#PRStack - a crowd sourced reference book for PRs

How-to's are growing in popularity.  According to the Hobson and Holtz Report FIR (#808) from earlier this week research by Google found that searches for how-to videos on YouTube are up 70%, year on year. 

A few months ago I asked Stephen Waddington if I could do a guest post on his blog. Always ahead of the curve, Stephen suggested a how-to, and the result was this post on  using Google Analytics to track PR outcomes.

While it's great to pontificate over strategy, there is a time when you need to just get on with it and how-to's make this easier. Following on from this it seemed obvious to look at other how-to topics to contribute with. And recently there was one on using Caspio to make a fully functioning database online.

And then there is #PRstack, an open crowd sourced repository of tools used by PR people. An ebook was going together and I volunteered a section on how to get results out of Brandwatch. The great thing about the book is it covers such a diverse selection of tools from Google Predict, to Buzzsumo, Topsy and Hemingway. They are all PR focussed, and written by PR people.

So where will #PRstack go from here? The tools are changing all the time and this content is time limited. Should it be just a snapshot of where we are now, to be replaced in 6-9 months by app which melds a load of PR tools into one? No idea but it will be fun to watch.   

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Practical guide to PR Tools - free ebook launched #PRstack

Tackling public relations workflow

The #PRstack book published today developed as a crowdsourced project to tackle modern public relations workflow.

My #PRstack: a practical guide to modern PR tools and workflow is a book published today.

It consists of a series of case studies by public relations practitioners exploring modern aspects of public relations practice.

There are 18 contributors and 40+ practical how-to examples of tools used in public relations, content marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO).

The book is distributed free under a Creative Commons license via the #PRstack community. You can download a PDF via Slideshare and the chapters will all be shared as a blog posts each day over the next three weeks.

You can download the book and check out the content for yourself.

Modernising public relations

Public relations is rapidly modernising from publicity to influencer relations, and brands are developing their own media and communities.

The third-party tools market isn’t quite so neat and clear cut. It is characterised by vendors selling tools packed with features all looking for a problem to solve.

My #PRstack: a practical guide to modern PR tools and workflow is made up of 17 chapters split into the following sections:

1. Social listening and planning - how to identify and listen to a community using the social web and other data sources
2. Content - creating content as a means of public relations engagement
3. Curation - curating content on the social web to turn social content into owned
4. Building relationships online - examples of influencer relations and community management
5. Example #PRstack workflows - putting tools together to create a complete workflow
6. Project management - managing a public relations campaign or any form of project

Building #PRstack

The magical thing about creating a community is that you never quite know how it’s going to develop.

Some gather around an event and disperse as quickly as they came together. Others quickly establish a purpose and hierarchy and become bogged down in bureaucracy.

Some, like the community of practitioners that I spearhead in my day job are noisy and thrive, developing a culture and life of their own.

The #PRstack community started as a blog post in mid-December. I publicly bemoaned the lack of mature workflow for public relations.

A community developed around a Google spreadsheet over the next 50 days. It described more than 100 tools.

Prezly’s Frederik Vincx offered development time to build a web app to sit on top of the #PRstack Google document to help people interrogate the data. Prezly is a storytelling platform for brands that is listed in the #PRStack.

We launched the PRstack app in early March. It now describes more than 250 tools.

During a #PRstack Twitter chat we explored ways to develop #PRstack. My #PRstack: a practical guide to modern PR tools and workflow is the result.

Meet the #PRstack crew

Thank you to Frederik and the team at Prezly for their commitment to the project. As well as the app they’ve laid-out this book. No other vendor has shown such courage or leadership.

The authors of this book have all given up their time and expertise freely to contribute.

Thank-you Matt Anderson; Stella Bayles; Michael Blowers; Stuart Bruce; Scott Guthrie; Sarah Hall; Adam Parker; Gary Preston; Andrew Ross; Andrew Smith; David Sawyer; Kalli Soteriou; Dan Tyte; Max Tatton-Brown; Ben Verinder; Angharad Welsh; and Ross Wigham.

You’ll meet them all as you read through the book, and I highly recommend that you seek them all out on Twitter.

Margaret Clow worked with me to knock the book into shape. Andrew Smith, Adam Parker, Sarah Hall and Sarah Pinch have given me helpful nudges along the way.

