Social Media Workbench » Media Relations Tools

Top Ten Influencers Covering iPad Apps

Jack Monson — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 13:52:45 +0000

Pitching iPad Apps Would Be Logical

Here’s a list of the Top Ten Most Influential Writers Covering iPad Apps:

Christina Warren - Mashable
Yukari Kane - Wall Street Journal
Roman Loyola - MacWorld
Eric Zeman - Information Week
Jay Yarow - Mashable
Nick Mokey - Digital Trends
Paul Krill - CIO Magazine
Brian X. Chen - Wired: Gadget Lab
Jared Newman - Network World
Erica Ogg - CNet News

If you’re doing media relations for an iPad app or just following the developments, this list is a great place to start! These influencers were uncovered using MatchPoint on 3/22/2010.

5 Awesome PR Innovations – PRWeek Awards

Jack Monson — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:47:38 +0000

The PRWeek Awards winners will be announced tomorrow in New York including PR Innovation of the Year.
I have been working on the development of MatchPoint for the past year and want to congratulate everyone on the team for the nomination.

All Nominees for PR Innovation of the Year:

Edelman and American Thoracic Society The TB Advocacy Toolkit

Ketchum The Ketchum Media Optimizer: Adding Discipline to the PR Discipline

Ketchum Virtual Meeting Mashups – Reinventing Online Events

Waggener Edstrom Worldwide What’s on Your Mind? Now Anyone Can Decipher Twitter Discussion with the Help of twendz!

eNR Services, Inc. and MatchPoint MatchPoint for PR

Best of luck to everyone and I look forward to speaking with you at the Awards!

The Most Engaging Part of MatchPoint That You Haven’t Used…Yet

Jack Monson — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:09:13 +0000

Using MatchPoint searches to uncover influencers who are writing stories similar to yours is just part of the power of the MatchPoint application.

Many MatchPoint users are finding time efficiencies and increased pitching success by using the ENGAGE button attached to each journalist, writer, or influencer.

The Engage Button in MatchPoint

The engage button will open an email pitch note from you to the selected writer. You may also include any previously saved campaign elements embedded into the body of this html email. These elements can include:

Links to videos
Photos
A Press Release
Attributable Quotes
Bulleted News Facts
Boilerplate

Journalists have raved about receiving these embedded elements as opposed to attachments which often get filtered, ignored, or deleted.

When sending your pitch note through MatchPoint instead of via traditional email, you can also track who has opened your pitch!

engage121 Launches Today!

Jack Monson — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:31:21 +0000

I’ve had a blast over the past few months working on a new application. It’s called engage121 and it launches today!

The application empowers you to:

1. Listen – monitor Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, and many other channels.

2. Speak – engage anyone via social media channels one-to-one.

Think of it as TweetDeck, Ning, HootSuite, your Facebook pages, your LinkedIn profile and about a few dozen more tools rolled into one. Oh, and it’s totally free.

Readers of this blog are invited to be beta testers and use engage121 for free via this link: www.engage121.com.

For more information about engage121, check out The Facebook Fan Page, The engage121 Community Blog, or follow engage on Twitter: @engage121.

Lastly, if you write one or multiple blogs, you can post to them all directly from engage. In fact, I posted this blog entry directly from engage121 this morning…

Beta Testing engage121!

Jack Monson — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:49:22 +0000

Checking out engage121. Amazing. More soon…

Top Ten Consumer Electronics Writers

Jack Monson — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:39:26 +0000

Here are the top ten of a long list of the most influential writers, reporters, and bloggers covering consumer electronics in December ’09 and (so far) January ’10:

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

Peter Svensson
Martyn Williams
Cecilia Kang
Andrew Berg
Don Clark
John Sutter
Ryan Kim
Sumner Lemon
Mark Milian
Ariel Schwartz

Associated Press
Network World
Washington Post
Wireless Week
Wall Street Journal
CNN
San Francisco Chronicle
MacWorld
Los Angeles Times
Fast Company

This index was compiled using MatchPoint based on several factors contributing to level of influence.

Pitching Tips – MatchPoint Users

Jack Monson — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 04:00:20 +0000

This is the first of our best practices posts to help MatchPoint users maximize their results and find more journalists and bloggers to engage one-on-one.

1. What should I do if my brand / product / client is extremely niche-focused?

Some MatchPoint users are working with products or clients about which no reporter has recently written at all. One such MatchPoint client was promoting a very specialized household appliance. The press release draft with which she was searching the “Point” box was very specific to this niche industry. And guess what? Not one of the 200,000 journalists in MatchPoint has written about this product in the past six months. She then searched keywords about similar products and broader industry terms to find journalists who would be interested. These included home repair, home improvement, holiday gifts for dad, etc. The Matching results showed dozens of reporters for whom her news was relevant. Remember, the objective isn’t to find people who have already written about your specific product, but to find those who are likely to write about you now!

