For this I'm looking for persons willing to act as public relations persons for their respective countries. This person would then take care the press release gets sent to appropriate places in his/her country. I'd try to avoid the situations where a) several people mass mail the same newspaper or b) where people think "well, someone must have told them by now" and don't send the press release to that newspaper. The appointed PR person would then coordinate the PR job in his/her country. This would involve emailing the newspapers and other news outlets and perhaps being a contact person if the reporter wants to ask further questions. In this case it might be useful to add a "additional contact: Joe Sixpack, joe.sixpack@email.addre.ss, 231 232 2323" line to the press release or its accompanying text. Some reporters prefer to interview some live person, instead of browsing the web for more details. And it'd be surely more effective and interesting if there was some real live person who would give the answers. Obviously there may be some questions directed to the EBT support email address, and in that case we'd like to know your email address and hopefully your phone number as well, so we can tell reporters to contact the EBT PR person in that country for additional details from a live person. Basically, accepting this job means that you'd email the press release to various places and then answer the questions if some reporter wants a clarification for some issue. Pretty easy, right? And you might get your 15 minutes of fame as well
This PR person should also inform the other EBT users about where the press release has already been sent, and other EBT users can suggest additional news outlets. This could be handled by posting a message to this thread. Naturally, if some news outlet makes a story about EBT, it'd be nice to hear about it. If some newspaper writes a story about EBT, it'd be nice if someone could scan the story and email the image to the EBT contact email address (this someone could also be some other person than the PR person).
If you're interested, post a message or send me a PM. At some point (before Monday!) I'd like to know the PR persons' real names, email addresses and possible phone numbers, they can be sent to me via email to contact (at) eurobilltracker.com or via PM.
Current public relations persons by country:
Belgium: bhoeyb for Dutch requests, could some French-speaking person assist him?
Netherlands: HNL
Here's the current draft for the press release. Please don't distribute it before Monday.
avij wrote:FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
contact@eurobilltracker.com
www.eurobilltracker.com
EURO BILL TRACKER REACHES 1 000 000 REGISTERED BILLS
Paris, France -- August 11, 2003 -- The top Euro bill tracking site has announced that it is now tracking a total of over 1 000 000 Euro bills, registered on the site by users from various countries, mainly from the Euro zone. The millionth note was a German 5€ note which was found in the Netherlands, Capelle aan den IJssel.
The idea behind the website is very simple: see how the bills travel around the world and give users a chance to find out where their bills have been and where they go. A more scientific aspect of the site is the diffusion section where monthly charts show how the proportion of foreign bills increases with time in each country. In order for this to happen, users enter the information about the bills they have and indicate where they got each bill. If the bill is already in the database, the previous users who have entered that bill are notified via email.
The success of the site in so many European countries is probably due to the fact that the site was designed to be multilingual from the start. The site is available in all Euro-zone languages thanks to a group of translators who give their time and assistance to the site.
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ABOUT WWW.EUROBILLTRACKER.COM
* Information about the eurobilltracker.com project is available at http://www.eurobilltracker.com
* Diffusion of Euro bills is available at http://www.eurobilltracker.eu/diffusion
* The Eurobilltracker website was inspired by the 4-year old Where's George website (www.wheresgeorge.com) but hopes to go beyond its big brother. The site went online on January 1st, 2002 to coincide with the introduction of the Euro in European countries.
* Project Statistics as of August 11, 2003:
12 729 users
1 015 103 bills, 25 674 570 €
391 double bill entries
51 participating countries