Whether you are new to PR or an old hand at public relations, there are really some essential tools that you should be using or at least should know about.
1) Responsesource
Website: http://www.responsesource.com/
ResponseSource provides easy-to-use tools that connect PR professionals and businesses to journalists, enabling them to give stories relevant coverage – quickly and easily. The ResponseSource Journalist Enquiry Service was created in 1998 by Daryl Willcox. It was designed from the outset to put journalists and other media creators in control of information they received from the PR community.
They offer a Journalist Enquiry Service, Media Contacts Database, Press Release Wire or Freelance Journalist Profiles. ResponseSource is an independent company and has a team of around 50 are based in Croydon, South London
2) Gorkana
Website: http://www.gorkana.com/
Gorkana connects organisations to critical information and insight to help them control and manage their reputation across all media platforms and also connects you to the best in the PR community so that however tight your deadline, or niche your angle, there will always be someone able to help you out.
They offer media Database, monitoring, social media services, alalysis and insights and media distribution.
Gorkana now works with more than 4,000 customers including:
65 of the top FTSE 100 companies, Key central government departments and
119 of the top 150 PR agencies
3) Cision
Website: http://www.cision.com/us/
Cision covers all aspects of your communication needs, helping you reach, target and engage your audience.
Cision claims to be the leading global media intelligence company, serving the complete workflow of today’s communication professionals. Offering the industry’s most comprehensive PR, IR and social media software, rich analytics, content distribution, and influencer outreach, Cision enables clients to engage audiences, enhance campaigns and strengthen data-driven decision making. Cision solutions include PR Newswire, Gorkana, PRWeb, Help a Reporter Out (HARO) and iContact brands. Headquartered in Chicago, Cision serves over 100,000 customers in 170 countries and 40 languages worldwide, and maintains offices in North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America and Australia.
4) Kantar Media
Website: http://www.kantarmedia.com/us
Kantar is home to some of the world's leading research, data and insight companies.
Individually, companies such as Millward Brown, TNS, Kantar Media, Kantar Worldpanel, Added Value and The Futures Company are famous and highly respected experts in their fields. Collectively, they offer the most complete view of consumers – the way they live, shop, vote, watch and tweet – in over a hundred countries worldwide. For the benefit of our clients, Kantar connects these specialists as well as providing access to the wider WPP group of companies and other partners.
They work with over half of the Fortune 500 companies, but also work with small businesses, national governments, media owners and NGOs and even the occasional Hollywood film star.
Their offer covers the breadth of techniques and technologies, from purchase and media data to predicting long term trends; from neuroscience to exit polls; from large scale quantitative studies to qualitative research, incorporating ethnography and semiotics.
5) Buzzstream
Website: http://www.buzzstream.com/about
Buzzstream helps brands and agencies build the relationships they need to succeed.
As more and more companies adopt content marketing, an ever-increasing volume of content gasps for attention. At BuzzStream, it’s our mission to help marketers build the relationships with influencers they need to get that attention, drive word-of-mouth traffic, improve search performance, and increase awareness.
6) ApolloHQ
Website: http://www.apollohq.com/en
Apollo is a project dashboard tool. Features include creating a project, set your optional due dates, give access to your team and your clients., star your favorite projects, categorize your projects, save time with task list template and set your projects as active, silent or archived.
7) Trello
Website: https://trello.com/
Trello is an online tool for managing projects and personal tasks. That may sound rather prosaic. But this increasingly popular app often inspires the sort of passion usually reserved for consumer apps like Pinterest or Instagram. It’s the kind of business software that slips into businesses through the backdoor, just because individual employees like how it works
The visual organizing software has amassed some 4.6 million registered users — now with one million monthly actives — turning their projects, whether household to-do lists or corporate realignment plans, into visual boards using its cloud-based software
8) Basecamp
Website: https://basecamp.com/
Basecamp is a web-based project management tool developed by Basecamp and launched in 2004.
Basecamp started out with four people, and today we’re a company of about 50 spread out across 32 different cities around the world. Our headquarters is in Chicago, but everyone at Basecamp is free to live and work wherever they want. Many of us love working remotely – we literally wrote the book on remote working!
Everything in Basecamp is carefully considered. We even carefully considered what to leave out. When you aim for the best mix of truly useful features without bloat, everything has to earn its spot.
9) Profnet
Website: http://www.prnewswire.com/profnet/
A subsidiary of PR Newswire, ProfNet(SM) is an online community of communications professionals made to provide reporters access to expert sources. ProfNet was founded in 1992 and acquired by PR Newswire in 1996. Between 100 and 200 reporters use ProfNet daily.
Our services covers such as meeting planners, authors, bloggers, publishers, government officials, and academic and may connect corporate researchers – with experts and speakers via four types of interactions: general queries, speaker queries, targeted queries, and roundups.
10) HARO
Website: https://www.helpareporter.com/
Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is the most popular sourcing service in the English-speaking world, connecting journalists with relevant expert sources to meet journalists’ demanding deadlines and enable brands to tell their stories. HARO distributes more than 50,000 journalist queries from highly respected media outlets each year. Its straight-forward pitching process allows sources to find topics related to their expertise, industry or experience, while allowing journalists to spend more time writing and less time sourcing. HARO reaches more than 475,000 sources and 35,000 journalists, making it a vital tool for brands and reporters alike. HARO is owned by Cision, a leading global media intelligence company headquartered in Chicago.
