My top favorite pastime is being a professional mentor of high school robotics team where I live, just a short ferry ride from downtown Seattle on Bainbridge Island. It’s a FIRST Robotics Team (4915 Spartronics) that I helped found six years ago. I’m the lead marketing mentor.
I am still stunned by the number of people I meet in the real estate industry, including prospective clients, who really don’t understand what Public Relations is. More importantly, many people often have misconceptions about what PR can do. Most often, PR is confused with activities and outcomes that are entirely in the realm of Advertising.
One of the tools in the Public Relations’ publicity toolkit to communicate for decades has been a paid newswire. PR Newswire and Business Wire early on dominated the business in the U.S. What people don't realize is that the reason one used a paid newswire has evolved with technology and our times. Initially, the popularity of newswires was fueled by federal regulations that required public companies to meet specific disclosure laws. With the digitization of news and the expansion of the Internet, firms like Marketwire and PRWeb emerged (and much later, GlobeNewswire), and so did the value proposition of newswires. Technology firms became the client of these more Internet-focused firms, and the value proposition became SEO.
