Tips and Tools

The Firm Voice, the Council on Public Relations house organ has a 9-step program for responding to RFPs in a way that wins business--despite the quality of the RFP--without giving away the store.

Top PR thinker Jerry Swerling, director of the Strategic PR Center at the Annenberg School for Communication at USC says that it's a risk worth taking. If you don't offer a strategic vision, you lose your ticket to the rodeo.

This article caught our eye in light of the survey we covered in April, revealing 90% of our U.K. brethren found ideas within their proposals stolen by potential clients.

Some of the points may seem obvious, yet are pervasive in agency work, such as avoiding typos and boilerplate proposals. A summary of the CoPR's nine step program are after the jump:

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Our newest sister blog Baynewser, explains this morning that Google News now has byline search functionality.

This is a big development for anyone responsible for media relations. Since Google came on to the scene, many of its products and approaches to information have helped PR people do their work--especially Google News and Google Alerts--and have in turn, quickened reaction time and made monitoring and client reporting easier, and cheaper.

Looking at a journalist's byline history is an obvious strategy, yet it's continually something that gets public relations people in to trouble. When pressed for time, account executives give in to temptation and skip their Lexis-Nexis research (an expensive product) and begin blasting out pitches. I've always argued that PR isn't deteriorating, just that journalists now have new steam valves in which to out bad pitching and pushy publicists, seen in the early Tweets of AdWeek's Brian Morrissey, for example.

Startups such as PRMatchPoint and HARO have taken different approaches to reducing PR spam.

Like the classic NBC PSAs say, "the more you know".

Older companies like and services like Lexis, Profnet, Cision, and Vocus may see their subscribership deteriorate--even though they're constantly improving and innovating--as Google and others develop free products.

Byline history was available on Google News all along, though not hyperlinked, and not available in search window functionality. The former allows you to track a journalist even if they change jobs. The tea leaves get harder to read if you choose to do an Archives search.

Information on how to use Google Byline and a screenshot (courtesy of BayNewser) of a typical search are after the jump:

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BuzzStream, a CRM/contact management service geared towards social media, launched in private beta today. One of the cool things about the service is how it can be installed into your web toolbar, allowing you to easily bookmark a blog post, article or tweet into a contact record for that blogger/reporter, complete with a variety of influencer metrics and contact info added automatically. You can then filter your contacts on a variety of levels as well as track all previous interactions with the contacts in e-mail and Twitter. Strategic Public Relations blogger Kevin Dugan may be disappointed to find out he only has a "medium" influencer rating.

One of the things BuzzStream doesn't do is provide a media list database service. So, you will still have to import your lists from Cision, Vocus or your good ol' homemade Excel or Outlook contact lists. The other option is tagging content and building as you go. Founder Paul May told PRNewser that the service is in beta for the next six to eight weeks and "we'll launch as a paid product" after that.

PRNewser has 100 beta invites for our readers to test out the service for free, available at a first come first basis until June 19th.

Sawhorse Media's Muck Rack added a "beats" tab today, to beef up functionality of its aggregation of Twittering journalists. With beats plus Tweets, Links, Sources, and Pictures, its easy to get a quick picture of 4th Estate zeitgeist.

Like Cision's JournalistTweets, Muck Rack is really a feed & filter of what the MSM is doing, though they are mirror images of each other. Cision benefits from sample size, pulling Twitter handles from its massive database, while Muck Rack has a small sample and much stronger filtering tools.

Muck Rack should grow quickly as they manually adds handles and receives submissions from anyone who wants to send them, PR people included. According to Sawhorse founder Gregory Galant, over a thousand journalists have asked to be added.

Sawhorse does the same thing for twittering celebrities, VCs, designers, musicians, and...pets, because we all need to know what @sockington is doing this very moment.

Cision, the big PR database company launched what is essentially a Twitter search engine today called JournalistTweets. It's limited to just journalists, "thousands" according to the press release. It's a handy tool to filter out the cacophony of voices on a trending topic and keeps it to just four topic areas: business, technology, health, and entertainment.

Luckily for its own reputation, Cision is not pushing any tools that allow PR people to automate their participation in Twitter conversations. The Twitter Tips section includes the following recommendation:

Avoid syndication tools that push content to Twitter in robotic-looking ways. Remember, Twitter is about personal connections. If you want to tweet about your own projects, make sure to tweet about other things too that won't be considered self-promotional.

