Deirdre Breakenridge

When I was at the #IMS09 conference, I got into a discussion with a fellow PR colleague about free monitoring tools (beyond Google Alerts). He had mentioned that his office had very little resources and that it was difficult to find the budget for all of the things that needed to be done in both marketing and social media marketing. I offered him our Free Tools Matrix as a way that he could see what types of gratis resources there are on the Web to monitor the conversations and to see how to connect with key influencers.

I had the honor and the pleasure of participating on a panel at the Inbound Marketing Summit (#IMS09) in Boston on October 7, 2009. I joined several colleagues including Jason Kintzler of PitchEngine (@jasonkintzler), Melanie Stachowiak of MarketWire (@melaniestack), Paul Roetzer, PR 20/20 (@paulroetzer), and David Weiner, PR Newswire (@davidweiner) to discuss the state of the PR industry and PR 2.0, with a strong focus on the value of the news release vs. the Social Media Release in a changing Web 2.0 world. Well suited for this discussion were panelists from two PR agencies, two wire services and the founder of a Social Media Release platform and social network that enable PR to effectively package stories with social content.