Summary: Nowadays, having a good and positive online presence is essential for any company to succeed. With the high-speed information transfer via social media and other online channels, any company can be brought to ruin just by destroying their good reputation. That’s why companies are constantly in need to employ good public relation (PR) strategies in order to stay ahead in their game. This is where Muck Rack becomes important, as it provides companies with the necessary PR software that they need to enhance their public relations and boost their online reputation.
Building a good reputation is one of the most important things a company needs to do in order to succeed in their business. No matter what industry you are in, if you want to keep your customers loyal to your business, you need to know how to keep a good reputation for your company. This is because having a good reputation can make it easier for your business to attract more customers as well as retain them.
Nowadays, with the prominent social media platforms and various channels in which the people can broadcast or share with others about your products and services, it is important to maintain a good quality of what you are offering to your customers. This is because any news, whether good or bad, can get spread easily on the internet, and it can affect your business reputation instantly. This is why keeping a good relationship with your customers is a very important thing to do, making sure that your customers feel satisfied with the products and services that they have purchased from your company.
One of the best ways for your company to keep a good relationship with your customers is to have a good public relation strategy for your business. With a good PR software, everything can be done automatically, from finding good journalists for your business to monitoring the news related to your business. Muck Rack is the software that you need to get things done when it comes to building a good public relation for your company. We have interviewed Emma from Muck Rack to let us know about this PR software and what it can do for your business.
The Little Background History of Muck Rack
The start of Muck Rack as a company has many things to do with Twitter in its early stage. Back when it was still called twttr.com, the CEO of Muck Rack (Greg Galant) was one of the few people who used this social media platform for the first time. Back then, Twitter was still not a thing, but the CEO of Muck Rack saw something big happening on this new social media platform. He found out that Twitter can be a strong social media platform that has the power to make any news viral in a short period.
On top of that, the first few people (the pioneers) who used this platform for the first time were mostly journalists that were trying to get the news about various things spread over the internet. Back then, Twitter was the platform where journalists from various places joined together to share various news that they have. Greg Galant paid attention to this fact, and it sparked an idea in his mind to create Muck Rack, the company that provides PR software for businesses to help them find the right journalists for their public relation jobs. Emma explained the history of Muck Rack as a company in this way,
“Our co-founders were early pioneers on Twitter. Our CEO, Greg Galant, signed up for Twitter back before Twitter could afford the vowels when it was just “twttr.com.” and ended up with @Gregory
Greg saw that there was great stuff happening on Twitter, but it was hard to know what was worth paying attention to. That led to the idea for the Shorty Awards, the first award show that let anyone vote with a tweet and it went viral within 24 hours becoming the top trending term on Twitter.
What really struck Greg was that journalists were on social before anyone else – using it to figure out who to write about, find sources and to promote their stories. And yet, there was no way to find all the journalists on social. We launched Muck Rack originally in 2009 as a site where you could see all the journalists in one place and categorize by what publication they wrote for. It became extremely popular with journalists and we quickly had over 10,000 journalists sign up and countless media organizations reach out to get their journalists listed.”
The Formation of Muck Rack as a PR Software Platform
When the idea of helping businesses find PR journalists for their companies finally found its way to its realization, this is where the first version of Muck Rack was released to the public. At first, it was just a simple free tool that helped businesses find the right journalists for their PR jobs using Twitter as the main platform of reference. It was used as a free tool for several years by various PR departments from various businesses, and at the time, the feedback was excellent.
Thus, in the year 2011, Muck Rack was finally got released for real; this time as a full platform that helps companies find the right PR journalists for their business. This platform has helped many companies ever since. It is the platform that continues on growing even until today, being used by big companies around the world. It now has various features that help smoothen the PR work for these companies. Emma further explained about the history of Muck Rack,
“Over the next few years, many PR people told us that it was a great tool to figure out which journalists to pitch. We realized we can give this great free service to journalists and also develop a platform for the PR people to figure out who’s the right journalists to pitch and then provide a whole software platform do to better PR following that.
In 2011, we relaunched it as a full platform for PR folks to find the right journalists as well as, monitor the news, build reports, pitch the media, collaborate and more. We’ve been growing quick since then and are proud to have customers including Under Armour, Taco Bell, Pfizer, Golin, Chobani and Penguin Random.”
