 Welcome to another edition of PR Tech Wednesdays. If it's Wednesday, it's PR Tech Wednesday. Our guest today, Ben Choder, he's the president of Digital Media at Intrado. You're gonna have a chance to ask him questions after the main interview. So if you have questions, go ahead and queue them up in the chat room. This episode of PR Tech Wednesdays is sponsored by the Electronic Freedom Foundation, Defending Your Privacy and Free Speech Rights Online. The Electronic Freedom Foundation is a US 501C3 non-profit and you can donate online at EricSchwarzman.com forward slash EFF. Our Bookstagram of the Week, sponsored by the Startups Guide to PR, is The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. Now, if you're doing PR for startups and you wanna better understand the process they go through to develop technology solutions that the market wants without wasting time and energy building out products they may reject, this really is the book to read. This is the book that coined the phrase minimum viable product or MVP. And that's essentially a scaled back version of a new product used to collect customer feedback and validate a product market fit prior to investing the revenue and building out something that people may not want. You can download the Startups Guide to PR at EricSchwarzman.com forward slash startups. Ben, thank you so much for joining us. Oh Eric, thank you for having me, man. It's really nice to see you again. Last time I saw you was at a conference in San Diego. It's an exciting time for you guys and I wanna talk about the Intrado PR software stack but let's start a little higher up with a discussion about the PR software industry because there used to be and still are a number of different products that do different things, right? Yep. I mean, so I think one of the things that we were talking actually before the show started was this whole industry is so ready to be disrupted, right? And we as Intrado Digital Media wanna be right in the forefront of combining all the technology. If we wanna be that one of the places, the one place that customers, PR professionals, marketing professionals could come to for the entire stack and I actually think this is that the most exciting time in the last probably 15, 20 years in the space. So G2, the online marketplace for users review software recognizes the following six categories of PR software. One, media and influencer targeting software. And I guess in our parlance we'd call that news media or journalist database products. Two, media monitoring software and I guess that could be either news or social media monitoring. Three, PR analytics software, which I guess would be interpreting the media we monitor to draw some business intelligence from it. Four, PR CRM software, which I guess would be like a hybrid of a media database and a CRM software. So you have to put your own notes in each of the records. Five, press release distribution, which I know is a big thing now given the prominence of fake news. And then sort of everything else, all other PR software, horror, newsrooms, you know, I missed gas because I had thought newsrooms would be the center. But if you look at, you know, kind of what took the center, it was pretty much media monitoring and news media database services, right? Yep. You know, it's really exciting when you say that as you were going, I'm gonna, which one is he gonna say that in Toronto does not play in? Every single one of them is part of our PR workflow, which actually I'm actually all smiles now because between our GNW product, right? Which is the third largest PR distribution product in the world and our acquisition of Notify and with GNW, we already had a media, super large media database. Every single thing you just mentioned, we now have in our stack also with the Notified Acquisition, we do newsrooms and actually with our NASDAQ acquisition, we were doing newsrooms and websites, IR sites before. So you just made me really happy, Eric. I mean, if the interview ends right now, this was awesome. We deliver each one of the things that you mentioned. I'm not letting you off that easy. I'm gonna grill you, okay? All right, make me cry, Eric. In the last decade, US markets saw explosive growth of 200%, nearly 200%, 195% was the number. So what does that mean for the PR software category moving forward? Is it growing? Is it contracting? Are we plateauing? What is your prognosis for the future of PR software as a whole? I actually think it's the beginning. I think everything was so antiquated and one off and done, disposed, it was never really combined. I think what's happening now for the first time, PR professionals aren't just about, I got a message, I gotta react and I gotta get out there. They needed to come full circle, right? They need to get the message out there. They need to take the information in. They need to analyze it, take the data and then send more information out and they're not gonna be able to do that using six different products or antiquated technology. So I actually think it's a boom. I actually think we've not even close to the tip of the iceberg. I think the technology advancement and changes you're gonna see over the next two or three years are gonna be super exciting. Prior to when we met or when we met rather at the PRSA International Conference in San Diego, you had just finished the acquisition of Notify and there was a flurry of activity. There was I think a deal that Cision announced they got bought out. Talk to us just about some of the numbers so we get a sense of scale because I know that's sort of your world. What do you mean by the numbers? Give me an example, what you mean? Well, I mean, to the extent that numbers were disclosed about what you paid for different companies or what other companies have received in funding, what scale are we talking about? I mean, the scale is huge. I mean, if you just see the announcement about Cision, which is a publicly traded company being brought private by a private equity firm, it is the numbers are eight to 10 times even in numbers. And it's a publicly traded company so it's easy to figure that out. I'm not giving any insights up what we acquired. What was the number? It was announced. The number in the Cision press release was what? I think it's in the three billion range, right? So that's unicorn status. It's a huge publicly traded company. I