In no particular order, here are 10 online tools PR pros should be familiar with for pitching, researching, managing and monitoring:
- MatchPoint – MatchPoint produces a list of journalists, ranked by relevance based on their bodies of work culled from a database of more than 11,000 news sources, 25,000 online news sites and 10,000 blogs.
- Radian6 – Radian6 is focused on building the complete monitoring and analysis solution for PR and advertising professionals so they can be the experts in all social media platforms.
- PitchEngine – PitchEngine makes it possible for PR pros, brands, and agencies to build and share digital, social media releases with their contacts for free. Share social media releases by email, with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google News etc.
- Google Alerts – Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.
- Google Trends – Google Trends can be used to see how popular certain search terms are across geographic regions, cities, and languages.
- Technorati – Technorati was founded to help bloggers to succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing online conversations. Technorati indexes more than 1.5 million new blog posts in real time.
- Quantcast – Quantcast is a service for measuring audiences of Web sites and blogs.
- Monitter – Monitter is a Twitter monitor, it lets you “monitter” the twitter world for a set of keywords and watch what people are saying in real time.
- Social Mention – Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services.
- Nielsen BlogPulse – BlogPulse.com is a blog search engine that also analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere.
A good example of a company attempting to integrate its traditional PR and PR 2.0 efforts is Anheuser-Busch. Last week, A-B launched AB-extras.com, an online newsroom created in collaboration with PR 2.0 guru Brian Solis. A-B will be using PitchEngine to issue social media releases (SMRs). The new site is a smart way for the PR pros at A-B to get more involved in social media. I suspect other consumer product companies will soon follow suit.
From Solis’ announcement of the AB-extras.com launch:
Anheuser-Busch Debuts AB-Extras.com; Fuses PR with Social Media to Humanize Stories and Ads
Disclosure: I am collaborating with Anheuser-Busch on the creation and release of AB-Extras.com
Today Anheuser-Busch announced AB-Extras.com – a social media destination for Bud fans 21 years of age and older to reveal the human element and stories behind the ads that will premier during the Big Game.
AB-Extras.com is a unique social platform for the internal PR team at Anheuser-Busch to also work more effectively with traditional and digital press and bloggers using the tools and services that they rely upon to publish and share stories.
AB-Extras.com features exclusive content using a combination of social tools and networks such as Social Media Releases (SMRs), YouTube, Blip.TV, and flickr, hosted on a blog platform. At the very least, it is a dedicated online newsroom that aggregates and packages disparate social elements from across the Web into a contextualized storyboard that streamlines the viewing, sourcing, and distribution of relevant information.
The press team at Anheuser-Busch is actively exploring the inherent benefits and opportunities of genuinely participating in the important and relevant conversations that are transpiring across the Social Web.
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