Expert sourcing after HARO: Qwoted, Featured and SOS

Connectively, the platform HARO became, shut down on 9 December 2024. Anyone still selling a HARO package is selling access to something that no longer exists. This work now runs across Qwoted, Featured, Source of Sources, Help a B2B Writer and journalist requests posted publicly on Bluesky and X, and about one filed response in ten gets used. Reactive sourcing is not a link tactic with a person attached. It is a person, made available, who is worth quoting. Everything below follows from that. The response standard: Filed inside 90 minutes of a request appearing, because the ones answered on day two are answered into a closed file. The first sentence answers the question asked. One number in the body that the journalist cannot get from anybody else: your return rate in a category, your restock lead time, the share of orders that replace a previous purchase, what happened to sell-through when you changed a size label. Under 150 words unless more is requested. Written in the source's own register, not in agency English, and read and approved by the named source before it is filed. If they will not read it inside the window, we skip the request. A quote attributed to somebody who did not write it is a liability with a byline. What I refuse to answer: Requests from sites whose business is selling inclusion in a roundup of fifteen experts. Requests where a fee is mentioned at any point. Requests with no named publication, which are almost always aggregation farms rebuilding the same article across a network. Requests that need your company to claim something it cannot support. Roughly half of what comes through these platforms falls into one of those, and filtering it out is most of the value here. Who you need to be: One or two named people with actual authority over a subject: a founder, a head of design, a head of merchandising, a supply chain lead. Two hours a week of their attention, mostly in ten-minute pieces. A real LinkedIn profile and a real title. If the only person available is a marketing manager repeating positioning lines, this does not work, and you will hear that at the intake call rather than after three months of invoices. What this is not: Not a substitute for press outreach with an original story behind it. Reactive sourcing puts your people inside articles other people decided to write; it does not make anybody write. Not a route to links from titles with a masthead and an editor on staff, most of the time. Expect trade sites, sector newsletters, business advice publications and a long tail of specialist blogs. On nofollow: Much of what lands is nofollow, and I do not pretend otherwise or quietly count it as something else. It still puts a named person from your company inside a document that other writers and answer engines read as source material, which is where a share of your future citations comes from. If your buying decision depends on followed links only, this is the wrong service and digital PR is the right one. Reporting: Every request answered, every one used, with the hit rate stated plainly rather than smoothed. Publication, date, URL, link status, which source was quoted. Where a source is being used repeatedly by the same journalist, I say so and we move that relationship out of the platform and into a direct one, which is the point of doing this for more than a quarter.