mean, the list goes on. Cision bought Trenkite for a big multiple. I think they were sold to them for $200 plus million. So all of a sudden, Synthesio got sold to Ipsos. We went out and bought Notified for the first time. All of the traditional companies who were in PR distribution, regular PR technology were like, media monitoring, the entire workflow, the PR solution is now forefront, right? So I think we're only at the tip of acquisition is gonna happen in this space. There's been so much. Yeah, and I think the actual number for now, I think of it is more like 2.7 million, the 2.7 billion that Cision was sold to. Did you disclose the figure on the Notifying Acquisition? No, I can't because we're probably- What about Globe? What about Globe Newswire? Because I know you bought the Globe Newswire, which is- So it's publicly- Well, we bought from NASDAQ, which is public. We bought their PR business. We bought their hosting business and their streaming business. And it was well over $300 million. And that's public, right? So again, never gonna give anything that's not public. NASDAQ was a publicly traded company. So obviously when they make a sale of an asset, they have to announce it. So there's been a good deal of discussion about PR becoming more like marketing about the two coming together. And marketing automation software is an enormous category. But why is PR software so much smaller than that? What happened? All right, I'm gonna give you two things. One is our whole vision as our company, we wanna do what Adobe and HubSpot have done for the marketing cloud. We wanna do for the PR workflow. The reason why is I really truly think up until very recently, the PR industry was sort of still in the 50s, right? It was very reactive. It was traditional press releases. It was press conferences. It was messaging. It's technology didn't catch up with them. And also I think a lot of corporations, like this is just my opinion, a lot of corporations could put a value and an ROI on marketing. Hey, we spend this much on AdWords. We spend this much on a conference. We spend this much on a marketing webcast. These are how many people came back. This is how much revenue we got. And in PR, it was really hard a while ago to sit there and go, we did a press release. Hey, outside of how many outlets picked it up, really what did it drive? And how did they get to us? Media monitoring or media database or an influencer database, what revenue did it drive? It was really hard outside of who saw how many outlets picked it up. I think now we're combining it all so we could help figure out the ROI. And I think it's just as important for businesses where it used to be, I do a marketing event. We know 1,000 people attended. Out of those 1,000 people attended, 300 ended to become customers. But what they never tracked before is those 1,000 people that attended, if 300 of them started tweeting and then they all have followers of 1,000 or 5,000 people and those people saw it or people put a message in LinkedIn or they Facebook and how many people saw that and came back and go, oh my God, this is a really cool company that only a small number of people actually saw on the web or on a webcast or some marketing event or even a physical event. Now they can sit there and go, how big was our reach and what did it return? And I think that, how can any marketer professional not think that's really sexy? Or it used to be PR like how sexy is a press release? Even though we all know, great SEO on press releases, they last a long time. When you go to Google tomorrow and you look up, if I look up your name, Eric, and I go to Google and I click news, only thing I'm gonna see about you is press releases that your name was in. So it's gotta be part of the mix. It's now a marketing tool, not just a PR. It's not just my earnings and I just hired a new executive or I have a new product launch. It is a marketing tool. So we started, we talked about all these different categories. And you have them all now, you've acquired them, you're integrating them into this full stack solution. What is the benefit of having all those tools come from one provider? I think I'll give you a couple, right? Or a few, right? One is single login, right? To me, I mean, it has nothing to do with the technology, right? But single login. When I go around, whether it's a focus group or a marketing event or a PR conference and you talk to any PR professional and they go, what do you use for PR distribution? What do you use for media monitoring? What do you, and they go, I use this, this and this and I have to go to six different logins. My dad is in six different places. One of the best benefits working with Intrado, digital media, single login, all your information in one place, all your data, you compare your press release data with your streaming data, with your media monitoring, all the data could come in one place so you can make really good decisions, right? So single login technology that actually talks to each other so you can come up with really good analytics. And then the third reason why I think it's really exciting is we believe, you know, we help clients deliver mission-critical communications. Doesn't matter if you're a PR professional, a marketing professional, internal comms professional or IR professional. We wanted everyone to be able to do these things. The first thing you gotta do for every company is listen, right? What are they saying about me, my brand, my competitors? So we have that with our media monitoring, right? Then we gotta connect, right? How am I gonna get my message to these people, right? So whether it's press releases, whether it's media database, whether it's influencer database, whether it's a virtual event, how are we gonna connect with people, right? Then we gotta deliver, right? So we gotta be able to take this information and deliver it out there. Press releases, marketing events, streaming events. We gotta be able to publish, right? Take this content, put it into newsroom, put it on our website, social press releases. And then at the end of the day, we gotta be able to do two more things. How do we amplify this message? How do we take it and actually throw it out to even more places to get more data back? And why do any of that stuff if you're not gonna be able to measure it at the end? So now we're gonna give you true measuring. And so