Modem Operandi: Online Gadgets and Gizmos

Now that you’ve trudged through a few basics of using the Net, it’s time for the fun stuff—everything you need to know about what’s available to you! Here is all that techno, whiz-bang stuff that you can leverage to begin creating more exposure for your company. A lot of these tools are time-tested, proven, and reliable. Others are so brand new that we have to sigh and wonder, but we still think they’re pretty terrific. We’ve also included tools that you can download and informational updates that you can request via e-mail.

Zoomerang (www.zoomerang.com)

If you’ve ever flipped through the pages of USA Today, you’ve noticed their famous informational graphics. Photo editors love making printable charts out of surveys, and for you, they’re a great way to qualify your claim, whatever it is, with the media.

Another great use for charts is to analyze the response to the buzz you’ve gotten already. Let’s say your scooter company has really taken off in Atlanta, and your scooters are everywhere, in corporate parks and schoolyards alike. You might consider a localized survey aimed at finding out if local commuters have considered new alternatives to the traffic in the last three months.

Should the response be encouraging (and that depends a great deal on how the questions are phrased), you can be certain the local news stations would love to feature the hard numbers on their evening news shows, fully equipped with workers buzzing around on your zippy scooters.

The problem is, as any college sophomore squeaking by on his statistics requirement will tell you, that actually getting a survey to work for you is one part skill, two parts miracle. Zoomerang is a nifty website that helps you ask the right questions and then send them out to the right group of people based on age, region, and other demographics. The best part is that Zoomerang will do the math for you, too, so you can make sense of it all.

Professor Russell Barclay, Ph.D., and chair of the media studies and public relations department at Connecticut’s Quinnipiac University’s School of Communications uses Zoomerang with his students to test their theories. For no cost, his students are able to add a question or two to a survey that’s going out already. This allows them to match their demographic and tap into the social consciousness, to see if big news or trends are registering with people in the same way the media or business community thinks it is.

Individuals can get some free play in this way at Zoomerang, too, but going for the full service is recommended. Why, you ask? Because, as with anything else, you get what you pay for. When you pay for the service, you can ask more people more questions, thus creating a better-rounded survey.

Media Life Magazine (www.medialifemagazine.com)

Media Life magazine is a free, digital daily magazine that covers what’s going on in the media and American culture in general. Media Life usually spots trends quickly, making it a must-read to find out where you or your big idea fits into the big picture. Use its coverage to enhance your pitch and make it more relevant to the consciousness of the nation. Ah, America.

Conferenza (www.conferenza.com)

Our clients usually come to us with bloated trade show budgets and sales teams scattered across the country, manning booths and passing out business cards. The reality though is that they’re spending precious time preaching to the choir and reciting their sales pitch for competitors. Depending on your industry, valuable tradeshows that put you in front of paying customers are few and far between. To sort through the ocean of convention centers, conferences, and expos, click over to Conferenza’s site and zoom in on the secret of trade shows—those with a technology bent, anyway—and industry events.

Newsletters and other articles on the site let you know which companies are sponsoring shows and which companies will attend, as well as news on their development. From this information, you can get a pretty good sense of whether it’s worth attending, much less fashioning a booth for. We used Conferenza recently to check out some shows that a search engine client of ours wanted to attend, and the site basically spilled the beans that all twelve of them weren’t worth the time or the fare for coach seats on the plane.

We also learned from Conferenza that most of the best conferences, meaning the ones that sell products, aren’t that well known. Search the shows by industry and focus on finding the ones that best match what or to whom you’re trying to sell.

Multivision (www.multivision.com)

Once the Associated Press picks up your story, you’re well on your way to being a star, but not quite yet. The AP, Bloomberg News, and more obscure syndicated services, such as Block Consumer News, send their stories out to thousands of networks and outlets. If you’re lucky enough to be covered by the AP or any of the others, you’d better know which newspapers or broadcasters picked up the story and where. Multivision is a news tracker that basically “Googles” TV broadcasts. It can tell you where your story ran and on which networks, when and how often. They’ll also burn the coverage onto a digital videodisc, copy it to a VHS tape, or digitize it and make it available to you on the Web.

Smart PR folks use Multivision to find out exactly where their story placed. Once you know where your story aired, you can call all the other stations in the area and serve up the opportunity to be in step with their broadcast competitors, thus never missing a great news opportunity.

