This week we are very proud to preview our latest offering, Influencing Social Wire which can be found at www.influencing.com and we believe promises to revolutionise influencer relations around the globe.

Since 2008, the team behind Influencing have been connecting journalists with businesses and PR professionals with our MediaConnect websites in Australia and throughout the Asia Pacific. Everything we’ve learnt about how we can make the lives of both journalists and those responsible for media relations has been boiled-down and transplanted into Influencing Social Wire.

We chose the PRSA conference in Detroit this week to debut the technology and the response has been terrific. Every single person we’ve shown Influencing’s Social Wire too has enthused about its potential and we’re looking forward to inviting all those who gave us their business card to start participating with Influencing.com.

So what is Influencing’s Social Wire? It’s a news distribution wire, it’s a Prof-net like media request service, it’s a media database, it’s a contact management system and it’s an online newsroom service. Oh, and it’s all FREE.

At first glance, you’ll notice the resemblence to Twitter. Why has Twitter been so successful? Because it’s so simple and that’s what we’re trying to replicate with the Influencing Social Wire.

As a news announcement service, we’re not interested in hosting your press releases. There are a bunch of wire services that already do that and most companies host their own releases on their own internal newsrooms these days anyway. All we host is the headline and link, which you enter in the system twitter-style. What that means is you can link your announcement to anything - a blog post, a social media release, a YouTube video or a traditional release on your online press room. The point is that there are any number of ways to make an announcement these days and the traditional press release is not always the best way to do it.

When you post an announcement through social wire, we make it very simple for journalists or bloggers to ask a question or request more information. That simply hit the reply button and press submit. Social Wire is about accelerating the interactions between the PR and influencer communities, which for the most part have not kept up with the pace that media operates today.

We further facilitate the exchange of information, by allowing journalists to quickly poll the Influencer PR community as to what information they might need at any point in time. You might think of this as prof-net on speed. And you don’t have to pay anything to get access to these opportunities.

Influencing’s Social Wire is also a social network in that we enable both the influencer community and the business community to maintain their own profiles so that the people they work with can find who to speak to and how best to get in contact with them. Again, it’s free. We don’t believe we have the right to charge people just to host journalist contact details or company information.

And finally, we make it really, really simple for PR pros and media spokespeople to track their interactions with media. Which is free too. By this point, you’re probably wondering how we expect to make money out of Influencing.com. Well, if you want to set up a company account, enabling you to share information and have multiple contacts related to each company then we’re going to charge you - probably around $99 per month for a mid-sized agency or PR team. And if you really want all the bells and whistles, we’ll upgrade you to our full Influencing portal which we’ll be launching in the US in the new year.

However, if you want to participate using an individual account, you’re welcome to do so at no charge. It’s important for our model that everyone can participate and the only way for us to achieve that goal is to not restrict those organisations who aren’t in a position to pay.

So stand by, we’ll be sending out invites and opening up the service shortly!

Influencing, a new online platform for PR and media professionals launched today at the TechCrunch50 exhibition as the first social application suite to focus on connecting journalists and bloggers with their sources.

“The PR industry as a whole is struggling to transition to online PR models while journalists spend far too much of their time struggling with information overload,” said Influencing founder and CEO Phil Sim.

“Influencing brings both communities onto the same platform, so they can find each other, understand each other and communicate and work with each other in a far more effective and productive fashion.”

Influencing combines a social network engine with a suite of specialist applications for both journalists and PR professionals.

“You could think of Influencing as Facebook meets Salesforce.com but designed specifically for media and PR professionals,” Sim said.

The social networking platform allows users to map their “professional graph” and then use those relationships to power its application suite which includes a personalised home page, RSS reader, contact management capabilities and online messaging. Journalists have access to tools which let them define the information they’re after, request information and easily and manage all of the leads and stories they’re working on. Meanwhile, PR users have tools to help them build media lists, distribute press releases, manage their online newsrooms and analyse their media coverage.

Used together, the two platforms interconnect to map out an integrated workflow between the two communities that will be far more efficient than traditional communication models.

“Influencing can be used to automate and improve every interaction between an influencers and a PR professional including helping both communities to find each other and track movements, automating the pitching process, managing leads all the way through to a PR person analysing their coverage and relationships,” Sim said.

Influencing is the result of eight-years of experience in building an media relations website called MediaConnect, which is used ubiquitously by media and communicators in the Australian IT industry. “MediaConnect changed the way IT media and PR professionals communicate in Australia and we believe that our new Influencing platform will have the same impact on the media and PR industries globally.”

The Influencing platform has been designed to be “white-labelled” by other media intelligence content providers but can also be accessed directly via Influencing.com.

“The media intelligence market is highly fragmented and we see Influencing as a way to consolidate both the media and PR communities on a single platform, which is why we hope to work with media intelligence providers from all over the world.”

“Our platform can be re-branded at the click of a button to enable media database, monitoring and content firms to offer their customers a full online PR applications suite”.

Influencing is accepting private beta registrations from public relations companies and professionals as well as journalists and bloggers as the platform is opened up to the public over the course of the year. Please email beta@influencing.com or apply for an account on the influencing.com login page.

Additional talking points
- Influencing will cost considerably less than competitive PR platforms and will initially launch in a free beta mode
- Influencing allows journalists and bloggers to manage their own profiles and content information
- Influencing is the first PR platform to integrate with social media applications like Twitter, Facebook and blogs

Contact Information
For more information please contact Influencing CEO Phil Sim at philip@mediaconnect.com.au or phone +61 2 9894 6277.

About Influencing
Influencing is an online PR platform connecting journalists, bloggers and other influencers with PR professionals. Combining a social networking engine with a suite of specialist on-demand applications, Influencing creates an integrated workflow that helps the media and PR communities find each other, understand each other and communicate and work with each other in a far more effective and productive fashion.

Influencing can be found at http://www.influencing.com

Influencing, a new online platform for PR and media professionals launched today at the TechCrunch50 exhibition as the first social application suite to focus on connecting journalists and bloggers with their sources.