After covering the "8 core principles of Digital PR" last week, I’ll move on to cover PR tools geared towards not only kicking off your PR activities, but also to help guide your SEO efforts. As a PR professional, I tend to use 3 categories of tools: Media Databases, Media Request Services, and news Monitoring and Analytical Services.
Here’s a breakdown of my top tools of choice:
Media Databases
Cision
Cision is the venerable grandfather of the PR space. Founded in 1892 as a press clipping service in Sweden, it’s now a multinational media conglomerate. Cision offers subscribers a comprehensive worldwide media database, along with press distribution services, content marketing, and media analysis services.
I used Cision for a PR outreach campaign a few years ago, and it offered a simple way to reach a significant number of journalists by phone, fax (yes, fax…), sms, and email.
Users have the ability to search for a specific outlet or journalist, and to filter by topic, region, media format, etc. A recently added power search function provides more relevant results for common queries, too.
Cision also has comprehensive list generation capabilities, which are useful as contact worksheets for keeping track of outreach activities. However, once a list is saved, it’s not updated when journalists' information is changed, so the data can become dated easily.
The training offered by Cision is comprehensive, and is delivered by scheduled webinars or in groups. The webinar approach means training can be scheduled on short notice, but it does have the disadvantage to inherent in webinars - distractions like emails can decrease attendees’ overall focus.
Vocus
Based in the US, Vocus is a rising participant in the PR space. Now with over 16,000 paid subscriptions, they offer a suite of services to monitor your brand, share your news, and interact in real-time with reporters and bloggers.
Vocus offers two packages of interest to marketers: the "Vocus Marketing Suite" and the "Public Relations Suite."
Released in 2011, they combined aspects of both marketing and PR. Email marketing was later added. In 2014, Vocus now includes "Buying Signals", which monitors social media conversations and attempts to identify people in real time who are making a purchasing decision, as well as customized lead scoring, a CRM platform, and custom communication workflows.
The public relations suite features a large database of journalists and bloggers, a press release distribution system, as well as a media monitoring service.
Key features:
- Automatic Clipping - Vocus features a set of tools to setup automatic clipping service, and automates sending clips to clients and to your team.
- Reply-To Enabled - Unlike other providers in this article, Vocus allows users to set the name and reply-to address for each distribution. (It gives you the ability to automatically route replies from different campaigns to different members of your team).
- PRWeb Enabled - PRWeb is now wholly owned by Vocus. Vocus has done a nice job of integrating PRWeb into their core offerings. If you send a lot of press releases, this integration can save you time and money.
Meltwater
Another major player in this arena is MeltWater. A global company based in Norway, Meltwater offers many of the same features as Cision and Vocus, but claims to have better media analysis capabilities.
Their platform features a Google-like NLP feature that allows you to identify and rank influential journalists in any chosen category. It also features a robust media monitoring and analytics suite.
However, some users have reported occasional problems with email deliverability - specifically, routing issues and high bounce rates.
MeltWater also feature an article-based search engine, which they claim is unique to the industry. Using this toolset, subscribers can launch queries to determine which journalists have written about their topic or industry in the past, and they the option to contact identified journalists directly.
Gorkana (UK focused paid service)
Operating with much the same business model as Cision, Gorkana is the mainstream media database provider in the UK. It offers a variety of PR packages for individual freelancers and agencies, including media data and analysis, media networking opportunities, and premium customer service options.
Gorkana offers the ability to search for a particular journalist or outlet, as well as a standard category search. Their map feature is intriguing and allows users to draw boundaries of the regions in which they want to search.
However, Gorkana is missing one common and very useful feature: the ability to search by term, which makes it harder to achieve relevant results.
Lists can be easily created and sorted by Contact, Name, Organization, email address, and Media Type. Missing feature alert: once you save a list, you can't sort it by popularity. The good news is that a saved list is updated automatically when a contact's information changes, keeping your list fresh for your entire campaign.
Of all the providers, Gorkana is the most expensive, but are known for their excellent product support and they also offer convenient on-site training in the UK.