SourceaSaurus (www.sourceasaurus.com)

SourceaSaurus is a clever service. It’s a database of “experts” for journalists to search through when they quickly need a comment from an expert qualified to address some aspect of their story. The benefit for you is that you get to make yourself an expert! The service is broken down into different topics, from food service to software, and you can list your name, background information that explains why you’re a relevant source, and your contact information.

Try to keep your listing updated, and classify yourself under listings that have seasonal importance. For instance, design engineers might fare well by listing themselves under automotive design in the months before the annual Detroit car show.

PR Source Code (www.prsourcecode.com)

If you aren’t monitoring the editorial calendars of all the magazines you should be in, you’re destined for failure. Profiles and interviews in the media aren’t enough for long-term press success. Feature articles found in editorial calendars compare the best businesses in the industry and lay out which businesses are the ones to watch—and you need to be there. Not being included wreaks havoc on your credibility and puts you in the publicity backseat. But finding editorial calendars isn’t easy, and finding out who actually writes them is practically impossible. Publications usually leave out most of the info PR people need, making it hard to get noticed and included.

PR Source Code just released “Edit Forum,” a tracking system that lists all the editorial calendars out there by industry and date and also gives you the actual information you need. Beyond the date the article is slated to run and its name, PR Source Code lets you know who’s writing it, their contact data, a summary of the article, and the date the article is due to be submitted, rather than the date that the magazine is on sale. Knowing when an article is printing and who’s responsible gives you an edge over competitors. For once, those jokers can be the ones wondering why they didn’t get into an article, while you’re having a copy of your glorious press coverage framed for the office.

eNVOLV Solutions (www.envolv.com)

If a journalist isn’t getting the information she needs on you or your business, she’ll abandon the story and find another one. The media window of opportunity is narrowing, and there’s more news out there than ever, so if a reporter has to work to get the basics, the story will never see the light of day.

To help you get the nitty-gritty info into the media’s hands, eNVOLV Solutions created Relationship Builder, a digital press kit allowing you to display more info about you and your businesses than you can in any regular paper press kit, including video clips and print-ready photography. You don’t have to be a digital wiz, either. Just drop your logos, graphics, and info into the fields that have already been created, and you’re done.

Eric Gerstman of Neale May & Partners in San Francisco uses eNVOLV’s digital kits in some clever ways. Before sending a client off to speak at an event, he sends out links to the kit to everyone in attendance, so that they’re well prepped for the lecture in advance. He also adds the link to press releases. That way, if a journalist’s interest is even mildly piqued, he has all the info in front of him before his interest cools.

For the self-starter in every PR person, eNVOLV’s digital kits are a cheap alternative to paper. Traditional kits worth handing out can cost up to $70 apiece, when all is said and done. You’ll spend most of your time trying not to hand them out! With an eNVOLV link, you can dish out press kits to your heart’s content.

Trash Proof News Releases (www.trashproofnewsreleases.com)

Paul Krubin is a long-time PR guru who has pretty accurately boiled down the science of getting coverage into a mathematical equation: PA+A+H = C. To the less wacky (us), Paul’s mathematics means personal adversity plus achievement and a bit of humor equals coverage. Paul says that the equation plays out on the front-page USA Today photo every day, so if you want coverage, you’re going to have to follow suit.

At Trash Proof News Releases, Paul takes your news, and for $200 or less (depending on how much research and time he must allot) he’ll write you what he calls a trash-proof news release of your own that puts his algorithm to the test. For newcomers to the process, it’s worth giving TPNR a go. There’s a special formula that goes into successful press releases, and having others help you out with the first few is a good way to learn the process.

MediaSurvey (www.mediasurvey.com)

Sam Whitmore knows what it takes to get into the big glossy business magazines. He used to be the editor of PC Week, and he was a senior writer at Fortune, too. To help out PR people and journalists alike, he put together MediaSurvey, a site that makes sense of publications and brings together PR folks and reporters to discuss the issue at hand.

First of all, by hanging out on the site, users get access to news profiles that tell you exactly what portion of magazines are dedicated to case-study material, product reviews, profiles, and so on. If you’ve been pitching a profile to Red Herring for four months without a return call, for example, Sam’s site can help you out by letting you know that most of the magazine’s coverage comes from case-study material, and that this is the better route to take if you want the ink.