we kind of think it's like rinse and repeat. You're gonna go through the wheel and then you're gonna start over but what's even cool about it is you don't always have to start and listen. You can start at publish. Today, I just want to publish, then I'll go around the wheel or I'll go the other way around the wheel but it's giving everyone all that information in one place. It's, listen, as a guy who started two startups, I wish I had a tool that I could go to one place to really understand outside of sales how my business is doing. You know, there's always a trade-off when you go with a vertically integrated solution that does it all and the trade-off is usually feature depth versus level of integration, right? So is feature depth worth sacrificing for integration? All right, so I don't think we have feature depth. I mean, you gotta understand that also the other part about us is we're basically a series of five to eight different acquisitions. We went out and picked the organizations we wanted for the technology, the integration and the delivery of all of them, right? So when we did the NASDAQ acquisition, you know, we bought one of the biggest, one of the top three PR distribution products. We bought one of the larger streaming companies in the world and we host, you know, close to 3,000 of the Fortune 5,000's IR websites. Then we went out and bought a company called InExpo. It's a streaming company, but it is, you know, state of the art technology, the best technology we've ever seen or I've ever seen in my career and I come from the streaming space and it's incredible for marketing and virtual events. Then we went out and we said, hey, we wanna own a medium monitoring company. And since, you know, we're private equity back, we had the opportunity to look at every single company out there, yet we picked this company in the Nordics called Notify out of Sweden for two reasons. Reason one, I've never seen a PR workflow product like this and a solution that's so user friendly in my entire life and we have seen everybody. And two, the most innovative team I've ever met and we were able to acquire them and build and grow from it. And then, hey, we wanted to be able to have clients ability to refer, right? Referral marketing. So we went out and bought the number one referral marketing company we think in the world, Ambassador and so we've taken all these technologies that we have and we've combined it together with two things in mind. One is we are not gonna have feature gap, right? We are gonna build the best products out there. Two, we wanted to own our entire stack. So no one could come to us and say, yeah, but you can't modify, you can't add and you're not constantly innovative. And the third is as an organization and this was my mission, I wanna constantly be disrupting myself, right? So I am never gonna be in a situation where we don't offer the best to breed everything. And then here's the other thing. Every one of our products is also offered as an individual product. So we understand, you know, a company has a long relationship with a PR distribution company. Hey, if you're not gonna switch, we understand, we give you all the benefits, how your data gets integrated and how it can post. But if you just wanna use this for streaming, we offer to streaming. You just wanna use this for monitoring or influencer database or media database. We have all the features for newsrooms. So we know if you use one of our products, you're gonna try to find a second one of our products. And then also what we're finding right now, if we go in there and show you our end to end solution and show you that it's cost effective, you know, chances are you're gonna engage with us. And we're not so private where we won't integrate other technologies in if you tell us this is who we use for this, we'll integrate. So, you know, your predicament as a CEO is not unusual. There are so many companies that have gone through acquisition, but obviously the challenge is always, you know, getting the tech resources to really integrate things smoothly. So talk to us a little bit about your plan for getting that done. You know, Eric, it's really interesting. I think my biggest challenge because we're 1,300 people globally doing business in 210 countries was how do I take six, sevens, eight different cultures and combine that into one organization, right? That to me and build one culture and take the DNA that was really good from each one of the companies and combine it. That was the number one thing for me. The tech, we have incredible tech people, right? We from day one have had really good technologists. It's the number one thing we did is making sure that we have great product owners, great business owners at each one of our products. And we probably spend more money on our, on our GTS, you know, on our technology team and development team than anything else. We are always innovating, right? And that was probably the easiest thing because we also had the luxury of not building everything in a house and only having expertise in one. We went out and acquired the expertise we wanted in different businesses. I was really impressed with the notified team and I was impressed with the demo that I saw. It's funny, you know, cold weather and good internet has just created so many interesting companies that have come out of that part of the world. So how many developers did you pick up with that acquisition? Oh, with that acquisition, you know, listen, it was a small company, but we also remember we were already in that space too. We have, you know, dozens and dozens of developers. I mean, listen, we have development locations in Sweden. We have development locations in Nuremberg, Toronto, Boston, Chicago, India, right? So what's great is we now have these incredible resources who work on different products, but for the first time we're one organization. So we're not doing things in a silo anymore. There might be a brain trust of developers we have in our Toronto office who worked on our PR distribution. Now we're combining that team with our team with notified and how do you take PR and put it into media monitoring in our workflow. To me, it's just been, it's fun. It's like putting a hell of a lot of smart people in an incubator together and they're building really cool things that are really needed, that are working, that have great ROI and at