Blog | TechNews

I look at the big PR platforms as the kind of legacy Bell AT&T systems. They’re big and powerful, but most PR professionals only use 5 to 10 percent of their capabilities. And how we actually spend 90 to 95 percent of our time as PR pros to get results has little to do with building lists, blasting emails, issuing press releases and doing coverage reports.

In the tech industry in particular, being good at the job has a lot to do with the knowledge you are building up about your client’s technology, the categories you are relevant to, what your competitors are doing, and where the white space is that you can claim to capture journalist attention. It’s really the combination of your constant engagement with the news, with the reporters, building your own knowledge and skills to capitalize on opportunities.

With TechNews, I found a platform where I use 95% of what it can do, because finally here’s a research platform that lines up nearly 1:1 with what’s most important to me as a tech PR professional.

The best comparison I can make is that it’s really like Google for tech PR. And I say that because Google is where I would go to fill in all the gaps between other systems like Cision, and the more real time information and news and author discovery that I actually needed to do my job. It’s intuitive to use, it’s all search- based, and the dataset is much more dynamic for the kind of knowledge that I’m seeking when pursuing stories for my tech clients.

With TechNews, I don’t have to get training, I don’t have to “learn a system”, I don’t need someone to help me me build search queries. With TechNews, I search on any technology topic, any company, and I’m seeing the trends of the conversations at a deeper level than anything else offers.

It’s for tech PR pros who are curious and not just checking boxes. If your mindset is simply “I need to build a media list and hit all these people,” this tool is not for you. If you’re someone that needs to get results (media coverage) and you are seeking the insights – new reporters, new columns, finding people talking about topics you care about that may not already be on your list of suspects – that is where TechNews excels.

With TechNews I can see the trend of the conversation. I can see trends going out of favor, new trends on the rise, and I hav the ability to stay smarter with a much smaller amount of time spent researching. It’s the difference between busy data (the big PR platforms) and knowledge that’s specific to the tech industry (TechNews).

Technology moves fast, and you need a dynamic picture of the activity, so you can make smart decisions as a tech PR pro. You don’t have time to read every publication, so where do you get your bearings?

TechNews.

Every tool has its flaws and TechNews is not perfect. But for me it’s the first great tool that really captures the use cases of the types of questions smart tech PR people have of this massive dataset around the tech industry. I’d love to see the platform evolve to start surfacing the hottest trending tech topics and companies (with machine learning / natural language processing) so it’s not always incumbent on me to know what I want to search for when using the product (and more ways to discover things I don’t know about).

If you are in tech PR and you are not already using TechNews, you should definitely take a trial.