I’ve been a member of the technology media in Australia for over five years, and if there’s one thing I’ve seen from the journalism side, it’s that often members of the PR world don’t quite know how to quickly track what we’re doing in our realm.
I can see how it must be complicated: we’re all writing tons of articles. I generally run the site I work for (GadgetGuy.com.au) by myself, and even I can’t remember half the stuff I’ve written. Tech journalists are always writing, generally at a frantic pace, and in some ways you could say we’re all pushing out so much work that it’s hard to keep up with it all.
I’m sure I’m not the only one to get emails asking for links to stories, and for a PR trying to find the story for their reports, I can see why emailing a journalist could be fruitful. It doesn’t help that website searches can be very unhelpful, and much of this is due to the nature of website search engines just generally not being very good (apologies, we can’t all be Google).
I’ve never worked in PR — a quick look at my wardrobe will tell you that — and I’ve heard that people who work in this field regularly have to make daily or weekly reports showing the client which media has written about the topic. Tracking all of this can’t be easy, especially when there are a good 50 of us working on random stories, forcing you to visit our sites and trawl through listings of articles until you come across the magic one.
I understand that, and as a journalist who also codes websites, I can see how this can be a problem.
However, there is a solution, and for a lot of websites across Australia — and no doubt the world — it’s staring at you right in the face, and most PRs (and I suspect journalists) don’t even know it.