ITDatabase Digs Data for PR Pros

Using ITDatabase for media relations research on topics, publications and authors

The first thing I ask from my media relations team when I join a company is a list of our top 15 reporters and their publications. My first goal is to build relationships with those important influencers so we can facilitate better communication with them. Basic media relations, right? Well, getting that data is another story. Other than educated guesses, getting those names takes a lot of combing through coverage reports and resorting of spreadsheets. ITDatabase solves this problem in seconds.

In just a few weeks, this tool has helped me land two news stories and saved me dozens of hours of research. With a couple clicks, the search tool will deliver a list of the authors that have written on any topic in information technology. For example, when you search for Apple iPad, it quickly delivers a list of authors and sources that recently wrote about that topic sorted by the story count. Anyone can search in Google News for stories on a topic, but I need to know how often they talk about that topic.

As the graphic (left) shows, Jeff Garnet, from The Mac Observer, has mentioned the iPad the most with 158 stories. He represents 2 percent of all coverage on the topic. If I was the iPad PR team, I'd probably want to know Jeff fairly well.

IT Database also parses the vendors that are mentioned in the stories that mention iPad. No surprise that Apple is #1, but Google is #2. Google gobbles up share of voice in 20 percent of these stories without having anything to do with the iPad. As a PR professional, this type of data tells me a lot about the conversation and who is really competing with me for the mind of the customer.

The sources that cover a topic are also sorted by story count. When I went to pitch a recent story about the iPad for a client I realized that there were several publications listed that I didn't track regularly. I recognized the publication's name, but didn't realize they had invested so much editorial on the topic. This key insight drove me to research them better and reach out to an editor that I had neglected with a relevant pitch.

With nearly all of my clients I've found at least one or two reporters that were writing on one of their key topics more frequently than I realized. These are great insights that simply cost too much to discover with traditional media analysis tools.

Turn everything around and search by author right before you outreach to them. Instantly you can see the vendors they mention the most and the topics or themes of the stories. You may think they focus their time on gadgets, but you learn they have a large percent of their stories on storage and cloud computing. That information will help you tune the conversation with that reporter to match their current interests.

The database only goes back six months and this limitation is the only serious flaw I've found. Large brands have a media cycle that is one or two years long so more history would be very helpful. Of course, as the name indicates the search results are limited to information technology publications and reporters. I'd love to see this same tool applied to a wider publication set.

ITDatabase allows you to include or exclude blogs - a useful tool when you need to separate traditional from online media. I haven't used them yet, but the service also includes search tools for editorial calendars and events.

Pricing is $3,000 annually for unlimited number of seats. I'm sure I recovered that cost myself in two weeks of use. They offer a free trial for people that work at a qualified tech vendor or PR firm.

After a few successful weeks of digging for media data on new clients, prospects, competitors and products, nothing beats ITDatabase.

Are you Tweeting or Squeaking?

How to measure the impact of Twitter on your media relations program

You land a great story in The New York Times and then you see that people are Tweeting a link to that story. You know that the readership of the story is dwarfed by the number of people who are reading it because of the Tweets. Even a couple dozen Tweets by influential Tweeps can reach hundreds of thousands of followers. But, how do you measure that for your marketing department?

There is an accurate and repeatable way to measure the reach of your news stories on Twitter. If you take five minutes to measure them, you can greatly improve the metrics on your media relations program. Additionally, this quick research will uncover the people that are the true influencers in your industry.

Here are a few steps you can follow to measure the reach of your news story:

1. Count Tweets - People who are referring others to your news story will include a link to that story online. Topsy.com has a tool that allows you to plug in any URL and it will show you all the Tweets that include that story. This search engine gives you a quick count of Tweets and lists each message so you can drill into them a bit more. It wonderfully walks each shortened URL so you have all the Tweets in one place.

2. Count of followers - The total potential reach of your story is the count of followers of all the people who Tweeted that story. For the old-school marketers, this is like the circulation of a magazine. You know not everyone who received the magazine read your story, but it is a objective measure of the weight of the publication. Unfortunately, there is no super easy way to get this number right now. Topsy doesn't tally all the followers of the Tweets (Note to Team Topsy - I'd love to see this feature). Yahoo has a unofficial tool called Important People that will count followers for a key word, but won't work on a URL. It allows you to download your search into a spreadsheet so you can easily tally and filter it. For example, I did a vanity search on myself and I pulled up five Tweets that mentioned my name that reached a total of 27,000 people. If these tools don't work, you can count the followers by hand.

3. Click Throughs - Search advertising where you pay when someone clicks on your ad has dramatically changed advertising because marketers can measure the reach of their ads. In a similar way, you can easily measure the number of people who clicked on a Tweet and read your news story. More than one-half of all Tweets use a service named Bit.ly to shorten URLs. In addition to saving you characters in your Tweets, the service gives you a count of the people who have clicked on the link. To figure out how many people have clicked on a Bit.ly link all you need to do is add a + to the end of the URL. For example, add a + to the end of this URL and you can see exactly the number of people that have responded to an event I'm putting on in February.

Link to event - http://bit.ly/c0Ahzl

Number of people who clicked on this link: http://bit.ly/c0Ahzl+

It is also a great way to see how much traffic your competitors are getting on their news stories. All the information is public so anyone can use it.

If you use this tool, don't forget the Tweets that don't use Bit.ly links. I recommend that you estimate the total clicks based on the ratio of Tweets that use Bit.ly links.

4. The value of a click - When an executive is unsure how effective your media program is at moving sales, be sure you don't skip this step. Nearly everyone agrees that traffic to the Web site is gold for your company. Advertisers can pay $1 to $7 for a keyword for search advertising to get people on your Web site. If you can show your company a large click-through rate, you can multiply that by the market value for your company's name on Google Adwords. If you get 3,000 clicks on your Tweets and the value of the keyword is $1, then you have a story that is worth well over $3000. If you can speak in dollars, everyone will understand you. I wrote a blog post that details this process.

5. Web site referral traffic - Every company has a Web analytics tool that lets the Web master know where traffic to the Web site is coming from. The standard reports from this tool can be a PR person's best friend. Because news stories have a relatively high trust among readers, articles have the power to drive a lot of traffic to your Web site. You know this already, but do you ask for those reports? Even five minutes looking at a Web referral report will likely show you that several of your recent news stories are driving much of the referral traffic. Again, this is another opportunity for you to put a cash value on that traffic. Buy your Web person lunch and get regular access to these reports and add them to your next business review meeting with your boss.

Getting your news stories into the feed of people's updates is a great way to increase the reach of media relations program. It is exciting to see your story be ReTweeted and go viral. Now you have the tools you need to measure these programs.

Do you have tools that you use to measure the impact of Twitter on your media relations and marketing programs? I'd love to hear about them in the comments section.