Marijane Funess
April 24, 2015 | 12:21:57
Technology public relations isn’t rocket science (okay, except when it is!), but soaring past the competition is easier when you have the right tools. They can improve every aspect of tech PR, from wooing and winning over the CEO to achieving and reporting top-notch results. Want to make a quantum PR leap? Try some of these.
Beyond PowerPoint and Prezi. Set your presentations apart with dynamic alternatives to the same-old, same-old. PowToon brings animation to your deck. Haiku Deck is customizable for iPad, and Sparkol works best for online video presentations.
Budget better. And plan and forecast better as well. With easy-to-use online software package planguru, your tech PR team can take some of the pain out of budgeting and plan more realistically.
Make your writing pop. As any PR pro will tell you, writing well for all platforms – blogs, byline articles, pitch letters – is at least half the battle in gaining earned media attention for your product or service. The best way to be a better writer is to write, but there’s no harm in getting help when you need it. We recommend Grammarly for quick editing beyond Spellcheck. Readability-Score is also very helpful in determining how clear your writing will be to your intended audience. Finally, Grammar Girl provides easy tips to ensure that, for example, you’d never say “insure” in this sentence.
Power up your pitching. Why not arm yourself with all the tools in the toolbox? You’re probably familiar with Cision or similar databases for list creation and Muck Rack for homing in on journalists “socially,” but have you tried Pitchrate, which likens its platform to — wait for it — match.com for media and sources? We also like PitchEngine, which microtargets bloggers and journalists with content from platforms like Instagram, Facebook and Vimeo.
Soup up your analytics. PR measurement and results reporting have become very sophisticated, and there are tools that help PR pros tell the most complete story. This includes Google Analytics, of course, but others as well. For example, CustomScoop provides customized monitoring and analysis reports. NOD3x identifies influencers and assesses sentiment and BuzzSumo ranks content based on number of shares generated. The insights can help the PR team with content promotion, curation and article development. Talk Walker is also great for gathering social data with a “Google Alert” type system.