the same time, we're not taking our eye off the individual products and what I'm finding from our development team globally, I'm making it, every developer wants to work on the next cool thing. Every developer wants to feel like they're engaged in working together and we've enabled it whether you're working on a referral marketing team in your developer in Detroit or you're working on a streaming product in Chicago or Nuremberg or your notified developer in Sweden. You now have access to this incredible brain trust to build your next stat. And did you hire a new CTO? How are you sort of managing all these disparate teams? Here's the best part. I mean, to me, one of the great part is when we do do diligence to acquire a company, we don't just do financial deal diligence and product due diligence, we do people. So sometimes an acquisition that you're acquiring is like the people that I'm acquiring with it are as important as the technology, right? So what we've done is we run it as our business stack is individual owners of each of our products, reporting up to head of business, head of product. And then we have at Intrado Global, we have a global CIO who's incredible, his name's Anu. And he basically gives them all the resources and tools that they need. And then also on our global team, Intrado has other organizations, we now have access to their teams as well. So no, we didn't need to go out and have a new CTO. We already had it all in-house with this master plan of what we were gonna do with it all. So when you think about what you do from a sales standpoint, and you wanna identify the problems that PR people have, other than the single sign-in, what are some of the problems that exist in PR today as a result of not having the latest greatest technology tools and services? Data, I think it's data. I think it's how do I take all this data and combine it all together? That to me, Eric, if I can solve that internally. Listen, I have that same problem as an organization, well over 100 sales people globally going out there and all these clients that we have, 10,000 plus, we have, how do we take all this data that we're getting in and from our marketing resources and our PR and put it all in one place and be able to come up with a clear roadmap and plan? I mean, at the end of the day, I wanna give you really great technology. I wanna give our clients the best support and service in the world, but I wanna give them tangible data and reports and measurement that they could use to run their businesses. So Intrato is branded as a workflow-oriented end-to-end tool that lets you listen, connect, publish, amplify, and measure all in one place. Yep. Talk to me about that sequence. Okay. Is that the logical order of most public relations initiatives? All right, so it is a logical order, but like I mentioned a little earlier, we built it so you can start at any of the spokes, right? It doesn't matter, you can start on publish, the only one you really can't start on is measure, right? Until you get some data, right? So, but all the others, whether it's listen, connect, right? I can make an argument, I'm gonna start on connect, right? I wanna find out who my influencers that I wanna reach, what database, what media contacts I wanna reach, I wanna go in there and add some of my own media contact. I'm gonna start there. Then I'm gonna write a press release and I'm gonna publish to those guys. Or I might sit there and go, well, before I do any of that, let me listen to what they're saying about my brand on Facebook and Twitter and social and podcasts and television and print media and take that information in or what they're saying about my competitors. And then I can sit down with my PR team and our marketing team and go, all right, this is what they're saying about us. Let's use like a hamburger company. If I'm McDonald's, I wanna know what they're saying about me at Burger King and in and out Burger, right? And I wanna know what our message is and I wanna know how our audience is responding to it. And then I could take that information and go, hey, am I gonna come up with an advertising campaign? Am I gonna come up with a PR campaign? What am I, a marketing campaign? What am I gonna do with it? Or if I notice that, man, these great influencers and these great media people are writing about this target, I wanna be able to reach them. Because again, it's not just about major television networks and New York times, which is really, really important. But man, the influencer, the media influencers, the bloggers and now the world of micro influencers are sometimes even more important because I can, the world of micro influencers, if I have 5,000 followers, I might be rabid on anything Eric says. And so when you say something, I'm gonna really react. And if I'm someone who has a mass audience, I don't know if everyone's gonna follow me, right? So I think it's really important and with our flow was truly built that you can follow it around, start over or start anywhere inside the wheel. Well, let's start with a second with the listen side of things. So what are the top three questions perspective clients ask you about news media monitoring? What are you listening for, right? Because are you just listening to what they're saying on Twitter and maybe some bloggers or what are they saying about me on Facebook or Instagram? I mean, so that's like the first thing someone wants to know, how big is your reach, right? And obviously, the bigger your reach, the more important it is, right? Because if I just told you the only thing we do is social listening, you'd be like, oh, that's awesome. You know, everything they're saying to me about social then you're gonna be like, hey, what are they saying to me about in print media? And what are bloggers saying? And then you're gonna go, what are they saying about me on television? And then you're gonna come back now because I'm the hugest fan of this and we made an announcement that we just integrated it is podcasting. I mean, listen to what, look what you're doing. This is more valuable. I spend more time on podcasts than I do listening to radio and listening to regular television. And when I listen to a podcaster, if I love that podcaster, I wanna know, did they mention my company? Did I mention my competitor? What are they saying about my brand? So the first question always is like, hey, what