PRSafe Basics

Table of Contents

All you need to get started is to create an account. The basic PRSafe service is free and with a free account you can host your news releases, event announcements and article releases on PRSafe. Send your releases to your social networks and leverage your existing connections – without cost. If you don’t already have a large following on other social networks, we provide distribution options for you to send your release to existing PRSafe users or to targeted news distribution feeds. We have a growing number of users who want to receive your news and if you need additional awareness or visibility for your News, PRSafe is a great tool.

I. Who Uses PRSafe

PRSafe is used by thousands of companies of all sizes to host and share news releases, event announcements and articles. A news release is a public news release typically sent by a professional individual such as an artist, consultant, attorney, subject matter expert or other independent individual or by a representative of an organization.

Individual - If you are an individual with news or want to publish an article to promote your expertise, PRSafe is a great option. Increase your visibility.

Possible individuals include:

  • Authors - An author is broadly defined as "the person who originated or gave existence to anything" and whose authorship determines responsibility for what was created. [Wikipedia]
  • Experts - Experts are individuals with specific expertise, experience or specialized knowledge who other PRSafe users, including journalists and other writers, can use as a source. Experts should include titles, experience, press mentions and other supporting information journalists can use to qualify experience.

  • Artists - An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. [Wikipedia]
  • Celebrities - A celebrity is a person who has a prominent profile and commands a great degree of public fascination and influence in day-to-day media. [Wikipedia]
  • Chefs - A chef is a person who cooks professionally for other people.[Wikipedia] You might have an up-coming appearance on a talk show, have a new recipe book or just started as the head chef of a wonderful restaurant.
  • Entertainers - You might be a comedian, sports announcer, comic, dancer, musician or someone who performs to entertain.
  • Politicians - Someone who is involved in influencing public policy and decision making.[Wikipedia]
  • Personalities - A remarkable person who is often on talk, radio or other medium.

Businesses and Organizations - Organizations of all sizes use PRSafe to distribute news to people who matter most including shareholders, professional contacts, associates, potential customers and more.

Journalists and Other Writers - If you are a journalist, blogger or other media professional who regularly receives news releases or story pitches, you should select "journalist" as your profile type. PRSafe users can send relevant targeted releases to you and you can subscribe to relevant categories. You can also search and communicate with potential sources.

Organizations typically include colleges, research firms, media companies or PR/marketing firms.

PRSafe can be used as a press release service but we prefer to call our service a news release service. Why? Because, a press release generally goes out to journalists and other members of the media. The word press can also mean the release is ready to go to press or publication. And, while we have a great connection system built into PRSafe, so you can send to one or more contacts, generally our submissions are publicly viewable.

There are many reasons you might want to use PRSafe but a few include; cause marketing & community relations, digital content strategy, media relations, stakeholder communication, sustainability reporting, philanthropy communications, internal communications, crisis communications, distribution of reports or case studies and more.

II. Getting Started: PRSafe in Plain English

To get started, all you need to do is sign up and create an account. The basic PRSafe service is free. You can create a profile, receive source requests from journalists and bloggers looking for experts. You can submit news releases, event announcements and articles and publish them to your profiles and out to your readers. If you have followers on existing social networks, you can send them free of charge and they're directed back to your PRSafe hosted release and all other releases.

If you don't have a large following on social networks and haven't built up a large following on PRSafe, we provide distribution options. Our distribution options give you the power to reach a growing number of PRSafe subscribers and publishers who will also help share your news. We provide over 500 distribution options including targeted categories based on topic or geography. Reach targeted readers locally or globally depending on your needs.

a. Introduction

We feel PRSafe is an easy-to-use application and you shouldn't need much if any help getting your feet wet. But, if you have difficulty understanding any part of PRSafe, please drop us a line through our contact us page.

b. Customer Training Options

We don't currently offer training options but may offer something in the near future. If you have a large organization or group and want us to come in and talk about PRSafe, contact us and we'll discuss it.

