PR and comms pros use many digital tools and services to stay on top of the news, identify trends, research the right media for targeted story ideas, and manage accounts. The following list of 24 great digital tools for PR and communication professionals helps you to share media coverage with the right audiences that you may not know about yet:
- Spike: Spike is a service that helps you spot trending stories in real time. It’s paid, but you can give the free trial a try.
- MuckRack: MuckRack should already be on your devices by definition: Where journalists and sources connect.
- Quora: On Quora, Users can collaborate by editing questions and commenting on answers that have been submitted by other users.
- Tumblr: Tumblr is the best social network for finding, telling, or sharing visual stories.
- Flipboard: Flipboard is a great mobile news aggregator and reader.
- Techmeme: This is a tech news curation site that will keep you up to date on breaking tech stories.
- Digg: RSS reader and social bookmarking tool.
- Facebook: Facebook news feed is where conversations evolve into story ideas.
- LinkedIn: LinkedIn is the best and most up-to-date network to see where people are coming from and going to. It’s also a great news source for strong thought leadership posts.
- TweetDeck: TweetDeck is a social media dashboard app for management of Twitter accounts.
- Google news: Google not only gives you a broad view of the news, but it also gives you a way to identify the most recent stories from media and reporters.
- Google Drive: Google Drive is a file storage and synchronization service developed by Google.
- Google Search: Google Search is a search engine provided by Google. Handling more than 3.5 billion searches per day, it has a 92% share of the global search engine market. It is also the most-visited website in the world.
- Reddit: Reddit is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images, and videos, which are then voted up or down by other members.
- BuzzFeed: BuzzFeed, Inc. is an American Internet media, news and entertainment company with a focus on digital media.
- Upstract: Formerly known as popurls is a dashboard for the latest Web buzz.
- TechNews: You can use this to find out which themes, companies, and products the media are writing about.
- WhoSharedMyLink.com: This site, which is now incorporated into Muck Rack, lets you find out how many times a URL was shared, as well as the journalists and bloggers who shared it.
- SimpleNote: This app is useful for note-taking on mobile devices, because it syncs across them.
- Google Chromecast: Useful when streaming and projecting (almost) anything from laptop to TV screen.
- Linkdex is the platform of choice for the world’s best national and global agencies.
- BuzzSumo does a great job of surfacing topical content and subject matter experts but also shows how well your content is shared on top social networks.
- SEMRush is handy for understanding what keywords drive traffic to publications you want to be.
- StyleWriter software is the world’s largest writing style, word usage, readability and English grammar checker.
Any more suggestions?
If you have any more good suggestions, just email me at kimharrisonatcuttingedgepr.com, and your suggestion can join the list. Will be glad to hear from you.
Kim J. Harrison has authored, edited, coordinated, produced and published the material in the articles and ebooks on this website. He brings his experience in professional communication and business management to provide helpful insights to readers around the world. As he has progressed through his wide-ranging career, his roles have included corporate affairs management; PR consulting; authoring many articles, books and ebooks; running a university PR course; and business management. Kim has received several international media relations awards and a website award. He has been quoted in The New York Times and various other news media, and has held elected positions with his State and National PR Institutes.
