PR Tools You Must Try: News Tracking
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It seems that almost everyday there is at least one new tool, gadget or a website that can make our life more productive and results of our work even more impressive. Because there are so many different tools available to PR professionals, I decided to review them, a few at a time, in this new series of quick reviews.
Today, I will tell you about three tools for tracking your company’s coverage and all of them are free. The next post will look at tools for tracking the blogosphere.
Google News, Google Blog Search and Google Alerts
I know I am starting with basics, and you are probably already using this, but I couldn’t omit mentioning Google when it comes to news tracking. I won’t go into detail on this, so here are just a few quick tips:
- When setting up your Google Alerts, make sure you choose “comprehensive” alerts. That ensures that you will be getting not only Google News alerts but also alerts for coverage in blogs
- If you are using Google News for monthly coverage reports, do them as soon as possible. Google’s archiving is not very good and you might miss a lot of the articles that are older than 30 days
- Use Google Blog Search to discover new blogs and track them directly via their RSS feeds
- After you do a Google News search, add it to the Google News homepage, your iGoogle page, a RSS reader or to services like Pageflakes and Netvibes
- Use Google connectors appropriately to get the right results (Here is a list of the connectors), for example if you want to find articles that discuss Obama but not the stimulus, your search should be “Obama –stimulus”
- Google is experimenting in showing news in a timeline. This allows you to view what was written about a topic by day, month or year. It might be helpful as you look at past coverage. It is in Google labs at the moment, so expect to see some glitches: http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com.
Newssift.com
Newssift.com is a business news search engine recently launched by The Financial Times Group. According to a TechCrunch article “Newssift indexes about 4,000 business news sources, from online newspapers and blogs to news portals and research sites. It is ingesting about 120,000 articles a day right now and applying semantic tags to each one.”
It might discover some coverage that Google News did not bring up and I also find it cleaner looking that Google News. It also has some additional features such as sentiment and categorizing by article sources.
Note: The site is currently not available. It will re-launch on April 26 incorporating feedback from users.
Congoo.com
Just another news search engine that is not all that different from Google News. Congoo.com sometimes catches coverage that does not appear in Google News, so give it a try.
What do you use to track news coverage?
