4 FREE Tools for Do It Yourself Public Relations (PR)

A lot of companies today turn more and more to social media as a way to enhance their visibility.  After reading an article titled Study finds PR aids startups’ funding efforts, I started thinking about PR and it’s role within a business’ marketing efforts.

I keep hearing everywhere around me that PR is dead and that the new marketing medium is social media.  While I believe that social media is a great way to reach new audiences and build more authentic relationships, I think that PR plays it’s own role as the main stream media has great reach and can’t be left out of the mix, but the introduction of the social media newsroom template has maybe changed PR forever.

If hiring a PR agency is not be in your budget,  here are some tools you can use to generate Press for your company for FREE:

Get reporter queries in your email

HARO - stands for “Help a Reporter Out” was created by a PR guy Peter Shankman. Each day, you’ll receive up to three emails, each with anywhere from 15-30 queries per email. They’ll all be labeled with [shankman.com] in the subject line, for easy filtering. If you see a query you can answer, go for it!  And it’s all FREE!

Find & Build relationships with reporters

Use Twello to find reporters who cover your industry.  Twello is a search engine that searches Twitter account entries.  You can run a keyword search by keyword “reporter” to find anyone who has included that keyword in their Twitter profile (bio, name).  You can also search by News & Media categories to help you identify reporters.  Once you find the reporter, try to build a relationship with them before pitching your stories.

Easily create a social media newsroom

PitchEngine makes it easy for you to incorporate PR assets like video, audio and images directly into your press release and share it with your media contacts via email and cut-and-paste links or post it directly to Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook.  You can create an account for free.  Your Press releases will be hosted for free for 30 days and you can purchase a subscription to create a permanent media newsroom.

Tap into the existing resources

The Publicity Hound is a great resource of Free publicity articles and ebooks.  It covers a broad range of topics including: Writing Press Releases, Pitching and Contacting the Media and Bloggers,  TV & Radio Publicity, Newspaper & Magazine Publicity, and much more.

Do you know any other resources for generating PR at no or low cost?  Let me know!