HubShout | Online Marketing Solutions

Danny Sullivan wrote a piece yesterday about the latest news about a fake acquisition story (Google buying WiFi provider ICOA) that was distributed by PRWeb -- How PRWeb Helps Distribute Crap Into Google & News Sites.

It was likely meant to boost ICOA stock, but what it did was reveal a seedy underbelly of crap many are pushing to gain links. As many turn to press releases to gain links in the post-penguin Google world, this serves as a reminder that QUALITY CONTENT ALWAYS MATTERS. Don't pump out crap and expect long term sustainable gains.

Interesting stuff.

I saw this yesterday and also thought it was interesting. Seems like a classic case of trying to inflate stock prices to turn a profit (pump and dump). They made the stock price go from something like $.001 to $.005 then sold off for a profit (check nytimes or another news source and check if those figures are correct if you want, I think i'm pretty close).

Since this surfaced I wonder what new security measures these PR sites will take on now to combat another fake article like this showing up.

I come from a traditional PR background, so have spent too many hours to count crafting, editing and re-editing press releases that would -- hopefully -- be a good talking piece to accompany media outreach and that would inspire someone to write about it. So I find the "submit anything you want" do it yourself era extremely fascinating. The good sites filter and moderate before they approve, but that's super challenging given the amount of information coming through the pipeline. This is especially true for free press release sites (here we go again with the ol' internet services being free discussion), which are the most accessible.

You know how I love a good "should the internet be free" discussion. I posted a new thread to the LinkedIn Group: Would charging for press release submission/distribution help eliminate a lot of the crap?

That was crazy. I saw this as well. I can't believe that someone tried that. Last I heard they were doing an investigation on it.

Yeah, you can pretty much write anything and submit to a press release site. Most of them don't seem to care much about quality or legitimacy. The only release I've written that got rejected, and I've written plenty, was submitted to a free site. They said my topic wasn't newsworthy enough. I respect that.