2. Should I include my company boilerplate in the “Point” search?

In general, the answer is “no”. But we recommend experimenting both ways and see how your boilerplate affects your results. If your boilerplate contains many generic words and phrases like “excellent customer service with a mission to create synergies…,” our Matching system may produce results that have nothing to do with your main subject matter. However, if your boilerplate contains specific terms for your topic like “ice cream, snack foods, and easy to make meals for busy families” you may want to include the boilerplate to help find even more relevant articles and journalists.

3. My release includes many high-tech terms – will this hurt my results?

The inclusion of technical jargon and specs should not hurt your search results. But be sure that your release includes general terms and phrases relating the subject – MP3 players, laptops, video cameras, monitors, smart phone apps, etc – and MatchPoint will find reporters and bloggers who write about such devices.

Got a good tip for using MatchPoint? Please comment below or email to me for inclusion on the next list at jmonson@enr-corp.com

Free a trial of MatchPoint for readers of this blog, click here.

MatchPoint: Finalist for PR Innovation of the Year at PRWeek Awards

Jack Monson — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 13:07:47 +0000

I am pleased to pass along the good news that MatchPoint has been nominated for The PRWeek PR Innovation of the Year Award!

Full disclosure: I’m a member of the development team for MatchPoint. Additional disclosure: I am freakin’ thrilled about this!

A tip of the hat to all nominees:

Edelman and American Thoracic Society The TB Advocacy Toolkit

Ketchum The Ketchum Media Optimizer: Adding Discipline to the PR Discipline

Ketchum Virtual Meeting Mashups – Reinventing Online Events

Waggener Edstrom Worldwide What’s on Your Mind? Now Anyone Can Decipher Twitter Discussion with the Help of twendz!

eNR Services, Inc. and MatchPoint MatchPoint for PR

Saying it’s an honor just to be nominated along with these top global PR agencies is not just an old cliché in this case. I cannot think of a previous year where any non-agency PR application, software, or service was nominated for PR Innovation of the Year.

See you at the PRWeek Awards on March 11 in NYC!

New PR Tool: Pitch with Me

Jack Monson — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 19:06:22 +0000

A new free online tool was added to your PR Workbench this month: Pitch with Me.

We have seen many new media relations tools and apps launched this year claiming to be more useful than the rest. Most of these are just more of the same: new ways to blast out PR Spam, SEO “experts” who think they know more about Google than you do, and Social Media monitoring tools that actually do nothing but look cool.

Pitch With Me rises above this PR app jam not with a glitzier app, but with a new concept in media relations. Or rather, a time-tested and proven concept put into an online form.

The idea of teaming up two or more clients for a story pitch has worked inside large agencies for decades. Agencies not only created a more attractive package, but also created efficiencies with resources and time. But smaller firms and independent practitioners often saw an industry peer as a competitor rather than a symbiotic friend.

Journalists will use what they need and toss the rest anyway, so why not offer more to potentially use? And you never know when your partner’s a story may be what grabs someone’s attention.

Kudos to Heather Whaling for creating this online bullpen of potential collaborators! You can check out co-pitching opportunities on the site or by following @pitchwithme. If anyone has used Pitch With Me already, please share your comments here.

Dear CEOs: Social Media Is Not E-Commerce

Jack Monson — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 19:58:41 +0000

The first Black Friday and Cyber Monday since the Great 2009 Social Media Explosion are now behind us. The first reports are in and it looks like many retailers had a great week.

I wonder if any CEOs who recently “gave in” to their marketing advisors and signed off on SM efforts are right now going over sales figures for the year and wondering why they’re not seeing a big payoff from Social Media.

The reality is Social Media is not e-commerce.

I’m not criticizing any CEOs who don’t get that…yet! For now, I am finding fault with any marketing directors (and God forbid any PR managers) who sold Social Media efforts internally as online magic that makes cash registers ring.

I fear that some people in the marketing and communications industry have set unreachable goals in order to sell their CEOs on Social Media Campaigns. Or perhaps they are measuring social media mentions in terms of Revenue per Tweet.

There IS an online community where any company can expect the cash register to ring the moment they establish a presence. It’s called e-bay.

But unlike social media, e-commerce and auction sites won’t allow an organization to engage with its customers, learn from them, build loyalty, and all of the things that social media can do that we haven’t thought of yet!

Thanks to my colleague Jeff Tidyman of eNR Services for suggesting this topic. End of rant and enough blogging for today… I’ve got to go check on how my eBay auctions are doing. That’s where the big money is.