Media Request Services
Media request services are a relatively new segment in the PR space. They allow journalists to post requests for quotes and other content, and receive responses from experts in related fields.
These services add value to the PR efforts of a business, especially if your pitches are aligned with your overall branding and PR strategy. If you are working with a PR agency, make certain they are kept in the loop regarding your pitches, to avoid overlap.
Here are my top picks:
HARO (one of the most popular free services)
HARO (Help A Reporter Out) was founded in 2008 and acquired by Vocus in 2010. Their numbers are impressive: over 30,000 reporters and bloggers, over 100,000 news sources and thousands of business subscribers.
HARO offers free and paid services to sources and reporters, and the platform functions much like a social media play for PR professionals: a place for them to tell their stories, promote their brand and publicize their content.
ResponseSource (Paid service aimed more at the UK)
Like HARO, ResponseSource delivers a near-constant stream of potential media coverage opportunities on a wide range of subjects to PR pros on a daily basis. It is worth nothing that the company behind ResponseSource (DWPub) require the purchase of FeaturesExec (their Media database), at just under £3,000, before you are allowed to purchase their media request services which are segmented by industry. So you would be looking at close to a total of £4,000 +vat. However, The quality of UK based media requests that you receive is brilliant.
Twitter hashtags
Examples of Twitter hashtags used by journalists are #JournoRequest and #Prrequest. I use Twitter management tools like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to monitor these hashtags. The only issue with this kind of tactic is how general and non-targeted the media requests from journalists tend to be.
Source Bottle (free service)
Founded in 2009, SourceBottle is a free PR connection platform that enables journalists and bloggers to efficiently find credible sources. It also provides PR professionals with insight into publicity opportunities to help them gain brand awareness for their clients.
Press Quest (UK free service)
Launched as a subsidiary of Journalism.co.uk, Press Quest is a service to help journalists connect with subject matter experts and case studies.
All-in-One Media Request and PR Database Platforms
Muck Rack (paid service)
MuckRack, founded in 2008 by Sawhorse Media (US) uses social media to help discover and match your stories with journalists who might be interested in your stories, it also allows you search, send pitches and monitor alerts.
Gorkana (UK focused paid service)
Operating with much the same business model as Cision, Gorkana is the mainstream media database provider in the UK. It offers a variety of PR packages for individual freelancers and agencies. Gorkana provides detailed media data and analysis, media networking opportunities, and premium customer service options.
Media Outreach Tools
Buzzstream
Buzzstream is not only the most versatile outreach SEO tool in the market, but also doubles as a digital PR management tool.
I originally started using to Buzzstream to keep track of and manage outreach SEO campaigns for clients, but then realized its full potential: the tool allows you to run full-scale PR campaigns right from within the interface. All key SEO metrics such as domain authority, backlink data, social media following and site age are at your fingertips. SEO savvy PR professionals seem to have also joined the Buzzstream bandwagon.
The best way to use Buzzstream is to export your contacts from a media database, tag them and then manage all communication you have with the media. Buzzstream also has the Buzzmarker Google Chrome browser extension that helps you save websites and key contacts whilst browsing.
I don’t know of a journalist who’s not on Twitter. They use twitter to find stories and to keep in touch with trending news stories and the public at large.
The best use of Twitter is to follow up email outreach rather than to pitch a story. Prior to the follow up tweet, use Twitter as a relationship-building tool with your favorite reporters by helping them out with answers to their questions and with conversations.
News Monitoring
Back in the day, news monitoring meant signing up for a few Google alerts related to your brand and competition. Today, savvy marketers are using more advanced tools to spot - and react to - trends before they make the headlines.
Spike (paid service)
Spike is a service that helps you spot trending stories in real time. It’s a paid service, but I do recommend taking the free trial to see if it's a good fit for you.
Your Turn…
This guide should serve as a digital PR primer for SEOs and eCommerce managers looking to boost their PR outreach efforts. As much as I have covered a significant amount of ground in this subject, digital PR is a very broad subject. Do you have any tips or recommended PR tools? Please share them by leaving a comment below.
