News and Events

22 Best PR Tools For Monitoring And Managing Media Relations

22 Nov 2021

"Whoever controls the media, controls the mind."

A quote that quite aptly describes the crucial role that media plays today. Due to the increasing influence of media, over most of the choices people make, it has become mandatory for organizations to have positive media coverage. However, with social media platforms becoming a rage, consistent monitoring of these channels is also important to make sure you are sharing the right things with your clients. Today, you will find many tools specifically designed for PR activities that analyze reports, monitor your stories, and send pitches. This article highlights some of these PR monitoring tools to ease out your workflow.

Media Relations v/s Public Relations:

Media relations is propagating to the public; the missions, policies, practices of an organization through media. The goal of this is to create a maximum positive outlook in media about the organization, without paying for it through advertising. On the other hand, Public relations is a term often colloquially confused with media relations. There's a subtle difference between pubic and media relations, however.

Public relations extend beyond media to the general public whereas media relations involve company relationships with journalists. The organization and journalists both are benefited from media relations. Institute of Public Relations in the USA defined Public Relations as a deliberate, planned, and sustained effort to establish and maintain mutual understanding between an organization and its publics.

Media Monitoring:

Media monitoring is not only useful to startups and small enterprises but also to large businesses. Media monitoring is basically being aware of what opinion others hold of your brand, competitors, and anything that affects your organization. In the past it was more of a cut-paste job wherein articles from newspapers were cut and pasted into clipbooks. Today, the software has replaced scissors. There's the use of machines, processors, algorithms etc., making the task more refined. In simple terms, it could be listening acutely at all times. It could be done on social media platforms, broadcast, print, and online. It makes use of news monitoring and media tracking to create an impact.

It helps understand the customer base, know the brand perception and reputation, help mitigate risks, and help in better decision making by evaluating efforts.
There are three broad categories of media monitoring:
♧Free or cheap options
♧Paid media monitoring tools
♧Premium monitoring services

PR Tools and Their Importance:

Public Relations professionals make use of various tools including speeches, special events, news, brochures, audiovisual materials, logos etc. to create brand awareness. However, the use of PR monitoring tools has been known to manage your company’s media relations the best.

Public relations tools can convert interested consumers into loyal customers by persuasion tactics and creating positive attitudes regarding the brand. They are cost-effective and highly pay off, and ensure that your agency’s visibility and image across the market improves. They not just manage and track your clients’ efforts but also your own company’s PR efforts and help you garner the required publicity.

22 Best PR Tools For Monitoring Media:

A) Muck Rack (A GPS to look for journalists):

Muck Rack is a platform that enables the public relations team to come across pertinent journalists to build media relations for their organization. It is user-friendly software whose email system keeps one thoroughly updated on everything that matters.

It helps with Pr pitches for journalists, automatically analyzes press hits, identifies the latest trends, and lets you create newsletters/presentations. This all-in-one PR software act as a centralized PR platform, helping you research and make contacts within the industry.

A few prominent organizations that make use of Muck Rack include Taco Bell, Pfizer, Golin, International Committee of the Red Cross, Knight Foundation, Kauffman Foundation, and Penguin Random House and so many more. Muck Rack's estimated price is $5000 per year, differing according to the features you choose.

B) Meltwater (A drone camera for media marketing):

Meltwater is the world's first online media monitoring company. Meltwater has been used for over 20 years and hence can easily differentiate relevant content out of the ocean of information available online today. It brings over 500 million pieces of information every day and keeps adding new sources as well.

The tool performs news monitoring, and monitor print media, over 25,000 podcasts globally, TV and radio and social media. Not only does it provide media monitoring but also provides media database, social listening, social media engagement, and social influencer management. Each of which is described below.

Media database; helps PR teams find critical information required to build relationships with relevant influencers and land their next big public story. It helps with social listening hence making you aware of everything; where everyone is talking about your company.

The social media management tool offered by Meltwater helps streamline the process of engaging with the audience. It tracks competitors, scans conversations, and picks out the most relevant ones. All in all, Meltwater make tasks easier for you and takes care of your company at effective costs. Based on research, the software costs around $4000 per year, some sources cite $6000.

C) Burrelles:

Combining sophisticated technology with specialized expert analysis, Burrelles’ new technologies and expanded product portfolio provide a simple, seamless and personalized connection to media data across all of today’s channels. Its comprehensive suite includes media monitoring, communication tools, in-depth customized reporting, analytical research, press release distribution, media contact database, data services, and professional services. With unparalleled expertise and industry insights drawn from more than 130 years of relentless innovation and dedicated client service, Burrelles takes media data beyond automation.