For individuals, we can offer a 15-30 minute paid training session. Contact us.

c. Getting to Know PRSafe

As you use begin to use PRSafe, you will find PRSafe is a great tool for communications management and media relations. You will hopefully discover new ways to integrate PRSafe within your current workflow. You should let us know if you feel we can improve areas of PRSafe.

d. Profiles: General Profile, Expert Profile, Journalist Profile.

As a new user, we prompt you with a profile prompt. You should take a few minutes initially to create your profile so other users can learn more about you and your organization and contact you if they have release questions. Link your profile to existing accounts with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google +.

1. Expert Profile - As a PRSafe user, you can support your expertise by listing skills and other personal details you think journalists, bloggers or other users could find useful when writing stories. If you want to support your expertise but don't have a news release or event to submit, you may consider submitting one or more articles. Articles are free and published to your profile. You or your readers can still share them socially.

The first question you might ask yourself when confronted with an "expert profile" option is - am I an expert? If you feel you have a vast amount of experience in a specific field, industry or topic, you should list your experiences. It's up to the person looking for an expert to make the decision as to whether you have the level of experience to qualify you as an expert and meet their requirements. Of course, if you've been referred to as an expert by a notable publication, you may want to include reference.

If you still don't feel comfortable labeling yourself as an expert, you can simply add personal events, education or publications you feel could be valuable to journalists. Posting information could lead to more visibility for you or your organization if a writer decides to use you as a source.

2. Journalist Profile - If you are a writer (journalist, blogger, etc.), you should create a journalist profile which will designate you as a potential contact for PRSafe release submitters. PRSafe users can send releases directly to you or you can subscribe to category-based news feeds. If you want to promote your own articles, you can do so by submitting a release and tagging it as an article. We'll publish the article to your profile and you can get additional visibility when you or PRSafe readers share the article socially. Of course, if you feel our distribution options would help you get additional visibility for your article, you can submit it as a news release.

e. Account Requirements

For general profiles, we only require you agree to the user terms and conditions. Please read over the user agreement thoroughly and DO NOT sign up if you do not agree. If you have questions about the terms and conditions, please contact us. Your questions could help us address similar questions from other users.

We do not require verification of expert or journalist credentials however, if your profile is found to contain false or misleading information, you run the risk of being removed and possibly restricted from future use on PRSafe.

Submission Requirements

Your release or article may be deleted or deactivated for any of the following reasons:

1) We were unable to verify your information either through email or direct contact.

2) The information you provided does not meet our content guidelines.

3) Information submitted may be in violation of third-party copyright(s) or trademark(s)

4) Information submitted promotes gambling, pornography, illegal substances or other prohibited content

5) Content may be libelous or defamatory

6) Submission includes violence or hate-oriented speech

7) Has extensive religious commentary or attempts to preach or solicit members for a particular church or faith.

8) Contains clearly misleading, fraudulent or illegal claims or content.

Please see compete submission guidelines for more details.

III. Sample News Releases, Articles and Event Announcements

Please visit our submission writing guide for tips on creating an amazing release submission.

Sample topics include:

Twenty news worthy developments that merit submitting a news release via PRSafe.

  1. New Product Launch
  2. Change in Management
  3. Quarterly Financial Results
  4. Other Material Event at Public Company
  5. New Feature or Change to Existing Company Product
  6. Public Service Announcement
  7. Product Warning Including Defective Product Announcement
  8. Public Event / Promoting an Event
  9. Acquisition or Sale of Company
  10. Partnership Announcement
  11. Joint Venture You Just Started
  12. New Book Release
  13. Fund Raising Event
  14. Release About Survey Results
  15. New Chat Room Your Hosting
  16. An Online Award Your Giving
  17. Soliciting and Looking for New Articles
  18. Online Products or Releases You are Giving Away
  19. About an Expert Who is Going to Speak at Your Next Webinar
  20. Company Milestone Reached

Articles are treated differently. For articles, Click Here

Some of the most popular release topics are; event announcements, employee or management changes, awards won, research results.

- Event Announcements: If you're hosting, sponsoring or attending an event, you may want to send a release announcing your participation. We provide special features for listing event dates, times and descriptions, and you can promote the event with your followers.