11) Coverage Book
Website: https://coveragebook.com/
You worked hard to earn that coverage. So when you succeed you want to show off and get some recognition. Problem is you’re busy and pulling PR reports together is mind numbingly boring. Shouldn't you be planning your next genius campaign? Not up all night cutting and pasting! Cutting out screenshots, manually searching for the latest website visits, checking how many people shared the coverage on social media. The list is endless. And you haven't even started to think about making it look good.
Their mission is to make it super-easy for you to add your coverage and get it ready to show-off! In minutes. Not days. We make reports that your clients will love. And you'll have time for a break.
12) Google Alerts
Website:https://support.google.com/alerts/answer/4815696?hl=en
Google Alerts is a content change detection and notification service, offered by the search engine company Google. The service sends emails to the user when it finds new results—such as web pages, newspaper articles, blogs, or scientific research—that match the user's search term(s).
By creating a Google Alert, you can get email notifications any time Google finds new results on a topic that interests you. For example, you could get updates about a product you like, find out when people post something about you on the web, or keep up with news stories.
13) Google Drive
Website: https://www.google.com/drive/using-drive/
Store your files securely and access them from any device using Google Drive. You can also open and edit your files from any device.
Features include 15 GB of free Google online storage, see your stuff anywhere, and quickly invite others to view, download, and collaborate on all the files you want
14) Dropbox
Website: https://www.dropbox.com
Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software.
Dropbox allows users to create a special folder on their computers, which Dropbox then synchronizes so that it appears to be the same folder (with the same contents) regardless of which device is used to view it. Files placed in this folder are also accessible via the Dropbox website and mobile apps. Dropbox uses a freemium business model, wherein users are offered a free account with a set storage size and paid subscriptions for accounts with more capacity
15) Hubspot
Website: http://www.hubspot.com/
HubSpot is a company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that develops and markets a software product for inbound marketing also called HubSpot.
Features include CRM that makes it easy to organize, track and grow your sales pipeline, brings entire marketing and Build a library of personalized email templates & sales content that you can access right from your inbox
16) Muck Rack
Website: https://muckrack.com
Muck Rack is a product of Sawhorse Media, a technology company based in the heart of SoHo, New York City that's also behind the Shorty Awards. We’ve been in business since 2008 and are funded by our customers. We believe in the power of technology, design and journalism.
We decided to build Muck Rack after launching new products ourselves. Despite having a zero dollar marketing budget, we reached an audience of millions by building relationships with journalists who ended up covering them including the New York Times, BBC and Wall Street Journal. We needed a tool designed for how the media works today, not how it worked ten years ago. So we built it.
Today Muck Rack is trusted by top-tier journalists, global PR agencies and Fortune 500 companies, in addition to many boutique agencies and entrepreneurs.
17) Anewstip
Website: https://anewstip.com/
Anewstip helps entrepreneurs, PR professionals and marketers connect with relevant media influentials.
Anewstip was founded in 2014 to push the boundaries of media relationship management. Today, we have more than 5000 global customers using our service. They're searching for relevant media contacts from the world's largest database, monitoring news articles & tweets from global media influentials on what's happening to their brands and competitors. Everyday they are building and organizing media lists, reaching out to media with relevant messages, and most importantly, getting real responses from the media.
Anewstip is a startup that moves fast.
18) Journo Requests
Website: https://www.journorequests.com/
It's our mission to help journalists urgently connect with sources.
'Why?' you ask... well, speed matters. Shrinking editorial teams and the pesky Internet have put pressure on journalists to turn around stories faster than ever. That's why we manually moderate every request within 3 minutes flat!
Thousands of people, from freelancers to startups to PR agencies. We’re the fastest-growing media requests service in the UK - and here are just some of our subscribers:University of Cambridge, trivago, Edelman, Cancer Research UK, pwc, skyscanner, Golin, Lewis PR, Mailchimp and Buffer.
Right now they’re UK only, but we’ll be expanding imminently.
19) PR Newswire
Website: http://www.prnewswire.com/
PR Newswire, a Cision company, is the premier global provider of multimedia platforms and distribution that marketers, corporate communicators, sustainability officers, public affairs and investor relations officers leverage to engage key audiences. Having pioneered the commercial news distribution industry over 60 years ago, PR Newswire today provides end-to-end solutions to produce, optimize and target content -- and then distribute and measure results. Combining the world's largest multi-channel, multi-cultural content distribution and optimization network with comprehensive workflow tools and platforms, PR Newswire powers the stories of organizations around the world. PR Newswire serves tens of thousands of clients from offices in the Americas, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific regions.
20) PR Web
Website: http://www.prweb.com/
PRWeb is the leader in online news distribution and publicity. It offers various press release packages, enabling businesses of all sizes to increase the visibility of their news, reach new audiences, stand out in search, and drive traffic to their websites. PRWeb’s editorial team reviews, optimizes and distributes news releases to major search engines, journalists and bloggers. Following distribution, PRWeb provides detailed analytics that measure the impact and reach of online news releases. PRWeb is owned by Cision, a leading global media intelligence company headquartered in Chicago.
21) BlogDash
Website: http://www.blogdash.com/aboutus
Focusing on open communication and building real relationships, they created an easy-to-use Blogger Outreach Software platform to streamline communication between PR agencies/brands and bloggers.
And seriously, if you want to spend some more time checking out tools that can help your PR efforts, take a look at this post, which gives pros, cons and pricing for 100 PR tools.