Related: Cision to Add Twitter Handles in Q2

A new PR tool specifically for tech came out of beta this week. ITDatabase does what much bigger platforms Vocus and Cision do, though with more targeted results based on keywords within journalists' published work rather than beat listings, or descriptions collected manually.

In my email exchange with ITDatabase founder Travis Van, I found out that their product has more names than their competitors, though he vows never to reveal the number--more on that in a moment.

In addition to keyword searching, you can search by person and by outlet. The database covers tech trades, blogs, and reporters who write about tech at non-tech outlets (such as PRNewser). A dashboard of results appears that includes the top "vendors" covered, and the themes. For example, when I type in Nick Carr I find that his blog is called Rough Type. He's posted 13 times in the past month, mentioning the company Twitter the most at nine times, and his top theme is "Web 2.0 & Social". I can then add him to my project list.

More after the jump:

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Beginning today, the Chicago Tribune will help anyone interested navigate government records via their online open records forum, "opening a new front in the news organization's focus on watchdog reporting" according to a press release issued on Friday night provocatively titled "Your Government in Secret".

This announcement does have PR ramifications for Illinois, empowering bloggers to quicken the news cycle, and also help those wishing to dip their toe in opposition research without hiring a specialist.

Journalists in Illinois during the era of disgraced Governor Rod Blagojevich had their Freedom of Information Act request routinely denied. Attorney General Lisa Madigan--nearly ensnared in the scandal as "Senate Candidate #2--is also looking to improve the system of obtaining public records.

Does your Twitter feed accurately project your personality? Are you sociable, vain, chatty, academic? Apparently our feed is, according to a quick therapy session on the virtual couch of Twanalyst.com.

We're also not practicing what we're preaching by not following enough people and not even putting up our location, URL or bio--we're too vain, and busy! We promise work on our personality right away. Give it a spin and see what you find out about your Twitter flaws.

In this "evolve or die" world, marketers and PR pros alike need to move fast and push boundaries, or be left behind. Nothing new there, right? This was the macro-level theme that framed the "Emerging From a Recession with Emerging Media Intact" panel this morning featuring David Polinchock, Brand Experience Lab and Patrick Moorhead, Director Emerging Media, Razorfish.

Polinchock told the audience, "hot brands know how to create an experience with the product and innovate constantly. Good companies test constantly."

But it's not always easy to test. "We're working with Fortune 500 brands that are risk adverse, to a fault, even," said Moorhead. Maybe they shouldn't be? "Google is proud to put that beta logo on it. When you do put the beta on it, we find that people want it more," he said.

So, how what are things PR and marketing pros can do to test internally, or limit risk before rolling something out for real? Moorhead gave us the following three tips:

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Today PR Matchpoint, a web service that helps PR people match their press release, pitch, or list of keywords with only journalists and bloggers likely to care came out of beta today.

The service is a joint effort between Jon Victor's eNR Services and Peter Himler, The Flack blogger, and head of Flatiron Communications.

eNR is the PR solutions company that until Matchpoint, offered five products to help you deal with things like media monitoring, editorial calendars, and hyperlocal publicity.

It's essentially a service that for $65 a month, aspires to save PR people a ton of time combining the two arduous tasks of pulling a list and analyzing the corresponding bylines of the names on that list. That latter task is what gets a lot of PR people in trouble, and we know from experience a lot people in the business don't bother to do it at all.

Himler mentions avoiding such trouble right at the top of his Matchpoint launch release--"Avoid Chris Anderson's Blacklist". We covered that particular backlash , or flacklash, quite a bit.

After pasting your pitch in the "Point" section, the engine spits out results in the "Matchpoint" window (with one tab for media, one tab for blogs)--and it's designed to be smart. Each journalist is weighted by relevance, and the list can be adjusted depending on which parameters you deem most important. The number of names in the database is likely smaller than Cision's or Vocus's, but with less chaff since they are active writers.

We'll take this one out for a spin like a kid with muscle car and let you know what we think. It pulls from six months of bylines (over 3 million) from 11,000 print, 25,000 online news, and 10,000 blog posts so should have plenty of horsepower for most projects and the price is certainly right.