are you listening to? The next question is, are you listening to this? And for us, I wanna give you the breath, the biggest breath I can, but then also there might be some places that have a paywall. But if you come to us and talk to us, we can figure out what we can do, right? Because A, we need to make sure you get all your data, but we also need to protect copyrighted information. And you guys just made an announcement about podcast monitoring, right? Yep. Talk to us about that. So here's like one of the best parts about this organization. If you asked about innovation. When I first joined, we first started in April of 2018. One of the first things I said in our press release product, Matt, was I wanna be able to embed video whether it's live. And we created media snippets, right? So fast forward to, I don't know, summer time this year. I'm an avid podcast guy. Even had a podcast like you do. I think it's a great way to get information. You follow me rabbit. And I said to my team, guys, we need to have podcast integration. And without a blink, they came back and go, here's the five different ways we can do it. They figured out the best way to integrate podcasts, literally 60 days later in December, we announced that we have podcasting embedded and it's just gonna be better and better. And sometime in the next, the out of quarter, when you go into Notified and you search, the podcasting will be right there. And you can actually not only listen to the podcast inside of Notified, but you can actually find just that one little clip that you want, just like you would with any kind of traditional media. Software as a service, I think it's such a healthier way to buy software because it's about a relationship and the provider has to maintain the integrity of the software over time. So you don't really have a lot of sunk costs on getting up and running. But when an account is in play, because let's face it, I mean, there are accounts that change hands between Cision and Meltwater and Intrado and different providers. When accounts churn in the news media monitoring business, why are they churning? One, it kills me any time we lose a client. So I lose sleep over it. And you can think how much sleep I lose with their 10,000 plus client. I think here's one of the other reasons because most of the organizations that came into the space didn't integrate their entire workflow like the whole listen connect rate. Everything we did is if you're just using someone for media monitoring, what's the big lift and shift if I'm gonna use someone else for media monitoring, right? Because I just gotta go into another site, log in, type this search term, use this Boolean search, and it gives me back all the information, right? But if you add more tools to it, it makes it stickier and stickier. And that's what the whole thing is. I love media monitoring and the search of it. But after a while, great, I got all the information. What am I gonna do with it? It's how does it connect to other parts of my PR since we're talking PR? How does it connect to the rest of my PR workflow? So, listen, I think the other thing that we offer because we're a global organization with over 1,300 employees, all of our technologies we offer as self-serve, like you said, SaaS, but at the same time, every single thing we do, we offer as full-serve. So if you need help, you're shorthanded, we have it. If you're a really big organization and you can afford to have the services, that's fine too. So we love the idea of, hey, you can use this full-service, you could use it on our own, or you could use a hybrid of it. And I think that's one of the best parts about working with one of the bigger players in the space is we can do that. Share your bragging rights. Where are you particularly strong when it comes to news media monitoring? When you're competing on that front specifically, where do you outperform? I think we outperform at ease, right? I think there's the reality, Eric. I think everybody who's in the media monitoring space can do the search, right? Can get the information, but where we make it really special is I dare anyone to show any media monitoring solution out there that looks cleaner, crisper, sexier, easier to use, more intuitive than ours is. Anyone who wants to do a demo of the notified PR workflow, we'd love to show it to you. But I think, Eric, that's the number one thing that's the differentiator is, hey, we think we'd put the data together better than anyone else. We think it, you know, all the backend stuff, but the reality, the number one thing is, you don't need to be a scientist to use our technology. And the number one we hear from PR and marketing professionals, and I are professionals when they look at our media monitoring workflow solution or PR workflow solution is, man, it is clean, crisp, and simple. It is, I saw it, I concur, it really is clean. It's a great interface. The notify guys really knocked it out of the park. They built a product that was meant, like it just makes sense. And listen, I don't come from the monitoring space. When I got my first log on when we were looking at using these guys, and I got log-ons for almost everyone else in the space when we were looking, I didn't need anyone to walk me through how to get the information. Obviously to run reports and figure out how do I take different, but to just get the basic of all the information and see how many Twitter followers, whether you're saying sentiment, it was just all there and it's so clean. Now 62% of communications experts predict future consumers won't be able to distinguish between a piece of information written by a reporter paid for by a brand or shared by an influencer. How does news media monitoring adapt to that environment? I mean, I think it's already built for that, right? Because theoretically today, you could log on to what you use notified, right? And media monitoring or any competitor really in space. And automatically it's gonna give you information whether it's forwarded, whether it's retweeted, whether it's written by me on a tweet, whether it's a blog I wrote, whether it's an article I wrote on The New York Times, whether it's something I said on CNBC, whether it's something that was placed anywhere, whether it was a press release, I think what media monitoring is becoming. And I think you're right, you're not gonna be able to tell