This is the question everyone would like to know the answer to. If it were only easy!
Radio is such an immediate medium and reporters have multiple daily deadlines that it’s very difficult to obtain direct feedback on the use of releases sent to them. We’ve tried emailed survey forms with little result. As reporters ourselves we know how difficult it is to provide good feedback. Often a story may be used multiple times or held for future use.
There’s no cost-effective “clipping service” for radio. You can pay a lot of money to have a particular station monitored but what if your release is being sent to thousands of radio reporters?
ZimmComm is in the process of installing a new distribution software/email system which will in the future allow us to provide you with more feedback on who opens your emailed releases and downloads the audio files. With that information we’ll also be able to do more direct follow up with the reporters we send to on your behalf! We estimate about 2 months before the new system is in place.
In the meantime we continue to send releases for very happy clients who obtain sufficient anecdotal feedback on release usage that they believe in the value of this added method of getting PR value for the releases they produce!
So far this week we’ve sent releases to over 1,500 reporters in 31 states for several clients!
We’re exploring the idea of offering you RSS feeds of your releases. More to come on this new and very logical way of getting even more mileage from your release.