PR Must Click-Websites

The “Going Forward” section of Entrepreneur magazine recently highlighted 10 must-click websites.  I have to admit there were some very good sites mentioned on the list.  From BizStats and Entrepreneurship.com to LadiesWhoLaunch and Nielsen, these sites were all jam-packed with great information, statistics and ideas.

I thought it would be a good idea to put together my top five must-click websites (this does not include my favorite blogs, which I’ll save for another post) for Public Relations professionals.  These are the sites that I rely on almost daily. Now, this is not as easy as you may think; on the contrary it’s a challenge because I know that there are many valuable sites, rich with information and resources for PR professionals.

A note to PR service providers: If you don’t make the list the first time around, feel free to contact me.  I’m sure I’ll be doing follow up posts in the future so that I can continue to share the “Best of the Best” with communications professionals.

Here’s my list (in no particular order):

1.       www.myragan.com

2.       www.pitchengine.com

3.       www.technorati.com

4.       http://search.twitter.com

5.       www.google.com

MyRagan.com is an excellent social networking community for PR professionals to share information, resources, tools and general knowledge about the Public Relations agency.  Mark Ragan, CEO has done a fantastic job building a community that is not only engaging with helpful blogs and useful articles, but he’s also built myragan.tv, which is a video sharing community.  MyRagan is a must click site because it educates me and draws me closer to my industry every day.

PitchEngine is not only a great community for PR professionals and journalists, but it allows you to develop and share Social Media Releases (SMRs) for free.  Another great feature on PitchEngine includes its PitchFeed, which is a user-generated searchable news stream.  You are also able to share your SMRs through Google News and apps like Facebook and Twitter. My agency uses PitchEngine for our SMRs.  The result for us has been a huge increase in traffic to the PFS Marketwyse website (as much as 600%).

Technorati is a blog search engine and PR professionals should be using Technorati to evaluate the authority and ranking of blogs and bloggers for their brands. The search engine collects and highlights global conversations. By searching in Technorati, you can find the blogs and bloggers who are related to your target world and those that also may have conversations related to your brand.   When you’re using Technorati correctly, then as a marketer you are using a tool that helps you to listen first and then join the conversation.

I don’t think I go a day without using search.twitter.com.  Aside from Google, it’s my second favorite way to search and find relevant conversations for industry trends, client related information, and threads of conversations based on key words.  Twitter search allows you to search, filter and interact with volumes of news and information being transmitted in real-time. One of the first things that I learned as a PR professional was to be up on the news in a variety of industries.  When I was first beginning my career, there was no Twitter Search so I read The New York Times every morning.  Now, I get my favorite media delivered to my inbox and I use Twitter Search to give me real time news as it occurs around the world.