Events may include but are not limited to:

Fundraisers

Conferences

Webinars

Book Tours

Product Launch

Trade Shows

- Employee or Management Change: If you've hired or fired a person you feel is a big deal and could affect your company - good or bad - you may want to get the word out. It's important to keep your stakeholders in the loop and let them hear important news from you. If you-re a public company, changes in management are sometimes required announcements and PRSafe can help you reach your stakeholders.

- Won an Award: Did you just win an award or get nominated for a noteworthy award? Let the public and/ journalists know. Winning an award can be a game changer for a company marketing products, and getting the word out can help generate additional interest in your product and services.

- Survey, Poll or General Research Results: Did you conduct a survey, poll or research study and want to share the results with a wide audience, and also measure the results? Use PRSafe to communicate the results to a broad audience and receive feedback from viewers. If possible, include graphics or documentation to support the results.

IV.(News) Press Release Format - Social Media Release

Our format for each release is as follows;

Name/Headline

- provide an attention grabbing headline of 100 words or less. We recommend you try to keep it under 15 words but more than 100 characters.

Date Line

- Weybridge, England & Melville, N.Y. (PRSafe) - March 11, 2009 -

Summary

- Provide a detailed overview of your release in approximately 150 words

Tag Line

- Includes the company tag line or other message

Body

- This is the main body of your press release. It should be used to describe your announcement in a concise newsworthy fashion. Feel free to make reference to your company's website(s), web pages and, of course, links to your social profiles for users to connect with you. You can include up to three links in each release. Ensure you complete your profile so users can contact you for more information.

Boilerplate

- Boilerplates are statements or information you regularly use in news releases. These statements are often standard disclosures written about the company such as investment statements. You can save space if you complete your profile which may provide detailed information about your company often added in a boilerplate.

City & State

- The city and state assigned to your release may not necessarily be your city and state. If your company is in Nebraska but your release is about a new location you just opened in Oklahoma, then you may want to assign Oklahoma State and the respective city. When distributing your release, you may want to select distribution in Oklahoma and one or more surrounding geographic areas.

Quote Text

- When writing about your story, writers often like to have pre-approved quotes. Quotes can help present a mood or attitude contributing to the power of the release. And, they make for a great visual in the release body. When including a quote, ensure it is accurate and list the quote source and title.

Images

- You can include multiple images on your release including graphics up to 500KB. This is fairly large though and we recommend limiting your images to 100KB so your users aren't waiting minutes to view your release.

Video

- We don't host video directly but do host the link to the video and the preview. So, if you want to include a video, please upload it to a service such as YouTube and use to embed code to add your video to the release. You can typically track any views or other analytics directly on the respective video service.

Social Media

- A popular term used by communication companies is Social Media Release (SMR). A social media release is a press release formatted for the Web. We include special features to make our releases social-friendly such as social bookmarking, sharing and meta-data for search engines. We also include messaging, forwarding, links and distribution tools to help our users take advantage of the power of the Internet behind the release.

File Storage

- We offer basic file storage. Your file may be a simple Word document you may want to include as an option for the user to download a copy of the release or a product slick about the new product you're announcing. If submitting an event, you may want to include an event registration form or sponsorship application.

Do you support other languages? We do not currently offer translation services but as we expand, it is possible. We do offer the ability for you to upload a release in another language and tag it as written in that language. If you do so, we will use a third-party translation program to determine if the news is spam but do not edit the release in languages other than English.

V. Distribution

Release Types

o News-Press Release - A News Release or Press Release submitted will be distributed over category based feeds, displayed in PRSafe Newsroom, sent to PRSafe users and publishing partners and offers the option of sending to contacts and/ recommended connections. This is a fee based service.

o Profile-Only Release - A Profile-Only Release is displayed in your profile and NOT distributed. This is the PRSafe FREE service. You can still send the release to your social networks, email it, link to it and get some visibility in search engines. But, it is NOT distributed and you are responsible for getting traffic to it.

o General Article(Non-news)- A General Article is NOT a news release. You can submit a general article and share it with your social networks, email it, link to it and it will display in your profile. But, it is NOT distributed to other PRSafe users, visible in our feeds, social network accounts or distributed to partners. If you are a media company and have articles you wish to publish but not distribute as news releases, please consider this option. We are working on improving our individual profile subscription and follow features and will update this section as more information becomes available.

o Event Announcement- An Event Announcement is simply a news release with event display options. We offer additional fields to enter event related information such as dates, times and event description. Your event is also searchable when people are searching specifically for events.