Some Common Challenges Faced by Businesses When It Comes to Online PR
When it comes to online PR or communications, businesses face different challenges when compared to the situation in the past. In the past, you might be able to find some good journalists, and they might be willing to cooperate most of the time. Nowadays, the good journalists are becoming scarce because their voices are outnumbered by the voices of the people crowding the social media platforms. This makes it harder for businesses to find them and reach out to them.
Even though, say, you might be able to find some good journalists, chances are they have already received some similar offers made by other PR professionals out there. So, your offer might not be accepted by them for some reasons. This also means that it would be quite difficult for you to connect with them on a long-term basis. Aside from that, there are other challenges that businesses need to face on a regular basis regarding their online public relations or communications. Emma explained about these challenges in detail,
“The media landscape has changed drastically over the past decade. Today, the definition of journalism is in flux and PR pros outnumber journalists 6 to 1. That means the ever-decreasing number of PR pros trying to reach (i.e. the media) is being bombarded with pitches, decreasing the chances of cutting through the noise. And unfortunately, because many pitches aren’t customized for a specific writer, some journalists reject 95 percent of the pitches they receive on a weekly basis — making PR pros jobs increasingly difficult.
Aside from making an impact with the media, many PR pros and teams face challenges with inefficiency. Some of these costs include, manual tasks and data entry, inaccurate information and poorly target distribution, imprecise or cumbersome measurement and difficulty collaborating and managing relationships.”
How Journalists Can Use Muck Rack for Their PR Advantage
Muck Rack is a PR software that is not only designed for businesses to help them connect with the right journalists for their public relation strategy, but it is also designed to help journalists connect with the companies that they prefer. This software allows journalists to add profiles and portfolio so that they can present the list of their past work to their potential partners. They can also add various information as they prefer and let the companies know how they would like to be pitched.
Not only that, the journalist profile information on Muck Rack also makes it easy for the journalists to browse all the work that they have done, no matter where they have published them. It also makes it easy for the companies to see all the work of their potential PR partners in a single dashboard. Moreover, the journalist profile page can be updated automatically as they publish more news in various online channels. Emma explained about the advantage that the journalists can get from using Muck Rack,
“Muck Rack is also the solution of choice for journalists, who use their free, automatically updated portfolios to showcase their work and to provide information about what stories they’re looking for, their personal interests and how they prefer to be pitched.
Muck Rack’s technology and editorial team work behind the scenes to automatically create and update their page for them, journalists don’t have to lift a finger to maintain a current and professionally designed online portfolio of everything they’ve written, regardless of where it’s been published. Their clips, outlets and social media profiles are automatically compiled and regularly updated, providing one-stop access to all of their active links. With full text backups and our lightning fast text search, it’s never been easier to browse their entire body of work.”
How Muck Rack Helps Companies Reach Out to Media Outlets and Influencers
Muck Rack is a PR software platform that allows journalists and companies network with each other, get connected, and collaborate with each other as a team. It is very easy for any companies to reach out to the relevant journalists for their PR jobs, and it is also the same with the journalists. Journalists can easily check which companies need their PR jobs done from among hundreds of PR teams from various big companies.
Not only providing the basic social media-type of communication tools, Muck Rack also provides various useful features that allow companies to reach out to various media outlets and influencers from within the platform itself. So, businesses don’t need to use any other platform or do it manually with the media outlets or influencers that they want to reach out for their PR communications. To conclude our interview, Emma explained about how companies can reach out media outlets and influencers easily using this platform,
“Muck Rack is a public relations software dedicated to helping journalists and PR pros do their jobs more effectively. Hundreds of communications teams at Fortune 500 brands, agencies and fast-growing startups use Muck Rack to efficiently find and pitch relevant journalists, monitor coverage across media outlets and blogs, social media, broadcast and radio, prove the impact of their work and collaborate better as a team.
With our intuitive yet powerful media search engine, teams can quickly discover information on what journalists are sharing on social media, search the full text of articles they’ve written and links they’ve shared, and watch or listen to TV or radio segments they’re featured in. This makes it super simple to create media lists with the most relevant journalists for any given campaign that they are working on or topic that they’re searching for.
Forget having to juggle spreadsheets, keep up with reporter moves and changes, or check and recheck the accuracy of your data. Muck Rack’s all-in-one PR platform gives you an easy-to-use single source for database and research, pitching, collaboration and reporting.”