Meet the Influencers: Jason Kintzler, PitchEngine

If you’re like me and have stumbled upon the website for PitchEngine, you’ll quickly realize you’ve found a new PR tool worth exploring. Billed as “PR for the social web,” PitchEngine is a web app and hosting service that automates the creation of Social Media Releases (SMRs) and Social Media Newsrooms. A concept first developed in 2006 by Todd Defren, the SMR has taken on several iterations and pushed the major wire services to incorporate social elements into their core service offerings. As Jason Baer points out, however:

The hang-up with social media releases has been actually getting them built. Most PR folks are not Web programmers, and the very nature of what makes a social media release useful (tags, links, multi-media) makes it tricky to execute if your definition of high tech is inserting a footer in Microsoft Word.

PitchEngine is the answer to easy SMR creation. Using PitchEngine, organizations can create and share SMRs for free. The site can also archive your brand’s releases, and offers a customized newsroom option as well (these features come with a nominal fee). Instead of pointing you to the PitchEngine site for more information, we went straight to the top and PitchEngine founder Jason Kintzler was kind enough to answer our questions about his site.

-Stephanie Stadler

1) First, can you share a little about your background and the genesis of PitchEngine?
I'm a former print journalist and broadcast news anchor turned PR and brand guy. I love the media industry and wanted to make it easier for both to share PR content and information. That is where social media and PitchEngine come in. Journalists need more than a bunch of printed paragraphs - they need flexibility of high-res images, cut-and-paste quotes, related links and contact info.

Brands need to share more than marketing, they need to share their culture and personalities. With PitchEngine, they can incorporate social links, video and other things that help give the brand (or your client) more authenticity.

2) I know there are a few different facets of PitchEngine. Can you break them down?
Sure. First, PitchEngine makes it possible for PR pros to share all sorts of PR content and assets with their media contacts for free via the Social Media release - it's like a micro-site for a PR pitch.

Second, PR pros can share their social media release with their media contacts via email, or through social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and more. We share your release with Google News, or PitchFeed subscribers, and more to come...(all that is still free!) We host each releases free for 30 days, after that you can subscribe to archive and host it. You can also get a custom newsroom to feed your website all of your SMRs.

On the media side of things: Journalists and bloggers can filter your news by keyword, search by category and create a personalized feed of the stories they want to see. They subscribe to it and every time someone posts a new story, they'll see it!

3) For our readers who may not be familiar, what makes the Social Media Release and the Social Media Newsroom different from their "traditional" counterparts? Why are they valuable?
The social media release allows for so much more flexibility. The word doc is for lawyers, email attachments suck and press kits are old school. How's that? No seriously, it gives you the ability to deliver your media contacts (not just a select few) all of the goods. It's like a press kit packed into a link - nice, huh? Media love it, because it is clean, consistent and concise!

4) How does PitchEngine compare to all of the household name (in PR and marketing) distribution methods and wire services? Is PitchEngine designed to replace or supplement these distribution methods?
I think it can supplement them now. Eventually, I think they'll all be like PitchEngine. You can pay to send your press release out and hope it gets picked up, or you can share it with media contacts, engage with them (through comment-enabled Social Media Releases, Twitter and more), and impress them. You decide which is the better approach.

5) For the company that has never created a social media release, or thought that they needed to build a Social Media Newsroom - what's your answer? Why should they do it, and do you have any best practices to recommend as they get started?
Um, here are a few "twestimonials" that might help convince you. The best thing to do - get on PitchEngine, sign up, create and share a release. It's free and you'll love it, seriously.

6) What's next for PitchEngine?
We're adding functionality by the minute. Translation, localization and Asian distribution are coming soon, lots of new SEO benefits and more and more places we'll be sharing to. We want to be known as "PR for the Social Web" and we're going to get there, just a matter of time. :)