165 14.12 Data about Journalistic Audience
Public relations professionals need to understand how to best place their news releases and other types of strategic communications messages with their journalist audiences. There are a number of tools and resources that help PR professionals identify the best targets.
For example, a service called MuckRack provides information to help strategic communicators pitch their stories or news releases to the most appropriate journalists covering a topic or a beat, to get alerts when a journalist Tweets or links to materials related to the PR specialist’s topic, to track how journalists are sharing the content generated by the PR specialist, and to create media lists of successful contacts and notes about what has worked in the past.
The PR specialist can do a search for journalists writing about industry YYY or bloggers who follow company ZZZ. Clients want to know if their PR efforts are effective. MuckRack can track the news releases generated by the PR specialist to see how and where they have appeared. For the busy PR professional, having this sort of tailored tracking service is invaluable.