Christopher “Chris” Simmons is CEO of Neotrope and Send2Press, a privately-held California company providing best-in-class personalized and targeted news distribution Direct-to-Editors, along with professional press release writing. In addition to sending news directly to working journalists, freelancers, and print and broadcast media, Send2Press places news into clipping services, online news sources and social networks, aggregation partners worldwide, and deep into search engines. Simmons is a veteran author and journalist, musician, photographer, marketing guru and public relations expert, multimedia artist, and entrepreneur with more than 25 years of experience in multiple creative disciplines and has written for over a dozen national magazines. He composed his first press release in 1981 for a self-published work, which led to a quarter-page in Playboy magazine’s June 1982 Potpourri section. That led to PR work for California entertainment and start-up companies, as an extension of his graphic design, copywriting, and photography freelance work, and the launch of Neotrope in 1983.  Simmons has served as a public relations representative for numerous public and private companies with extensive experience in placing news stories in the media. A member of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), he has served on the judging panel for the Excellence in Technology Journalism awards created by the PRSA. He has been on the launch team for numerous successful companies, including MacMall and FindWhat.com. In addition to managing the day-to-day operations of Neotrope/Send2Press and developing new business, Simmons is directly involved in the management of all client projects.
 
Health E-Insights: What advantages does Send2Press offer over other news distribution services?
 
Mr. Simmons: Primarily the people, as we’re all accredited PR folks, members of PRSA and hold degrees in journalism. We all come from the professional public relations side, working with clients to help them get coverage through personal engagement, and we’re also published, paid authors, having edited, designed and written for national trade publications. Secondly, and perhaps notably, we were the first newswire to really push the idea of search engine optimization (SEO) of press releases in 1997, when doing corporate work, and also building websites for companies. This led to developing the e-commerce solution for Oprah Winfrey’s Begin with Love video series. When we launched Send2Press, as a spinoff of Neotrope, from day one we promoted the idea of search engine optimization. Nobody else was doing that 10 to 12 years ago. The big services like PR Newswire used to expire news after three months, based on the idea it wasn’t news anymore. Syndicators pulling their content were also required to remove stories in three months. We took the long view. That’s why if you look at our site in the Way Back Machine (archive.org) a decade ago, SEO+PR is right there on our home page. But our main advantage is we tend to treat projects more like making a client a memorable wedding cake, and not a greasy burger flipping joint. Not that there’s anything wrong with a greasy spoon—it just may not be what you need to stand out from the massive growing wall of fake and junk news and content spam. We started an initiative back in 2000 with a large trade group to try to educate small businesses when first jumping on the net to be more responsible in building content around news, but that has largely been ignored. So, we act responsibly in how we approach the media, how we post news online, and we don’t do web evil (i.e., like posting fake comments on other portals linked back to the press release). The main thing is we really do send news to media folks. We don’t just place it on a bunch of crap blog sites and call it national distribution. The Internet is global, but that’s not the same as actually sending to people on a global basis. Finally, we have spent almost a decade building our own content network to carry our news even when traditional media won’t, which also helps ensure online visibility, penetration and permanence. It becomes a paper trail back to the client, the brand and the message, primary for media, but as a secondary level for the public.
 
Health E-Insights: Do supplement news stories usually garner a lot of media attention?
 
Mr. Simmons: Generally yes, when they are from legitimate companies that have well-defined and disclosed backgrounds and not masked information. A real company can get coverage when announcing a new product that offers a unique solution to a consumer interest. The transparency of the company and product on the Internet has a big impact on this, beyond the press release or ad campaign. Much like drug companies disclose their company info, location, background, development of products, and health safety practices, those in the supplement industry do best when they can be checked or verified by media. If the only thing online is a landing page that is a buy me now brochure, then media are immediately suspicious, and rightly so. PR and online marketing must rise above the late night TV commercials to improve and support credibility. But it still always comes back to the product, proof of what it does, full disclosure of ingredients and clinical trials.
 
Health E-Insights: You’re at ground zero for social media. How much has social media enhanced PR campaigns?
 
Mr. Simmons: In some ways, too much. It’s become the latest buzz, as if crowd sourcing will somehow immediately result in media coverage. On the other hand, if you’re a journalist who lives and breathes Facebook or writes items based on Twitter’s so-called trending topics, then social media can be invaluable. I have one long-time client who is in the entertainment industry and six years ago I put him on the map. He’s received literally millions of dollars of publicity, and now he has such notoriety that he can practically put up a Facebook post, add some high-res images, and he doesn’t even need to do a traditional press release. This is transformational, as this helps him immensely. But how much of a fad is that? How can you sustain folks checking in on what you do all the time, for fear of missing that one juicy bit? At some point they will stop looking if you don’t update your content at least a couple times a week, if not daily. One of the things we’re launching for 2012 is a social media powered news engagement platform, which will rely entirely on crowdsourcing for media opportunities being posted, as well as for story pitches being posted by marketing departments and agencies. Right now, we’re calling this platform ScoopCloud.
 
Health E-Insights: On average, are most news releases you receive well written?
 
Mr. Simmons: Depends. We catch all kinds of errors, often by agencies that rely on their client to proof and approve, which leads to errors when neither the agency or the client catch mistakes. We catch 99.9% of them. The main thing about PR is that it’s really got to be matter of fact, and not prose. A lot of people don’t get that. It’s not an article; it’s an announcement. It can’t be ad copy or re-purposed text from your home page. It should have a call to action. An editor or blogger generally isn’t your customer. The end reader of the editor’s media outlet or blog would be. Often we have to educate our clients on traditional precepts like attribution, clarity and consistency. By and large our clients have been well educated by us over time. Some we get are perfect, most almost so and some not well written at all. And of course we write a lot of great press releases for our clients.
 
Health E-Insights: What’s the best compliment you’ve received about your media services?
 
Mr. Simmons: Simply that we did a good job. Often for us the warm and fuzzy isn’t about the money going into the bank. It’s when we’ve genuinely helped somebody get their message out and it resonated enough with somebody to want to re-tell it, share it and propagate it. It’s wonderful when we go the extra mile and somebody appreciates it and says so. I really can’t think of one in particular, without sounding too full of myself. I was really proud of some of the work we did for World Savvy, a non-profit who was a beneficiary of our PR Grants program. One of our projects helped them have a record-breaking fundraiser event. We also helped a couple of folks prior to my dad passing in 2003. My dad did some great work for them and a couple of those clients still call me for new things and mention that, almost a decade later.
 
Health E-Insights: Of all your talents and successes, what do you want to be remembered for?
 
Mr. Simmons: Probably my art, music and writing. Being a good person. Monogamous in relationships, trustworthy and straightforward.
 
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