Current Insights in Media Measurement
PR Blogs: Rich Resource for Research
PR Media Monitoring Grants Program Expands
Author's Query: Interactive Textbook of Public Relations
CyberAlert Announces New High Speed News Monitoring Service

    Media measurement is emerging as one of today's hotter topics in public relations and marketing.
    In "The Measurement Standard", Katie Delahaye Paine analyzes "How to Measure Relations with Opinion Leaders", including thought leaders and influencers in academia, government, and business who are frequently quoted in the media. The report includes two short case studies.
    With the Internet rapidly expanding as a primary media source for news, especially among opinion leaders, the Institute of Public Relations (IPR) has published a "Primer in Internet Audience Measurement" by Bruce Jeffries-Fox who examines methods and metrics to measure media exposure on the Internet.
    An IPR slide presentation by Donna Coletti of Texas Instruments entitled "How to Measure PR's Contribution to Corporate Objectives" emphasizes the need to correlate pr metrics to business objectives and results.

   While the traditional trade press for PR has remained more or less stagnant over the past few years, online PR publications and blogs have proliferated.
    Blogs (short for Web logs) are an online medium that enables independent authors to easily publish their thoughts, usually with a mechanism for reader response. Originally intended as personal journals, most blogs are now designed as information sources within a specific field of interest.
    There are now upwards of 70 e-mail newsletters, online publications and blogs centered on public relations, mostly authored by journalists or PR professionals to impart their thoughts, examine issues, espouse causes, compile article digests, and share ideas. (See linked list of selected PR blogs at right.)
    While some PR blogs are little more than sophomoric ramblings and rantings, many provide a rich resource of substantive insights and ideas, making worthy additions to the PR literature and often covering issues ignored by traditional PR publications in print. Many PR blogs also provide links to other noteworthy articles on PR and marketing, enabling PR professionals to quickly research specific subjects.
    Some of the better online PR and marketing publications have more "visits" each month than the paid circulation of some PR newsletters in print, suggesting that the online publications are gaining readership and influence.
    To find the best blogs in other subject areas including technology, journalism, politics and many other subjects, it's best to use a specialized blog search engine such as Kinja (www.kinja.com), Technorati (www.technorati.com), Bloglines (www.bloglines.com), Blogwise (www.blogwise.com), or Feedster (www.feedster.com). Yahoo has a directory of blog directories.
    Blogs are published using software that allows individuals with little or no technical background to update and maintain the journal. Blog software applications include Blogger (www.blogger.com) from Pyra Labs, Moveable Type (www.movabletype.org), and Greymatter (www.noahgrey.com/greysoft/) which is open source software. A detailed list is available on Yahoo.
    Nine of 10 PR professionals have never visited a blog. A 60-minute tour of PR blogs can prove enlightening about the value and emerging power of new media publishers.
    Other articles of interest on corporate blogging:
    It's a Blog World After All, Fast Company 04/04
    Blog-Bleary? Try a Blog, New York Times 04/01/04
    Blogging Thoughts:  Personal Publication as an Online Research Tool Torill Mortensen & Jill Walker.  Long and deep academic article with superb bibliography.

PR Machine
PR Opinions
Strategic Public Relations
Marketing Profs
Seth Godin's Blog
What's Next (B.L. Ochman)
Engage (Greg Brooks)
Canuck Flack
Corporate PR
PressThink (NYU)
EMM-ESS (Marc Snyder)
Marketing Vox PR
PR Studies (UK-Leeds)
PR Watch Spin
Viral Marketing Blog
    ...and these links will lead you to many more.

    PR grants for media monitoring have been awarded to 16 not-for-profit organizations in the U.S. and Canada by CyberAlert, Inc. (www.cyberalert.com), the media monitoring and press clipping service. Selected from over 500 grant applications, grant recipients included Alzheimer's Foundation of America, American Association of Poison Control Centers, Lutheran World Relief, and Youth Vote Coalition.
    Each grant consists of one year of media monitoring services. The retail value of the grants exceeded $45,000.
    The entire list of grant recipients can be seen at http://www.cyberalert.com/prgrants.html.
    CyberAlert has committed to awarding the PR grants annually and expanding the grants program. Applications will be accepted during the month of December and grants awarded in January. All not-for-profit organizations are eligible to apply.

    RushClips™, a new high speed news monitoring and press clipping service that automatically delivers today's news clips promptly throughout the business day, often within minutes of publication, from more than 3,500 online news sources was announced recently by CyberAlert, Inc. (www.cyberalert.com), the worldwide media monitoring service.
    The RushClips service also incorporates once-a-day overnight clip delivery from 10,000 additional news sources in 17 languages worldwide.
    Once delivered, the press clippings are stored in a "Digital Clip Book™", an exclusive service of CyberAlert that safely keeps clips in a central database accessed through a password-protected Web site. The digital clip storage enables RushClips subscribers to easily sort, search, distribute and manage news clips.
    RushClips is a subscription service.
     More information about RushClips is available at http://www.cyberalert.com/rushclips.html.