where the source is. It's gonna be how do I get all that information in and then bring it down to a way that's really digestible. And that's, to me, that's the magic of it. And also here's one of the other things why PR distribution is getting hot again. It is the easiest way to disseminate what's real news and fake news because you know who it's coming from, you know who listed it, you know that it's out there. And so that's why I think, I actually think a lot of people say PR distribution is starting to go a little bit declining. I think it's about to start growing the other way, and especially from one of the big three PR distribution companies like us, because we're viewed as credible news when it goes into social. Some services in the news media monitoring space are starting to shift from Boolean search logic, which makes it tough to eliminate spam and irrelevant content to artificial intelligence. So as tech computing power continues to advance, how will it impact news media monitoring? Oh, it's gonna impact it a lot, right? But I think at the end of the day, you're always gonna be able to do Boolean. I mean, look, you can use us as an example. Listen, we have basically natural tech search, right? We have Boolean and we're adding more and more AI. And I think it's the same as us searching. It's the same as the information coming to us. So let's just dive in to some of the features if we can. With respect to time span, what's the window on monitoring? How far can I go back? You can go back really far. I mean, listen, a normal search usually goes back for seven days, or that's what normally is set up. But in ours, you can go back as far as the providers of that source of material will give you, right? Like Twitter has a limit on how far you can go back into their archives, Facebook, they all. So for us, we don't limit it. It's more limited by the sources that deliver to content limited. One of the big challenges I've found researching the space because as I mentioned, I'm writing a news media monitoring buyers guide now. You most of the organizations aren't even aware of what they cover and what they don't because there's so many changes and every provider has a different format of how they provide their feed so there's no normalization there. But I noticed like nobody really has like a searchable database on their site that's open where you can just search and see if that outlet is covered. Why is that? You know, I don't even know, Eric, but I think you just gave me an idea for one of our next solutions. So I appreciate you. Do you just get the text in the monitoring or do you also get some indication of like where it ran and if there was a photo or graphic or caption? Do you get all that too? You get it all. I mean, listen, in our feed, you actually see, you know, think about like a LinkedIn feed, right? When you get the feed on your LinkedIn, until you click on it, you're gonna get this much of it. The moment you click on it, you're gonna get the whole thing. It's the same thing with us, right? And if it's social, whether it's podcast, whether it's media, it doesn't make a difference. And if it's social, right? In some cases, it actually even brings you back to that. If you click into it, we'll bring you back to that site. What about syndication? If I get an AP story or an AFP story, a Reuters story, do I get the story and everywhere it ran? It depends on how the search is gonna go, but you could get it everywhere. I mean, that's, and depends on how your search goes and how you set up your search. That's a tough one. That's always a tough one. So, I mean, can you somehow get a plan? You could filter out. What about truncation? What if a story is truncated or a story's ever shortened, or do you actually get the whole thing? So, in the image, you'll get the truncated version, but when you click on it, it'll either bring you to that site or it will launch the whole thing depending on how that feed comes in. So, we're not just giving you the... How much of the article do you get in the truncated view? It depends on your screen size. I mean, I can show you, but I tell everyone, think about what you get in LinkedIn. When you see, when you do a post in LinkedIn or I do a post in LinkedIn, you don't get 140 characters like Twitter, you get a lot more, but it depends. Was there a big photo with it or was it mostly media? But clicking to go deeper is really what it's about. It's supposed to tease you is what it's supposed to do. Can I click from the article to a journalist profile? Yes, you can. If there are any... So, you can do two things. You can click from it. If there are journals in our media database, it will go right to it. If it's not in our media database, right? You can actually add it to our media database. So, I can pivot from the journalist profile to their coverage? If it's your dog, my power is about to die. See, so I'm about to have a faux pas like you are. So, someone's going to get me my power. What's the dog's name more importantly than anything? This is actually the mascot of PR Tech Wednesdays. This is Ace. Ace, how are you Ace? Ace, he's saying hi, say hi, Ace. What kind of dog is Ace? Ace is a couton de tulière. And it was a companion dog bred in Madagascar. And it's a very affectionate sweet dog. This is a puppy. He's seven weeks old. Oh, that's beautiful, thank you. All right, we'll put him down again. So, I can pivot from the clip over to the journalist profile. In the journalist profile, can I see an archive of all coverage? No, you'll see who they are. You'll see what they cover, how big they'll reach it. I mean, it depends, let's say, on a journal, on a media database, it'll list who they are, what organization they're right for, or organizations they're right for, it'll give you whatever contact information that's available, and you can reach out to it. On the influencer side, it does the same thing, but it also lets you know how big their reach is as well. What about New York Times and Wall Street Journal? It does search and we'll find, you know. Can you get the whole thing? It depends, right? Paywall, non-paywall. Well, I mean, that's also a paywall. Yeah, then it will give you just a clip and you'll have to, it would not give you content, it's not. If it's copyrighted content, you have to pay for the copyrighted content. But you don't have a deal in place with Factiva or Dow