Bacon’s Information, Inc. has acquired MediaMap, bringing together two providers of media databases and other tools for PR practitioners. Bacon’s claims it will continue to offer both lists, but I am willing to bet that won’t last six months.
Since Media Map was the more expensive, better-promoted service, many would have expected them to buy Bacon’s. However, maintaining a media database of 30,000+ names is incredibly labor intensive and when MediaMap stopped using the Bacon’s database a year or so ago, my guess is that they couldn’t keep up the lists. Most of the other companies, despite sales claims to the contrary, use the Bacon’s database.
Some of the bigger PR agencies don’t use commercial media databases because they worry that their proprietary lists will be incorporated into the general lists and sold to other agencies. And of course they will. But for smaller companies, the databases. all of which are fraught with errors, are the only option.
I published a report on press release distribution services two years ago, “Secrets of Effective Press Release Distribution” and tried and studied all the major services. Since then, there has been such a huge proliferation of services that it is impossible to tell them apart but Bacon’s and MediaMap are standouts because they include a broad range of other services which are helpful to PR firms.
MediaMap has had a smoother interface to its database of media contacts than Bacon’s, and includes blog contact information and more and better Internet media information than Bacon’s MediaSource.
The bottom line is that none of the majors provide even halfway decent coverage of Internet editorial contacts. Not one of the services I tested recently could give me a list of the editorial contacts for the top 100 circulation newspapers or the top online publications.
Hey BL,
It’s been awhile since we communicated. I’ve moved from independent SEO (search engine optimization) to corporate since we last spoke about (online) press release optimization for search engine ranking. I still have a few long standing small business SEO clients who wouldn’t let me stop working with them ;-) which I make time to handle on weekends and evenings.
One client insists on using Bacon’s for their press release distribution. Since my main focus is on the SEO value of press releases to those clients, I generally use partners of PRNewswire or PRweb to distribute those releases because they get automatically reproduced on newspaper sites, local TV station news sites, CBS MarketWatch online in many cases, and it gets them inbound quality links from those major sites from their URL published in those distributions and related automatic publications.
One big benefit of using ONLINE distribution sources like this is the ability to choose the market focus of the recipients. I’ve seen my clients releases reproduced and archived on many major sites in their own industry due to this distribution option.
So my main question here is – can Bacon’s provide those same benefits in your experience? I did a few searches and found few references to Bacon’s (*except their OWN news releases – hmmmm) in online archives or press rooms of major sites. That may be simply because they don’t include their name as distribution source, but may also be that they fail to get client releases reproduced in ONLINE sources and linked back to client sites.
Remember, my goal for clients – in addition to getting actual news coverage – is to get my clients links from topically relevant authority sites from their (optimized) press release. This is for the search engine ranking value provided by gaining those links from topically relevant major authority sites.
What say you, PR maven?
Mike