any online services… Instead of sending a press release to 10,000 journalists, we will send every press release to fewer but more targeted journalists, enabled by the more specific management of our database and the manual intervention of our team before every release is sent.”
Another key feature of the new platform is that it delivers a new, higher quality journalist database that offers users access to 490,000 journalists and bloggers in 181 countries. This database, which is updated daily, includes twice as many journalists and bloggers as the initial version. PressKing’s new CEO Bertrand Besse underscores the importance of the having a comprehensive, in-depth database to their business adding, “The key to public relations remains the quality of the journalist database.”
Finally, their new platform also offers a couple other important features including a new distribution system for press releases allowing users to better analyze the success of a press campaign via engagement with journalists after they’ve received the press release (via their email or Twitter account) as well as, for those who are official subscribers, a dedicated, customizable press room.