Meltwater is dedicated to helping you find relevant media contacts, manage outreach campaigns, monitor and analyze what is being said in the traditional press, and help engage and drive campaigns in social media. It was founded in Norway and is now a global company headquartered in San Francisco. I am currently using one of their products, Meltwater Press. I recently spoke with Pauliina Rauhamaa about their two public relations solutions, Meltwater Press and Meltwater News.
Meltwater Press offers a media contact database, a Natural Language Processing (NLP) search engine to locate relevant press contacts, and a press release distribution and management system. I have used it to easily create a number of media contact lists on relevant topics to my work. Meltewater Press is organized around finding relevant reporters, both in traditional media and key bloggers, rather than around general topics or beats that can be incorrect or out of date.
You build your media lists by first picking key terms. The NLP search engine returns relevant journalists and bloggers who have written articles discussing those topics, ranked by their relevance. You can then see either all of their work or the work relevant to your topic and select the time period to cover. You can click through to see the actual articles. Here is sample set of returns below.
Once you find a relevant reporter, it is easy to add them to an existing list or create a new one. The reporters are described and contact information is usually available. You can then contact them through Meltwater individually or as a group. There are useful tools within Meltwater to manage this process. You can also export the lists to other applications such as Excel. Below is a sample media list.
You can embed images in your outreach. The media distribution tools include the ability to see who does and doesn’t read your email or press release. You can use graphic analysis to get an overview of journalist memes, users; and identify and understand trends.
We next looked at Meltwater News, a real-time media intelligence platform designed to enable you to monitor your brands presence across online media, as well as follow relevant topics. While Meltwater Press is organized around reporters, Meltwater News is organized around topics. They monitor over 200,000 online news sources worldwide, including several blogs that I write for.
You can set up searches based on keywords and use Boolean logic to refine these searches. You can also select what types of news sources you want to include such as top tier journalists, news from relevant countries, or even drill down to track a specific list of outlets you are particularly interested in. The searches can be on your brand. For example, I was able to see spikes in mentions of my topics and then drill down to see what sources and content caused these spikes.
The reports can also be on relevant topics. For example, Pauliina showed me how to set up daily reports on topics of current interest. If the results are too broad, you can add filters to narrow them down. There is an intelligence dashboard that gives you a multidimensional overview of the latest trends. Automated sentiment analysis gives you an overview of media tone.
In addition to traditional media, Meltwater News looks at social media conversations on more than 200 million blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other sources. The volume of content on the Web is ever increasing with more content generated every few years than in the entire prior history. Tools with the capabilities of Meltwater are essential for keeping up with what is relevant and taking advantage of it for both business intelligence and media outreach.
They also offer Meltwater Buzz specifically targeted to social media and social media marketing. My experience with Melwater Press suggests that this entire suite of products is both easy to use and comprehensive.
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