D) Prezly:

Prezly is a Public relations tool for better and faster cation. Prezly speeds up comms workflow and contact management is made easy by this software. It tracks conversations; teams can leave private notes on the timeline as well. According to surveys; a large number of people rely on manual search, which can be very time-consuming in today’s time. So Prezly speeds up the process and makes everything well-organized by using filters, tags, relationships (add notes to contacts to keep a record), automation (use icons to highlight contacts needing attention), and enrichment (system finds out additional information from search engines and adds it up to the contact information automatically).

Prezly allows you to publish press releases and also lets you create content your way, delivers your content to the right people, keeps spam mails away, and creates well-structured emails. It costs around $50 per month varying according to the plan. Big companies like Ikea also make use of Prezly.

E) Mention:

Mention is a popular media monitoring tool that helps companies with decision-making. You can easily manage your social media accounts and perform other actions from its dashboard. A few prominent clients include Airbnb, Spotify, and Microsoft etc.

Mention monitors the online media, looks out for brand competitors, which helps plan further strategies in a smarter way. It manages your brand by responding to crises right in time, gets you the audience insights, which helps improve, pilots your social channels, and helps your agency grow. 750,000 companies use Mention daily.

Mention has several pricing plans that you can choose from to fit your needs. The average price is €166 monthly.

F) Coverage Book:

Coverage Book lets you build reports faster and more efficiently. It does the grunt work for you. Instead of spending hours opening links and copying data; just by collecting URLs of your mentions, the software gets your data in line for you. Also, it adds relevant images and makes a fancy report within minutes which is, all ready to share. It saves time and sanity. You can also review individual articles and evaluate the impact with the tool. Further, your created report can be edited according to requirements.

The pricing depends on which plan one chooses. The annual plans range between $1089-$5489.

G) Google Alerts:

Google Alerts, send emails to the user when new content related to the search engine pops up on the internet. It keeps one updated about the recent information that matches the search terms. It helps users schedule alerts. One of the most striking features of Google Alerts is; they come free of cost. One can monitor media without paying a penny. However, there is one drawback of Google alerts that it isn't as well developed yet as the paid software's are.

H) Cision:

Cision is a media monitoring company known for its avant-garde public relations software that offers marketing resources, public relations services, media contacts database, and press release distribution. Some prominent clients include Citrix, LinkedIn, and 3M etc.

It helps understand brand reputation with help of globally collected data, helps relationship management by increasing outreach. Its top traits include tracking distribution, analyzing features, and making sure you never fail to prove the value of your agency PR efforts. It understands your audience and offers analytics that is insightful and appealing.

The pricing depends upon the package you choose. It is estimated to be around $7200 annually.

I) Brand 21:

Brand 21 is another amazing tool that helps with brand building and integrated marketing expertise. A few users include- BMW, Starwood Hotels and Restaurants, American Express, Microsoft, L’Oreal, and many more.

The tool helps you develop strategies that make your business reach greater heights. It lets you conduct webinars and events to help you go about developing your organization better. With this digital PR tool, you can track your brand rapport, share alerts to your team, and work with one on one follow-ups.

Price starts from $49/month.

J) Anewstip:

Anewstip is a Public relations platform through which media influential and marketers can connect. It helps users find relevant contacts by news, tweets, and profiles. Besides this, it also monitors global articles, news etc. It organizes the media lists and contacts; helps reach journalists through private pr pitches. It also lets you filter out the journalists according to their language and topics.

The tool has various plans to choose from and comes with a 7-day free trial. The average cost of the software is between $200- $400 per month.

K) Agility PR Solutions:

Agility PR Solutions provide media monitoring and analysis software services. It provides a clear picture of your coverage, finds influencers, journalists who want to know your story, tracks your outreach, comes with a newswire tool, provides media intelligence services by doing analysis for you, making briefs, and so much more. It's a user-friendly software designed to streamline your PR activities.

It doesn't have a free trial and costs around $1000 per feature.

L) Brandwatch:

Brandwatch is a digital consumer intelligence company. Cision is its parent organization. It's an AI analyst and gets you insights at a glance automatically. It performs an image analysis and segments data according to your needs. It can be customized and its UI can be combined to find useful insights. It is adaptable and bendable and comes with new technology, which has numerous positive aspects. The tool lets you track breaking news and is very useful during crisis situations and tracks ongoing PR campaigns.

