Monthly Archive for January, 2009

I was meeting with a friend of mine who runs an agency on Long Island – she was showing me the newsroom her designer had cooked up for her web page. The design was very nice and colorful; the search mechanism worked like a charge. But for all practical purposes, the site was all wrong for what she needed. For one thing, there was no way to save a search as an RSS feed. And for another, the PHP script that ran the searches returned the results into one generic URL, so there’s no way to link to the results of a search. So if my friend is pitching a restaurant client, for example, and she wants to point out to the prospect all of her restaurant experience, she has to direct them to the newsroom and tell them to pull down menu one and find results in window two, instead of giving them a unique URL where they can find all of the results.

This may seem like a minor point, or the point made by a technology geek, but it illustrates a larger problem in the PR world. As the demand for more sophisticated knowledge of social media technologies is growing, our tools are still stuck at where they were at the dawn of the 90s Internet boom. 

Cision’s interface and search mechanism is woefully inadequate for any sort of serious research for building media lists. I haven’t used Vocus but I haven’t heard much in the way of positive reviews. Most agencies have no contact management solutions in place other than individual staffers keep track of media contacts on Excel spreadsheets. And while agencies talk the SEO walk, many of them have websites built entirely in Flash. 

There are of course a lot of great solutions out there, many of them free or open source. I’ve started tinkering with BatchBlue for contact management and lists. Radian6 is a great tool for tracking social media and turning hits into actionable items, much better than the old clip books. And the research and development that has already gone into the Social Media Press Release has taught a lot of PR folks about the basics of XHTML and microformats and hopefully some of those folks are taking those smarts back to their agencies. 

Most importantly, since we’re all keeping lists of journalists, it shouldn’t be that hard for someone to take on Cision and  Vocus with an inexpensive, open source and community built media contact directory. 

All in all, we need to get smarter, not only about the effects of our tools, but about our tools themselves. Because in many cases, what we are using is not working for us.