Jones. We do, we do, we have all of that. It depends on some certain content is still paywall, right? So we do have, you know, we have our Alexis Nexus feed, right? We have all the feeds that anyone else would have in the space. What about chat support? Is there live chat support in the tool? We do offer live chat support in a notified platform and we actually offer it in most of our platforms. In terms of speed, if I've got a Google alert going, what's gonna be first? You or Google alert? I don't know. I'd like to do that, I'd like to do that running race. Good question, you're not sure. That would be incredible. I'd love to do that race. You know what, email isn't as, you know what? I don't even wanna answer, I wanna, you know what I'm doing the moment I hang up with you, right? I'm going to check. I'm going into notified and I'm gonna wait till I get a, you know, I think it's very cool. Listen, I think it's really close, right? Our thing is constantly, it's not old, it's whatever date range you put into, it's the most up to date. So I can't see it being much faster. What about multi-user access? Is it possible to set up different users with different access levels? Yes. In fact, in all of our products there is, like you can do search, but you can't reach out, like we'll choose notify, for example. You can do searching, but you do not have access to reach out to media database, right? Because that's the company, I don't want you to represent me and send a message to a media outlet, right? Or a writer. So yeah, I mean, everything we do, all levels of security. One of the best parts of coming out of a lot of our business coming out of NASDAQ and specializing in IR, security, security, security, security, and permission, permission, permission. You faded in and out again. Are you publishing an API? We are about to launch an API, but we don't offer an API into other people's products right now. So the API that you launch will not be published for integrating into third-party software? No, it will be. Let me give you an example. In PR distribution, we already have an API. So you can actually embed, press release into your website, right? Let's say, use that as an example, right? Which a lot of people do. So we do offer it. We're gonna offer it with Notified so you can take some of the data, but we're working on how we're gonna allow it and how it will be published. And I know you're a big fan of APIs. Let's get into the connect part of the equation. So how do you keep your database crying? All right, so there's a couple ways. One is we're always taking a feed of our database. We're always checking it, but every time, this is like one of another brilliant thing that the Notified team did. Every time there's an article and it's being searched when that article comes up, is that person already in our database? So theoretically, every time someone does a search, they're helping us build their database. How do you differentiate in the database between reporters and influencers? It's totally separated, right? So we have a media database, which we've had for a really long time, have one of the largest in the space. It came from the GNW days. Press release, you wanna reach media. And being one of the big three, that sort of gave us a luxury to build that. With Notified and other partners, we've built out our influencer database, which is influencer database and micro-influencer database. That's the last few years. That's a big growing area. And again, earned and paid, right? So are you looking at an influencer group that's a paid influencer group, or are they just influencers? So we totally separate it. They're actually theoretically, they are actually separate searches that you would do. You go into our media database for the press, and you go into our influencer database for influencers. Can I add notes to a journal's record? Listen, we gotta get you another demo and a trial account. Get you an account to Notified. Again, one of the things they did brilliantly. As you read an article, you could add that guy to your own personal. You could upload, but also in there, I could write anything I want. Like, hey, this guy has wrote good articles about us. This guy has written good bad articles about our competitor. Anything I want, I could do it. Yeah, it is basically, I'm not gonna call it a CMS because it's not a CMS, but it's really my media database, my influencer content management system, right? But it is a CMS because you have the newsroom functionality. It is because it will go in it, but a CMS is so complicated. What we built for our, I'll give you an example. So for our hosting business, we host 3,000 of the Fortune 5,000's IR websites. That has a real CMS. Like a heavy duty CMS. You know, everything's gotta be in different places. Where's this media gonna live? Our CMS is, you know, it's kinda like a contact database that has notes, allows you to put all your information in, allows you to share it, where do you wanna deliver it? But I don't want people to look at it and go, oh, I could just use this to run everything from. If I'm a journalist, can I log in and update my record myself? Not currently inside our platform. But that's another idea that I'm stealing from you, Eric. Now in terms of distributing press releases, why is press release distribution important in the age of fake news? All right, so I'm gonna give you a couple of reasons. One, in no particular order. One is it's credible news, especially if it comes from one of the major PR distribution companies like us, Business Wire, Cision, right, you know, the big three. The media outlets, you know, the Yahoo Finances, the APs, other people, they consider our press releases credible news. Not that they're saying the other guys aren't, but they're saying it's credible news, right? That's one. Two, in that age, it has the most incredible SEO. It stays. And if it's credible news and you're one of the bigger guys, it lasts a real long time, you know, a few years when I search Eric on Google and go to news, I will find press releases from a couple of years ago. It's credible. I think especially in today's news, I mean also in a press release doesn't go blind, right? You're not like, who is this article? Who's this journalist? It says right on the top. This, and it also has our name on top and it has the company's name. It has the information. It has the PR