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Home > PR > A Fairly Comprehensive List of PR and Comms Technology Vendors for 2023 [PR Tech Sum No. 40]

A Fairly Comprehensive List of PR and Comms Technology Vendors for 2023 [PR Tech Sum No. 40]

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17 Jan 2023
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If you are striving to build your short list of PR and communications technology vendors, this long but neatly organized list of companies and resources might prove helpful 

My last PR tech sum went up in November of last year – and very little in the way of substantive news has happened in the PR technology community since. So, I thought it’d be a good time to update the list of vendors I’m tracking.

My previous list was something of a mishmash of tools, where this list attempts to categorize vendors in a way that is useful to prospective buyers. To that end, I’ve also made some changes to the list.

1) I’ve modified the list to only cover those software providers that are in my assessment primarily or heavily focused on PR and communications.

2) If I’ve published a briefing, product review or substantive blog posts on any company mentioned here in the past, I list those as well.

3) There is no order of merit to this list. Each category breaks out vendors alphabetically. While I do provide some comments, I’m not grading or recommending any vendor. This is an effort to provide an impartial, but candid opinion, based on my experience on the vendor side and monthly research and writing.

4) Finally, this is a work-in-progress that I will update over time.

All-in-one PR software incumbents

The all-in-one category are those vendors that offer a contact database, email distribution and media monitoring, analytics and reporting. Some offer press release distribution either natively through a service they own or through a partner.

Agility PR Solutions  (Canada)

Burrelles

  • Products: media monitoring & reporting, media outreach, short video demo.
  • Resources: newsroom, company blog, news search.
  • Comment: One of the oldest independent vendors in the space. I have an affinity because I recall being a young account executive getting envelopes of newspaper clippings in the snail mail from their team in Maine.

Cision

Meltwater

Muck Rack

Notified

  • Offers native newswire service through GlobeNewswire which it owns.
  • Resources: press releases, in the news, company blog, news search.
  • Parent company: West Technology Group and Intrado (the company has rebranded several times), which in turn is owned by the private equity firm Apollo Global Management, LLC (NYSE: APO).
  • Briefing: Notified by Intrado is a Promising PR Software Tool.
  • Comment: The name is newer to the field, but it stems from a PR startup the company acquired and then took its name. The review above is based on the startup’s product and I thought it looked pretty good at the time. I haven’t seen it post-acquisition. The company comes at PR from an investor relations and event management perspective, which I believe is in part because it got its start by acquiring assets from Nasdaq (and Marketwire[d]). You can find the background in this PR Tech Summary under the fourth point.

Onclusive  

All-in-one PR software startups

Propel

International-based all-in-one PR software providers

Prezly (Belgium)

Prowly (Poland)

Vuelio (United Kingdom)

Standalone media monitoring

The following companies focus primarily on media monitoring and reporting. Some use words like media intelligence and reputation management, but these are based on media monitoring.

Truescope

Signal AI

Public Relay

iSentia (Australia)

Standalone broadcast monitoring tools

The following vendors primarily focus on broadcast monitoring. This often includes both video and audio – and can include both news monitoring and advertising performance monitoring.

TVEyes

  • Products: broadcast news and ad monitoring.
  • Resources: newsroom, company blog, news search.
  • Comment: TVEyes is also a white-label partner of other vendors on this list – and powers their broadcast monitoring.

Kinetiq

Standalone media outreach

The following products primarily focus on media outreach, but they all do things a little differently.

Vetted

OnePitch

  • Products: contact management, email distribution, pitch analytics.
  • Resources: company blog, news search.
  • Comment: The company has pivoted from its original plan of compiling PR pitches into a single email digest for reporters (i.e. “one pitch”) to more of an outreach tool. One interesting feature is a recommendation engine that analyzes pitches and matches the text against contacts in its database. Then it recommends media contacts for you to pitch that have written about related topics.

Qwoted

PRophet

  • Pricing: starts at $299 per month (~$3,500 annually).
  • Parent: Stagwell (NASDAQ: STGW).
  • Resources: in the news, news search, pricing.
  • Blog: New Tech Tool Aims to Predict the Probability Your PR Pitch will Resonate with Reporters [PR Tech Sum].
  • Comment: This company refers to itself as the “first-ever AI-driven PR pitch platform” that aims to predict how your pitch will land with a reporter. I maintain interest but also a healthy skepticism. The founder, Aaron Kwittken, is also a “founder and chairman” of an agency, which represents PRophet. He has served as President of PRSA New York and will “will continue to serve on the 2023 Board as immediate past president” according to a PRSA NY. In 2021, PRSA NY put out a press release that identified  said, in part, “PRSA-NY and PRophet joined forces last week for the first of two no-cost training sessions to introduce and train attendees to use PRophet’s proprietary technology, which public relations agencies and in-house PR teams can use to improve their media relations, issues management, and strategic capabilities.” The latter press release identified Mr. Kwittken as “PRSA-NY president-elect” at the time it was published.

Reletter (UK)

  • Find, contact and get featured in newsletters.
  • Resources: blog, news search.

Internal communications tools

I currently only know of one company that focuses on internal comms – and employee engagement. Suggestions for other companies to watch are welcome.

FirstUp (formerly SocialChorus)

Staffbase (Germany)

Investor relations tools

Q4 Inc.

Press release distribution

I typically use PRWeb, but I’ve also experimented with iCrowdNewswire and GlobeNewswire. iCrowdNewswire is interesting because, for a time, it spent a little money on PPC and social media ads to help promote the release. That ad spend seemed to me designed for users who weren’t familiar with paid promotion. In my experience, Globe offers the best value for European distribution.

Also, see these posts on press releases:

On the radar

These are tools that seem to be focused on PR on but I haven’t yet examined them in depth.

Tools removed from the list

I’ve stopped following Nexis Newsdesk and Talkwalker as they just don’t seem to focus on PR or communications.

* * *

Who am I missing that I should consider adding to the list?

I publish a monthly piece that summarizes news from the PR technology community that I call the PR Tech Sum. I also write an occasional PR Tech Briefing and Product Review. Stay up to date by subscribing to this blog.

Vendors, please read this before pitching.

Do you need help with B2B tech marketing and PR? I’m a seasoned consultant that can both bring big ideas and execute them; I’d be glad to speak with you about your needs. Here are some useful links: about, services and contact. Or just reply to this message if you are a subscriber and received this post by email.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:
9 Corporate Characteristics to Look for When Buying Public Relations Software

Image by DALLE-2: “a robot reporter interviewing another robot by Vincent van Gogh”

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