Besides clearly laying out the anatomy of every magazine worth reading, Sam connects influential writers with eager PR people over the phone. On a regular basis, journalists from Forbes, Fortune, BusinessWeek, and others join Sam and registered PR people for a conversation about issues on media relations and other, more general topics. Reporters let you know where they stand on different issues, and flacks can ask questions, pitch related stories, and help shape their coverage. (By the way, we can use the word flack [or flak—either way]. We live for this business—we’re allowed!)

News Talkers (www.mdsconnect.com)

One of our favorite new services on the Web, MDS Connect’s News Talkers gives a video and a venue to PR personas with something to say quickly. Like video news releases, or VNRs, News Talkers give you video capabilities to beam your footage and thoughts to the broadcast (TV and radio) media. But instead of the canned corporate statement that VNRs typically feature, News Talkers employs a seasoned interviewer to ask you real questions about your announcement, giving other producers a better sense of what the real news is behind the spin.

News Talkers is also unlike VNRs in that it isn’t distributed via satellite, but through the Internet, so that the nonbroadcast media get an opportunity to take a peek. There are plenty of good uses for News Talkers—reacting to current events seems to be one of the best. Let’s say you sell security equipment, and there’s a rash of break-ins in the neighborhood one evening. In an hour or less, you can have a video out to the media instructing residents on what they can do to protect themselves and what products are available to them. It makes good sense and good TV!

Media Bistro (www.mediabistro.com)

Going onto Media Bistro as a PR person is kind of like spying on the media itself! This site, for unemployed writers looking for their next gig, is sort of a Monster.com for scribes—that is, journalists. But besides all the job-finding help, Media Bistro serves up daily content about the news within the news biz—for example, which magazines are launching a news section, the maneuverings of highly read journalists, which networks are booming and which ones are flopping, and all sorts of industry rumors. Keeping up with the articles on Media Bistro means you’re keeping up with the ever expanding and contracting media culture that is so vital to spreading the word about your products.

Jack Myers’s Report (www.myers.com)

Thankfully, Jack is a total broadcast guy—the type who arranges all of his furniture at home to allow him to see the boob tube from any seat in the house. As a total media business hound, Jack appears on Tech TV to dish dirt and useful information on the biz, and the advertising industry trusted him to lead the delegation to the White House Conference on Children’s Television, so you can rest assured he knows what he’s talking about.

His self-titled report is a must-read for those of us after small-screen fame. Day after day Myers churns out news—not about Katie Couric’s quadrillion-dollar contract and new coiffure, but about how cable operators are becoming more dependent on programmer support and what role consumer technology will play in broadcast programming. For the PR enthusiast, Myers’s report gives some pointers into what networks and programs are thinking and where their focus is headed. It’s useful information, and reading it will allow you to at least carry on a convincing conversation with producers when the opportunity arises.

Shadow TV (www.shadowtv.com)

If your PR starts rocking and rolling and you find TV coverage for your product popping up in unlikely places, if your competitor is popping up all over and you need a handle on it, or if you’re tracking a syndicated news piece in which you appeared, click over to Shadow TV and test out their “monitor TV” service, a little “kluge”—that is, not quite perfect but worth attempting.

Basically, it’s like all of your traditional monitoring services, but it differs in two major ways. With most monitoring services, if you aren’t a huge client, you have to call in and tell them what you’re trying to find. Then a humanoid goes through the reels, finds it and sends you the tapes in the mail. The next time you want something, you call and repeat the process.

With Shadow TV, your query or queries are recorded digitally, and the service sniffs out what you’re looking for, around the clock. The other big difference is that ShadowTV won’t send you a clunky VHS tape. Instead, it streams the coverage digitally right to your desktop. This way you can actually share the stream and use it with your digital propaganda campaign to take over the world.

I-PR (www.http://www.adventive.com/lists/ipr/summary.html)

I-PR is one of the best interactive PR boards still buzzing away. Thousands of PR people go online and put their heads together to imagine how to spread the buzz on the Web. They talk about everything, from how to pitch on the Net to which Web columns work best for building coverage and infamy, online and offline.

As you can see, the Web is endless, and so are its possibilities. Everyone will tell you that it’s all been done before, but pay no attention. Even the most talented surfers find new ways to use the Web every day, and the faster you make the digital realm part of your process, the faster your coverage will spread. Your market will expand past its borders, and your profile will rise above the competition’s. The Web can be the catalyst for your success if used to its capacity. Use it well and use it carefully, just as you would any powerful tool.