I just discovered this news network and have had good experience posting things for my clients.

AOL’s patch.com is a neighborhood specific online news service. Small businesses or nonprofits can post their blog offerings, photos and videos as well as their own press releases. Go to patch.com. Look for the pulldown menu to identify your state and look for your neighborhood. Large cities will have neighborhoods identified. Small towns might be linked with another town or township. 

This is local news going social and shows great promise for many organizations who may have had trouble getting media attention from print sources. I recommend sticking to journalistic principles and not just spamming the media. Take time to write a feature about an employee or something you are involved with in the neighborhood.

There are professional journalists monitoring the submissions but they encourage submissions and comments.

Hello Everyone!

Even though I concur that Patch could potentially be very useful for some businesses, it did not work out for us. Our primary complaints are as follows:

1. Representative changed frequently. They have high turnover which results in a new name, and often times emails, updates, and implementations faced large delays.

2. Poor click through rate. Although a number of issues can go into this, we found that we had very strong CTR from other sites running the exact same advertisements, and poor results on Patch.

3. Primitive to non-existent reporting. We got infrequent PDFs with limited information. It was handled through email (See point 1).

Anyway, those are my first hand observations. Your millage may vary.

Jason

Hello Judith,

So instead of using it as an advertising platform, you used it to get your content out? Clever! We’re going to be doing some branch openings and such over the next few years, I’ll have to find out if there are local “Patches” and see about getting them PR and invites!

I like that idea – consider it stolen!

Jason