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April 20, 2000

Ten Fast Facts

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TELLTHEMNOW.COM

WHO:
A privately held Internet news and information service founded last year by Wiley Brooks, owner of a prominent Seattle public relations firm.

WHAT:
Enables online readers to instantly send e-mail messages to newsmakers.

WHERE:
Seattle.

Fast Fact #1: TellThemNow found an e-mail address for Fidel Castro.

Comment: Castro is one of many key figures in the Elian Gonzalez case to whom the public can send comments via TellThemNow. How did the company get Castro's address? "If I told you, I'd have to kill you," says Brooks. "Or Fidel would."

Fast Fact #2: Brooks will close his public relations company next month to focus entirely on TellThemNow.

Comment: Founded in 1988, the Wiley Brooks Co. gained a national reputation for crisis management by helping Jack-In-the-Box respond to the 1993 e.coli outbreak. "I have somewhat mixed emotions about [closing] because the PR firm had a great reputation," says Brooks. "I made a really decent living at it. To close it down was a major decision." All but one of the PR firm's employees will work for the new company.

Fast Fact #3: A pink burger inspired Brooks to launch TellThemNow.

Comment: Brooks saw red after a restaurant served his 3-year-old daughter an undercooked burger last June. The next day, he tried to e-mail complaints to the restaurant and health officials, but struggled to find the addresses. A month later, he created TellThemNow. "It should have been easy," says Brooks of trying to reach restaurant and health officials. "Now it is."

Fast Fact #4: Yahoo! recently named TellThemNow as a "site-of-the-day."

Comment: "We've started getting traffic from all around the world," says Brooks. As a result, the company is rethinking its original game plan. Launched in March in beta form, the company's Web site was supposed to take a back seat while TellThemNow focused on selling its services to other Internet news outlets. Now, the company intends to upgrade its site next month.

Fast Fact #5: TellThemNow uses technology and the telephone to collect addresses.

Comment: "We don't talk a lot about how we do it for obvious reasons," says Brooks. "You find ways of delivering the mail." Although Tell ThemNow was able to purchase a list of some government addresses, "we had to capture the rest."

To do that, the company uses a spider program to prowl the Web. It also turns its employees into reporters, each with different beats. For example, when TellThemNow featured the Masters golf tournament on its Web page, the "sports guy" tracked down addresses for all the major players.

Fast Fact #6: Users simply type the name of the person or organization they want to contact.

Comment: TellThemNow's proprietary software does the rest, searching the company's exhaustive data base for addresses and delivering messages to everyone from CEOs to senators to movie stars. The data base already is so large that 80 percent of all messages reach the addressee. "Our goal is to get that to 95 percent," says Brooks.

Fast Fact #7: More than 400 news outlets have expressed interest in using TellThemNow's services.

Comment: TellThemNow will appear on an affiliate's Web site as a pop-up screen that is linked to TellThemNow's servers. When visitors to an affiliate's site want to respond to a news story, they can easily send an e-mail to virtually any person or company mentioned in the story. Current affiliates in the Puget Sound area include the Tacoma News Tribune and KOMO TV.

Fast Fact 8#: TellThemNow cannot guarantee messages are read.

Comment: "It varies from recipient to recipient," says Brooks. "It's kind of the way they treat regular mail. If they deal with it, they deal with it. If they don't, they don't." In addition, some recipients receive TellThemNow messages through a third-party. For example, e-mail for a ballplayer may go to team headquarters.

Fast Fact 9#: Only one recipient has complained -- US West.

Comments: As a former PR person, Brooks says the timely feedback that TellThemNow delivers can be extremely valuable, especially to businesses and public officials. TellThemNow tries to make the mail convenient and valuable to recipients by sending it in overnight batches and summarizing its tone on a scale of 1 to 5. In the future, TellThemNow hopes to go one step further. The company plans to build a data base of users who volunteer to provide demographic information. For a fee, TellThemNow will survey those users on behalf of corporate clients. TellThemNow's other revenue sources include its affiliates program and future banner ads on its Web site.

Fast Fact 10#: TellThemNow plans to seek another round of financing in June.

Comment: At first, Brooks self-funded the company, but he has since raised $2.5 million -- $1 million from Pacific Northwest Partners of Bellevue. Brooks hasn't thought much about an exit strategy. "Right now, the goal is pretty simple," he says. "Make this baby really sing!"



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