Gary Preston and Stella Bayles from CoverageBook.com have been strong advocates alongside the social teams headed by Gemma Griffiths and Dan Tyte at the CIPR; and Danny Whatmough at the PRCA.

Communities can be magical things.

** On a personal note I have read a couple of the guides and they are really helpful. Simple things like Google predict can fashion keyword use around issues, while Hootsuite is a genuine help to managing multi-channel social output.

Ofgem come under social 'flack'

Listening to the news this morning it quickly became clear it was not going to be a good day for Ofgem - the governments watchdog for the UK energy market. They has announced that the energy firms were making about £125 a year from customers, instead of the more normal £15 per person. Aside from the technicalities of the energy market which is often portrayed as more broken than mended, why not let the social media reaction decide quite how the bad it is for Ofgem?

Using Brandwatch I looked at the social media exposure on Ofgem for the past 24 hours. The system collected almost 600 social media references, mostly being form news sites and Twitter. I would liked to have manually confirmed their sentiment rating, but as time is short and I don't half a day to spare for the exercise, I am working with their auto sentiment rating. Frankly I thought it might have been worse, but it is fair to describe it as pretty bad....48% negative, 50% neutral and 2% positive.

Assessing the measurers

Over a period of 6 weeks my intention was to use of as many online/social media monitoring tools as I could; aiming to understand their strengths, drawbacks and pricing options. I will deal with this latter issue in a follow-up post. The organisations tested included Brandwatch, JamIQ, Lithium, Trackur, UberVU. Obviously this list in not exhaustive. At the last count there were more than 100 providers in this space.

One of the criteria when deciding who to test was they had to be a player in the lower cost (non-enterprise)/self consultancy space. Believe you-me...you could spend considerably more than those I have tried! Indeed, if you include bespoke dashboards and human validation of articles tone and messaging you could easily spend many thousands of dollars a month. I wanted to understand more about the lower-cost players; see what you can get for a couple of hundred dollars a month, over the free tools we all use like Google Alerts, etc.

It is quite easy to point to the things which they all come with. You get a social media capture featuring stories relevant to your keywords covering Titter, Facebook, Linked-In and other online sources. You get the opportunity to compare and contrast these keywords (they could be a list of competitors or an agency's clients) either in a list or graphic form. It was also notable that this latter option would allow the user to click on a peak or trough and see what were the stories making it up. I last tested a few of these tools about 18 months ago and this is a new (and very welcome) addition to many of the providers service.

Another welcome addition to many of the providers is the ability see the impact of various commentators/Media sources. Whilst I am reluctant to describe it as a measure of influence, the combination of MozRank, Klout and similar scores are a welcome indication of media impact.

So what were my experiences with the providers listed above? It's probably easiest to firstly separate them into 2 groups based on ease of use. In the easy to use camp I would put Lithium, Trackur and UberVU. This is not say they are simplistic tools. Far from it, they have the ability to be customised and adapted to meet a variety of requirements and I would defy anyone using them for the first time not to be able to generate some kind of meaningful results in less than 5 minutes. Quite an achievement and very important considering that not everyone in PR has a Masters in statistics!

It is necessary though to draw meaningful categories, and if you are after a more comprehensive style of reporting you would do well to consider JamIQ and Brandwatch. I like the accessibility of the Asian based JamIQ portal. It is logically laid out, offers scalability and a broad selection of features including a nice dashboard, graphical interfaces and the ability to 'drill down' to the actual media coverage from most points.

Brandwatch is similarly feature-filled, though the set-up process is longer winded and involves several stages. In time I am sure the different groupings and queries would become logical, but I have to emphasise the point that it sometimes does not seem entirely logical. On a number of occasions I had to follow one of the online video tutorials (involving several stages) to be left with the impression that I had done what the others providers allow you to do almost intuitively.

All said, it is probably my favourite provider, generating coverage lists I could be confident with and filterable via and wide range of attributes. Other useful features included topic word clouds (I particularly liked the ....coloured plug-in version), and the ability of download as a CSV, Excel listing Or JPG for the charts.

This is a fast changing space and I will try to keep my views updated. I will also try and follow-up with a posting on their relative charging structures and value for money.