contact information. It has the organization's information. And if it's a publicly traded company, it better be real news. What's happening in the PR, in the PR Newswire space? You know, Warren Buffett bought Business Wire how many years ago? A few. And so he's obviously doing well. It's obviously a healthy business. And you've just acquired Globe from NASDAQ. So they got out of that business. Globe was a series of acquisitions itself, Market Wire and others. And PR Newswire is, you know, the 800-pound gorilla. And there's several acquisitions, right? They're PR Newswire, right? But I remember like, you know, when, you know, I date myself, you know, before there was an internet, I remember, you know, we relied on the Newswire to get it out there. There was no other way to do it. And then I remember thinking early on, well, you know, now that there's the internet, you can just publish it to a newsroom. You really won't need a Newswire anymore. But that's not really what happened, right? I mean, it's actually, you're saying becoming more important now because of fake news. Yep, listen, and we also believe that, I mean, as an organization, we believe there are times to do a global national press release. There are times to do what we call a social press release. So in Notified, in the workflow, when you go to publish, you can actually send a press release to, you know, a national or global circuit, right? Reach all the media outlets if you want. Or you can sit there and go, hey, I'm just gonna publish this press release. Same format, but a press release to just my social outlets, whether it's Twitter, whether it's, you know, Facebook, whether it's any, whether it's just my newsroom, whatever you want. And so we want people to sit there and go, hey, you still gotta do it. When you come into our system, when you go to publish, you'll decide, am I gonna go to the national? Which is obviously gonna cost more money for anyone than sending it just to social. But still at the same point, you gotta get that information out there. And a press release is no better way. But the pricing on Newswire still goes on word count. Because it's not like it's querying a satellite anymore. So how do you rationalize that? Well, you know what, me, you know, it's really interesting. In some ways, it depends on what type of press release. Let's take earnings press releases and put them over here. Earnings, you have to do legally, SEC involvement, there's certain things. You can't, they're long, right? There could be a 50 page, you know, earnings press release, right? How many transactions did you do in that quarter? All the information. So let's put them aside. But one of the things that we just launched, even in Notify, was a token based system, right? Which means you can pay one token, which has a dollar amount to reach this audience. We don't care how long your press release is, right? You can pay this many tokens and go to a national or an industry list or a global list and we're trying to cut that out. The other reason why traditionally people have paid by word is if it's gonna go through a team of editors. And what I mean by editors is not editors who are gonna take and change your copy, editors who make sure, hey, this press release is gonna look good when it goes on Yahoo. This chart fits perfectly and it's not gonna be cut off and it's gonna be picked up by, I mean Bloomberg or somewhere else, right? So a lot of people use the editor and also to check that grammically, right? That it's a grammar is right. All the spelling is there. It makes sense. So you're never gonna get away from word count when a physical human being editor is gonna touch something to make it. And again, hands on the press release. You're doing a press release of a new hire. I don't even know if you need to go through an editorial process, you're gonna sit there and go, hey, am I doing this press release just announced that I hired Eric and it can go to just a social one? Or do I wanna do this one to just an industry trade? Or do I wanna do this to a national or global? Oh, we lost you again, Eric. You've got the amplify for the social side. It's obvious why you need that. So final question real quick. When you're measuring your campaigns and ROI, talk to us about ROI. How do you determine the true ROI of a reputation? I don't know if you can truly quantify the true ROI of a reputation, but I can tell you what our clients do and what it could be used for. So one of the interesting when you go into our measure is we have all different kinds of reports you can run. One report might be how does my brand stand up against my competitors in a time period? Really important, right? Man, I had this many mentions. This percentage where sentiment was really, really good. This many were not so good. My competitors had this many that were great. These many that weren't. How come my brand is bigger, but yet I have a far less reach in Twitter than my competitor. The ROI there is I know now what I need to do on my marketing and PR campaigns to grow an area or actually respond in an area. So ROI is one of those things that I think are very personal to an organization outside of the ROI. I'm doing this marketing campaign, how much revenue did I get in? But brand recognition is really important. We can help you with that, right? So really one of the keys is what, when you sit down with a client, what is ROI for you or they can ask what kinds of ROI can we give you and we can help them with all of it. Ben, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I want to invite all of you to join us next Wednesday for a conversation with conversion CEO, Rob Key, on the state of artificial intelligence and PR tech. I want to thank our diamond sponsor, the Electronic Freedom Foundation. You can donate at EricSchwarzman.com forward slash EFF. And I want to thank our gold sponsor, Flux Branding. Located in downtown Los Angeles Arts District, Flux Branding is a hub for creative thinkers to strategize, collaborate and innovate and learn. For the past 18 years, their studio has been helping transform brands and as well as helping them grow and evolve. They're seekers and navigators, guiding brands to discover their true potential and you can find them online at fluxbranding.com. And once again, Ben, thanks so much for doing this. Thank you, Eric. Have a great day. Take care. Bye-bye.