The two tools in question are Trendpedia and Help A Reporter Out.
Thanks to Beth Kanter for the first one. Beth runs a great blog on social media and non-profits and did a post on Trendpedia which is a blog search engine that let’s you compare blog coverage of up to three topics and presents the info as a graph. And the coolest thing – you can click on any point on graph, like a sudden spike in posts, and it will take you to the posts from that time that caused the spike.
Here’s a screen shot of a comparison of coverage of U.S. presidential candidates:
It’s still in Beta form by very cool.
I found out about the next tool on the great marketing communications podcast, For Immediate Release by Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson. Help A Reporter Out, or HARO, let’s you sign up as a contact for reporters looking for sources for stories and is run by its creator Peter Shankman. Here’s the scoop paraphrased from Shankman’s blog:
Basically, reporters send Shankman queries about what they’re working on. (”I’m writing a story on farming, and I need someone in NYC who’s grown a windowsill garden,” or “I’m doing a story on General Electric, and need a financial analyst who covers them.”)
Peter (www.shankman.com) puts these all queries together, and emails them out, three times a day. There are usually anywhere between 10 and 25 queries per email, organized so you can read all of them in about five seconds. If any work for you, simply scroll down, and email the reporter with your details and why you’re an expert. If they don’t, simply delete them.
And it’s all free. The list has over 20,000 members that have joined since it launched four months ago [i.e. around April 2008]. Members have been quoted in everything from the NY Times to CNN to the Washington Post to the NY Daily News to Fox News to TV to radio to bloggers around the world.
Also, it seems like it’s pretty much U.S. focused now which is great for all of you working in the US. But, hey, there’s no reason this couldn’t become a great tool for marketers everywhere, including Canada. Just sign up and start telling other Canadian marketers and journalists you talk to about it.
The alternative is signing up for Canadian Sources directory that does pretty much the same thing but with two big differences: it costs $349 a year and it only lets reporters contact you – not vice versa like HARO’s 3-email-a-day system.
What your $349 buys you highlights another key difference between HARO and Sources. Sources only accepts organizations as sources and there is an assumption that if an organization has paid to be listed that they’re a credible source. HARO is free and leaves it to reporters to decide the credibility of the sources. This is another reason I like HARO. In journalism school Sources was our Bible and that meant that most of us got lazy and usually just went with the same sources that Sources told us were credible. HARO puts journalists back to work.
I’ll be spreading the HARO gospel. Oh wait,I already am..
Posted in Mainstream media, Media coverage, Monitoring |