We've made significant improvements to our distribution in our new release. We now have over 500 different distribution options and distribute our releases internally. We've included more email distribution with built in connection management and email alerts to keep users engaged on PRSafe. We also include integration with popular social services such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Our new version of PRSafe was created with a focus on improving distribution. You can now publish to your profile - FREE - and your news release, event announcement or article is available to anyone tracking your profile. You can also send to your contacts at no charge.

If you don't already have a large following on social networks, you can send your release out over our targeted distribution networks which include distribution on AOL, Google, Yahoo and MSN. We also distribute your news internally to a growing number of PRSafe users.

VI. Contacts and Connections

o Uploading / Adding Contacts

Add contacts one-by-one or upload a contact list

o Managing Contacts

o Finding New Connections

Our release distribution includes the option of finding new connections you may want to reach with your news. If you are sending a news release about advertising, for example, we'll recommend various potential connections in our advertising category or journalists who cover advertising. You can click on the profiles of the suggested connections and purchase send credits to reach them.

o Sending Releases to Contacts and Connections

Each time you add a news release to PRSafe, we'll present you with options for sending to one or more of your contacts. And, if you don't have any contacts, we'll recommend sending to existing PRSafe users. When selecting new contacts, simply ensure you have enough connection credits. We currently charge $20 for a block of 20 contacts.

For tips on creating a news release, visit our Release Writing Guide

o Spam

Nobody likes spam. So, when adding contacts to PRSafe, we've limited the number of contacts to 100. We are not an email service provider. If you have a list of over 100 contacts and want to send out over email, you may want to consider using your existing email client or email service provider. You can still send a link to your hosted release and get the added benefit of additional visibility on PRSafe.

VII. Did You Know You Can...

o Subscribe to News Alerts?

Receive the latest news as submitted by PRSafe users right in your dashboard. And, get our newsletter including the latest news sent directly to your email or mobile phone. Select from over 500 topic or geographic category options such as advertising, technology or the latest news about zoos.

o Find New Connections?

We understand not all of our users will want to upload contacts and you may not have a big following on existing social networks. To help you get your message out, we'll recommend connections to other PRSafe users. We don't want you to just spam all of our users so we charge a small fee for each connection. Other PRSafe users will receive your news in their dashboards and, if they have alerts enabled, will receive your news in their email accounts. Please ensure you only select connections who are relevant to your release.

o Contact Journalists and Other Writers on PRSafe?

PRSafe started as a press release distribution service and we understand the potential value of presenting your news to journalists and other writers. We have a large number of journalists, bloggers and other writers who use PRSafe to find story ideas, sources and receive general news. When contacting on PRSafe, don't be a jerk. Please understand that other users have the ability to report you if you are harassing them or otherwise abusing our service. So, please think before you send and try to send relevant professional and structured information to other users. Thank you.

o Submit News On-behalf of Other Users?

If you are a PR or communications representative and are submitting news on behalf of your client, you need only be able to prove your relationship with the organization. If we receive a release that is suspect, we may contact you to determine your authority to send the release and potentially request proof or further verification.

VIII. Tips on Connecting With Journalists and Other PRSafe Users.

If you weren't partying too hard in grade school, you probably read the story about the boy who cried wolf. If you didn't read it, a boy jokes about seeing a wolf because he enjoys the reaction from people in his town. Then, when he actually sees a wolf and cries out, nobody listens to him and he's eaten up.

The point, don-t just send anything and everything to your contacts. If you want a specific contact to pay attention, before sending to them, ensure the release is targeted to them. For example, sending a release about railroads to someone who writes about advertising wouldn't make much sense unless the release is about something like how businesses are advertising on trains.

