pr :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

It’s kind of definitional, surely, that home based businesses don’t have PR departments or in-house PR specialists, except of course where the business owners are themselves PR people.

And my assumption is that home based businesses generally do not have PR agencies on call to handle their media engagement.

It follows that, in that respect at least, work-from-home professionals have in the past been operating at a disadvantage to any corporate competitors, when it comes to getting their story out.

Social media, and more pointedly the social media release, a template for which Todd Defren famously debuted back in 2006, changed that paradigm forever.

The term is pretty clichéd now, but in the PR field, social media has levelled the playing field. There has been a dramatic shift from the long-established format and process of issuing press releases into a completely new way of communicating your message. And, acknowledging my own bias but being confident nevertheless in my assertion, in that process the social media release platform PitchEngine has led and is leading the way.

The key point I want to make in this post is that PitchEngine is an ideal resource for home based businesses, as well as for other businesses small and large. I have become even more convinced of that since I wrote here a year and a half ago my post PitchEngine Works for Small Business Too.

PitchEngine is easy to use, as long as users can get over the idea that they have to be PR experts to use it and just think of it as a way to get their story out, especially via the social web.

PitchEngine is economical. Check out the prices here: Basic at $39 a month is perfect for any home based business.

PitchEngine is environmentally friendly – 100% wind-powered.

PitchEngine is friendly, knowledgeable and helpful people.

Naturally, we’re actively, attentively on Facebook and Twitter too.

PitchEngine Founder and CEO Jason Kinztler, a.k.a. New Media Cowboy, is passionate about helping businesses get their story out and PitchEngine is his creation to help them do just that in the new economic world of social business. This is how he puts it:

PitchEngine isn’t a wire service or a “free distribution tool,” as some bloggers like to put it. It’s a platform for getting the word out about your business or brand. Whether the mechanism be email, text message, tweet or post, PitchEngine provides an easy way to to package and share you stories. That, coupled with our new Search Meets Social™ offering provides a new, more innovative approach to public relations that’s both traditional and consumer-facing.

And if that’s not enough to arouse your curiosity, you can try PitchEngine free for thirty days.

If you have any questions, please ask in the comments or send me a message via the Contact page. If I don’t have the answer I will call the PitchEngine folks in Wyoming and get an answer for you.

Do you have a PitchEngine success story to tell? Please share it.

The social media release service provided by Pitch Engine empowers small businesses, as well as large, to be more effective in their online marketing.*

Although the term “social media release” has wide currency, I don’t know of any one, generally accepted definition or simple explanation.

My adaptation of an explanation by social media template author Todd Defren is that the term “social media release” (SMR) is used to describe a media release which incorporates social media tools (social bookmarking, RSS etc) to provide background data, context and on-going updates to clients’ news, so as to help journalists and bloggers better understand and/or research the story behind the releases.

Pitch Engine has been taken up by some major brands, including Xerox, IBM, Hallmark and many others.

It also works very effectively, in terms of functionality and especially financial affordability, for even the smallest, work from home, solopreneur business.

The most economical option is the free one. The next level of subscription, providing archiving of releases and other benefits, is only $35 a month or $400 a year. And for an additional $15 a month or a total $500 for a year’s subscription you get, for any brand from the largest to the smallest, your own customized newsroom. The details of the various options are described here.

Right now there is a special Buy One Get One Free offer for annual Pitch Engine subscription purchases – but it lasts only for another couple of days, through June 13, 2009. For anyone taking out a one-year paid subscription, a second will be added free. You might notice that the media release focuses on PR firms, but the offer is for any subscription, so the home based entrepreneur who does her own pr is most certainly included!

* (Disclosure: our company Webartsco is now working with Pitch Engine to market and support the service in Australia.)