The #PRstack toolbox of free public relations tools

26 Mar

Third-party tools investment in public relations has traditionally been limited to media databases.

Much of the business runs on Excel spreadsheets for tasks ranging from tracking influencers to editorial calendars, and from managing projects to reporting results.

Proving the business case for tool investment

Investment in tools is a challenge as we shift from publicity to new forms of engagement using digital and social media.

Budget isn't set aside in many organisations or it's limited. Practitioners are expected to build an investment case by demonstrating the business benefit.

I’ve filtered the #PRStack database and curated a list of more than 30 freemium tools in a bid to tackle this challenge.

#PRstack is a crowdsourced project that I kickstarted in a bid to characterise the third-party tool market and help understand modern practice and workflow. It now lists almost 250 tools.

Prezly has built a web app to help interrogate the list across different areas of public relations practice and workflow

There is no such thing as free

A word of warning: free or low cost tools are never as sophisticated or robust as commercial tools. There is no guarantee of the quality of the output or continuity of service.

If a tool is free vendors are typically using it as the basis to sell a service or are collecting data. I make no guarantees whatsoever for the quality of the tools listed.

What’s your #PRstack?

Over the coming weeks I’m inviting people to guest blog about their personal #PRstack. If you’d like to contribute please drop me an email. If there's enough interest we'll make an ebook.

Update 6 April: 20 people have offered to get involved and we're well on the way to creating an ebook called My #PRstack: a practical guide to modern PR technology and workflow. We're aiming for an early-May publication date.

In the interim I hope this list of free tools is useful. If you spot anything that’s missing please feel free to add it to the #PRstack Google document.

Planning

AnswerThePublic

A free consumer insight tool that pulls in all of the ways that people are searching and asking questions around a topic

Bluenod

Data visualisation of Twitter conversations. Enables you to pinpoint influencers and view the flow of conversation

Boardreader

A search and discovery engine for community forums and boards

BuzzSumo

Analyse which keyword related content performs best through major social media platforms

Echosec

Location based social media search and monitoring

Google Consumer Barometer

A tool to help you understand how people use the Internet in different countries around the world

Google Rich Snippets Tool

A tool to check HTML code for structured data. Useful to insure your web pages and posts are set-up for programmatic discovery

Google Search Trends

Search on any topic either nationally or worldwide based on Google's search volume data

Google Webmaster Tools

Allows site owners to monitor their site and see what keywords Google has discovered, look for crawl errors, and check the health of a site

MozRank

Moz metrics are indicators of how useful a website is to a search engine crawl bot, and usefulness to humans

Rapportive

Gmail plug-in that provides a photo of your contact, an overview of their LinkedIn profile, company, title, location, Twitter, and connections you have in common