The same goes for sending releases out over targeted categories. On PRSafe, you can select up to five relevant categories for each release. Don't abuse it. The PRSafe admin will receive each release and check to ensure the release is professionally formatted and appropriate categories are selected. If you continuously select inappropriate categories, you may be labeled as a spammer in our system and your account suspended or cancelled.

IX. Measurement & Analytics

We currently report on the number of views and clicks of releases and are expanding on our measurement and analytics. Views are calculated by the number of views of the release in our RSS feeds, Newsroom and areas where we can receive data. Views may not include views on certain social networks, emails, websites that repost your news and private computer networks.

Clicks are calculated when people view your release snippet and click through to read the entire release. If you write a good headline and description, the people who click through to your release will be more relevant so please ensure you spend a few minutes to craft a professional release.

We do not currently allow for third-party analytics but are working to expand the data we provide to our users and you can look forward to a more robust measurement platform in the near future.

X. Tips for Promoting Your PRSafe Account

1) Include a link to your PRSafe profile in your email signature.

2) Include a link to PRSafe on your website in the -news- section.

3) Ensure you send your releases out to your existing social networks with emphasis on Facebook Company Pages, LinkedIn and Twitter.

4) Send an email out to your contacts to make them aware of your PRSafe account and ask them to start following your news.

5) Ensure you respond to all journalist messages as they may need to reference your information in a story.

6) Ensure your company profile is up-to-date and you've included any expertise.

XI. Enabling Technology to Ensure PRSafe Functions on Your Computer

Table 1. Browser Cookie Directions

For Internet Explorer:

Go to Tools> Options> Privacy> Sites , After clicking the Sites button a pop-up displays titles "Per Site Privacy Actions." Under Managed Web Sites, check to see our domain(s) (prsafe.com) is listed. If yes, double click the name and click ALLOW. Repeat for each of our domains.

If no, enter each of the domains listed above and click ALLOW.

For Firefox:

Go to Tools> Options> Privacy> Cookies, If the box next to Allow sites to set cookies is unchecked, click Exceptions and add the domain(s) listed above. (prsafe.com)

If you are running security suites such as Norton or McAfee, or anti-spyware programs such as Trend Micro, refer to the program's help feature and search under terms such as cookie, privacy, approved sites, or exceptions.

Note: Some programs may overwrite these settings even after you have set them. If the difficulties suddenly return, begin troubleshooting by first checking these programs' settings.

If you continue to have problems with password retrieval, email support@prsafe.com for further assistance.

Suppressed E-mail Prefixes:

The list of email prefixes commonly suppressed from delivery by leading email service providers are listed in the following table:

abuse@ admin@ alerts@ blacklist@ blackhole@

bulkmail@ contact@ devnull@ domain@ domreg@

domtech@ email@ ftp@ help@ hostmaster@

hr@ info@ information@ it@ jobs@

Mailer-daemon@ maps@ marketing@ news@ noc@

nospam@ postmaster@ privacy@ rbl@ remarks@

root@ route@ sales@ security@ spam@

spamtrap@ support@ techsupport@ test@ usenet@

uucp@ webmaster@ webteam@ www@

XII. General Information & Questions

a. Copyrights - Link to information about Copyrights

b. Cancelling your account - send email to accounts@PRSafe.com or send a message to customer service using the form we provide online.

c. Investor Relations -

d. PRSafe company information -

e. What is a DMA? - A DMA is a small geographic area often one or more small towns or cities within a state. If your release is political or government related, for example, you may want to send to PRSafe users within a specific relevant geographic area.

f. Archiving or taking your release off-line. We currently offer an option for taking your release offline but do not offer the option to completely delete it. The release will be stored in our archive and available for an archive search.

g. We DO NOT currently offer a mobile application but our application is available from mobile devices.

h. We do not currently offer media monitoring but can recommend a monitoring service to you if you wish to monitor your news more thoroughly.

This section is edited and reviewed often. If you have questions that are not answered within this section, please let us know. There are probably other users who have the same questions. Thanks.