A few prominent users include Nestlé, Unilever, Monster, Delta, Sky etc. It starts from $1,000 per month for 10,000 mentions.

M) Critical Mention:

Critical Mention designs and develops software solutions. It is a reliable and fast media suite. One can get results within 60 seconds. The tool offers easy customization of your reports, improves analytics, and helps them share instantaneously.

Users can search global TV, social media & online news, watch videos, edit and share coverage, build reports, receive real-time email alerts, and analyze coverage using graphs and charts.

N) Journo Requests:

Journo Requests helps find journalist requests and instead of pitching to journalists, it involves responding to their requests. It filters out irrelevant requests and gives you instant alerts on requests in a specific category or based on specific keywords. The tool also provides free daily emails of all the useful mentions from your required journalist list. You can choose 25 categories for daily updates, and the price differs accordingly, starting from £600.

O) Help A Reporter Out:

Help A Reporter Out popularly called HARO is a platform for journalists to get public reviews. The tools help you connect your clients with journalists for expert sources. Journalists and bloggers provide their media outlets and information, submit a free source request, and HARO sends pitches to inbox directly. Using this tool helps you secure valuable media coverage. However, there are a few guidelines that the users must follow while using this tool.

HARO has a free version, but a premium version costs between $19- $149 per month.

P) Augure:

Augure is a CRM-style, cloud-based platform that helps track communications with journalists, offers social media monitoring, email marketing, and a range of other features and options for PR agencies and managers. It allows professionals to find influencers, engage with the audience, and measure the results.

With the help of this tool, relevant media content is compiled, which displays the success achieved on various media platforms. It helps improve ROI and brand management. The price is $350 per month for essential plans.

Q) PR Web:

PR Web works towards building brand awareness. Building text links to sites, adding keywords to URLs, submitting releases to search engines is all undertaken by PR Web. It ensures the digital footprint of your brand stays online and improves your brand awareness. PR Web provides tools to create compelling stories. It also provides a comprehensive report. All this makes it easier to influence target audiences.

PR web provides various options, affordable to expensive ranging between $99- $389.

R) Covered Press:

Covered Press is a Public Relations reporting system that provides analytics, real-time press alerts, and collaboration tools. It makes the job of publicists, journalists, and editors easy. Covered Press integrates with the graphic designing platform, Canva, which helps add visual graphics into reports easily. It offers white label reporting and streamlines three important tools- tracking, reporting, and analytics into one PR platform.

Covered Press pricing starts at $99 per month.

S) Business Wire:

When it comes to press release distribution and regulatory disclosure, Business Wire is a global leader. It is a trusted source for delivering news. It has been connecting audiences and organizations for about 60 years.

It provides tools for pr professionals, investor relations and distribution and analysis. You can reach more than 100,000 media outlets across 160 countries with Business Wire, assuring authenticity and credibility. Pricing is based on the word count of your press release, where 400-word PR starts at $325.

T) Radio Guest List:

Radio guest list is a podcast guest booking service. It provides a platform for experts or brands to self-promote. They have talk shows every day. If a user signs up to their email, they send a guest request through mail, for free. Then the user can gain publicity through 'on air' interviews.

U) BlogDash:

BlogDash is an outreach platform for businesses to connect with the relevant bloggers in various categories. It allows creating pitch lists, setting campaign goals, and tracking. They also have an outsourced service for managing content creation, blogger outreach, and tracking.

The price is $199 per month for unlimited services.

V) Pr.co:

Pr.co is a professional public relations firm that helps increase earned media coverage. It makes newsrooms for brands and PR agencies. It allows easy publishing of client news, manages complex editorial workflows, generates media exposure, builds press lists etc.

It considers diversity and inclusion and tries to mitigate environmental impact and contributes to communities. This is done through online magazines, events, and meetups. They offer free services to NGO's and special programs for startups. The average costing is around £ 447 per month but varies according to add on's to the basic plan.

Conclusion:

Being socially conscious doesn't demand perfection, it involves sharing your story to inspire others to start their own. Today, media rules the world. Almost all our decisions are blinded by what the media presents to us. Google search has a significant impact on how your brand is viewed by customers, competitors, and the industry overall. So using public relations monitoring tools and public relations platforms can enhance the development of your organization and help you make it better. Not only does it improve the current status of your brand but also gives an insight into better decision-making in the future while nurturing your organization.