Iphone and vinsol
We, at Vinsol, have been doing some work in iphone development for some time now. While we have done some good work in this area, we have never officially announced our iphone services to the external world except adding few initial apps in our web portfolio. Most of our clients usually ask us for iphone version of their rails applications and now, we have a solid team of 3 developers and 2 UI guys doing some interesting custom development work in iphone development. Exploring PR I have been thinking of doing a press release for announcements of our iphone services. PR is no longer targeted towards just a handful of journalists. Now audience of press releases is thousands of people with Internet connections, google alerts, filters, access to search engines, social media and RSS readers who may be interested in our services (web development / Ruby on rails development/iphone etc. ). There are some rails consulting companies and a lot of rails hosting companies that go for press releases regularly For eg: Iflexion took part in rails conf 2009. http://www.pr.com/press-release/194340 or, New Bamboo,UK is one rails consulting company that regularly do press releases. Options Using a service such as PRWeb gets your release onto lots of sites, as well as into traditional media. Their most popular plan costs $200. Although, there are some free options also, but I am not sure about their effectiveness http://www.startupaddict.com/blog/small-business-toolkit/press-release-distribution-for-free/343 Apart from that , there are numerous options - Business Wire– PR Newswire
– PRWeb
– 24-7 Press Release
– PR Zoom
– PR Leap
– I-Newswire
– Webwire
– ClickPress
– PR.com
– PR Log Notes
- Online PR and SEO - Press releases give you a lot of search engine love. look at this article for detailed analysis
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/12/19/how-press-releases-can-be-great-for-search
- BIG NEWS – Consulting Companies like new bamboo don’t just send news releases when big news is happening; they find good reasons to send them all the time. I disagree with that approach (but many people like that approach) and I feel that web consulting companies should go for PR only with major announcements in form of new service offerings or winning a big/important project from a client.
- WRITING RELEASES - If you are going to do a press release, get someone that understands media and how to make your news relevant to them by writing releases that are replete with keyword-rich copy with proper links. Also, placing links in releases that takes potential clients to landing pages is important ( for eg: iphone development services on vinsol.com).
- Social web – Social web is the most critical aspect of online PR. Dont forget to add social media tags for Technorati,digg, and del.icio.us so that your release can be found and shared.
- Risks - I would rather have 5 future clients learn about Vinsol iphone services than have some random journalists habitually discarding my releases.
But, I thinks its worth trying PR once if you have not done and check if it works for your major announcements. Any ideas on online PR will be cool through comments 
