PubSub

Headquartered in New York City, PubSub, which started in 2002, is a matching service that instantly notifies you when new online content is created that matches your subscription. The company develops Internet-scale Publish/Subscribe systems and plans a series of product releases designed to make prospective searching a vital element of the Internet experience. PubSub.com provides a free prospective search service that continuously monitors more than 18 million blogs. PubSub is designed to make users aware of what they're looking for, as that information appears.

The Challenge

In April 2005, PubSub turned to PAN Communications to help re-launch the company's brand name amongst its key constituents. The PubSub brand was in need of major national press that would help garner interest from the investment, business and consumer community. As part of a national campaign to raise awareness amongst consumers, blogging and the business community, PAN reached out to the top tier business press to secure interest and briefing opportunities.

PAN was charged with two main tasks. One was to drive consumers, media and other key influencers, such as top level bloggers to the PubSub Web site to increase subscriptions. The second was to get in front of key investors by being included in or featured in high level business press stories.

In order to secure national business coverage for PubSub, PAN Communications worked toward the following objectives:

• Secure a national article in a national business-focused publication, specifically The Wall Street Journal, that would help convey PubSub's core technology as the company that invented prospective search


• Within The Wall Street Journal, secure coverage in Walt Mossberg's "Personal Technology" column in order to reach the business, investor and consumer audience all at once


• Accurately highlight the company's differentiators/value proposition


• Position PubSub as the leading company in "blog search"


• Drive investors, consumers, key bloggers and media to the Web Site

The Approach

PAN immediately began strategizing with the executives at PubSub in April 2005 to determine key messages and develop positioning documents focusing on their unique capability; prospective search.

Once this was solidified, in the summer of 2005, PAN began making outreach to national business press to secure interest in PubSub from top tier reporters.

At this time, PAN and PubSub agreed that the number one goal would be a profile piece in The Wall Street Journal, specifically written by Walt Mossberg, Personal Technology Columnist. The Wall Street Journal is a national publication and also is targeted to investors, one of PubSub's key audiences while the personal technology column reaches both business and consumer audiences and is syndicated to other various publications.

Based on Walt's blogging habits, we decided to target a pitch directly to him. In early July, we crafted an email pitch that discussed the ability to search the blogosphere for Boston Red Sox stats, etc. and that drew his attention, since we knew from his blog that he was a HUGE Red Sox fan and we were in the midst of the baseball season. Due to our experience in pitching Walt in the past, we knew that we would either capture his attention quickly or he would immediately let us know that he wasn't interested. As we had hoped, Walt responded asking us to work with his assistant to set up an in-person interview with PubSub at his office in Washington, DC.

Leading up to the interview on July 28, 2005, PAN worked closely with co-founder and CTO of PubSub Bob Wyman to ensure he was prepared with information about Walt's interview style, recent articles, and was given bullet points of information Walt would be interested in hearing more about.

After the interview from early August and every month thereafter until the coverage appeared, PAN kept in close contact with Walt to ensure he had the latest and greatest news on PubSub. We never knew for sure if and when he was going to write about PubSub, since Walt covers such a wide variety of topics. He wouldn't give us a date, so it was very difficult to predict.

The Result

Every Thursday from August through early February 2006, we would anxiously check Walt's weekly column for coverage. To our great delight, PAN's diligent efforts resulted in PubSub being featured in Walt's column on the front page of The Wall Street Journal's MarketPlace Section that captured the message of PubSub's brand. The story ran on February 2, 2006, reaching more than 2,106,774 business people, investors and consumers. The article was also then syndicated and published in newspapers and on Web sites across the country including: Chicago Sun Times, SearchEngineWatch and others.

The feature hit right on PubSub's target message, prospective search, and also discussed how smaller "search engines" are stacking up against the larger companies who dominate the space. PubSub was in the headline and took a lion-share of the coverage. The day the coverage ran and following, PubSub's Web site traffic tripled.