It is a news announcement service, a Profnet-like media request service, an online press room, a contact management system and a social network - all built with the goal of making the interaction between influencers and their sources as efficient and successful as possible.

Influencing.com is now accepting registration requests from PR professionals and business executives with responsibility for marketing communications in their organisation. Once we have a reasonable amount of content flowing through to the site, we will then begin inviting journalists and bloggers to join our community - a process we expect to start in early January.

Using an interface that is similar to the hugely popular Twitter service, Influencing.com asks business and PR professionals: What are you announcing?
 

Rather than hosting yet another version of your press release, Influencing.com simply takes your headline and then links that back to whereever you want to send interested readers. That could be your online newsroom or even a traditional wire service, but it could just as easily be a blog post, a Youtube video or a FriendFeed discussion. You have total flexibility as to how you want to announce your news and where you send the traffic to. By sending traffic back to your own site you can better measure your results and get greater SEO (search engine optimisation) benefits than by simply hosting your release on a traditional wire service.

Journalists have total freedom as to how they might want to read the Influencing feed. They can read it via RSS in their favourite feed-reader, they can receive email notifications and digests, they can follow our Twitter and Friendfeed streams or they can read the news directly via Influencing.com.

Even more importantly, Influencing.com makes it a breeze for journalists and bloggers to ask questions, request more information or set up an interview. They simply click reply on the announcement, start typing and then press submit - instantly relaying that message off to all media contacts for the company in question. These requests can be emailed and also show up in the relevant media contact’s Influencing.com Inbox and Activity list.
 

Influencing.com also allows journalists to request information in a similiar fashion to the way that services like Profnet work. However it’s so much easier to use - journalists simply type their request into the text box at the top of the page and press submit and that query is fired off to all relevant companies.
 

We expect that simplicity to generate significant useage of the system, which will in turn provide a steady stream of editorial opportunities to our business and PR users. Again, it’s a snap to reply facilitating quick-fire exchanges that actually keeps pace with the rapid minute-by-minute news cycle of today’s online media

Journalists can also set up pitching types, which presents those companies and PR pros who wish to pitch a journalist with a pre-defined form so that the journalist can specify exactly the information that he or she needs.