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Get Started with Media Relations

Learn quickly how to perform media research and earn media placement with Meltwater.

Blake Corman avatar
Written by Blake Corman
Updated this week

This article will walk you through how to pitch, research, and manage media contacts in the Media Relations platform.

What does this article cover?


Getting Familiar with the Media Relations Module

There are six main areas of the Media Relations platform you could have access to.

Note: "My Contacts" is being replaced by "Media Lists" by August 20th, 2024

Let’s look at what you can do in each section:

Search for sources and contacts

Search is where you can:

Manage Contacts & Media Lists

The Media Lists pages are where you can:

We have an entire article on the extensive new features built entirely for managing, organizing, and understanding your media lists. You can review that article here: Media List Management.

Outreach

Outreach is where you can:

PR Assistant

Powered by OpenAI's ChatGPT API, PR Assistant takes drafts or even a few sentences and helps you get off the ground with your next pitch and PR campaign.

PR Assistant is where you can:

Newswires

Newswire is integrated into Meltwater, so you can distribute your release whenever you'd like (whether in real-time or scheduled) on your own without having to engage your account manager.

When you use Newswires, your press release is published via the wire, an electronic transmission service providing up-to-the-minute news stories to news desks and journalists. With over 100+ newslines, you obtain targeted, guaranteed coverage in a particular geography or beat. Watch the tutorial here.

Note: Newswires is an additional paid offering; if you don't see it, speak to your account manager.


Finding Media Opportunities

It's essential to research and vet journalists for media outreach. You can do this in the Meltwater platform in four areas:

  • Media Relations Search

  • Media Relations PR Assistant

  • Within Monitor or

  • Explore

To find, vet, and reach out to relevant journalists and publications, learn How to do Media Research in Meltwater to Discover Relevant People and Sources.


Searching for Journalists and Sources

Search is where you can find journalists and sources with ease. Several filtering capabilities and actions within the search result stream make it easy to perform media research and add people of interest to lists.

To use Search:

  1. Go to Media Relations via the left-hand side navigation bar

  2. Select Search from the top tabs

  3. Via the 'I'm looking for' option, select either contacts or sources

  4. Use the search bar to look for journalists by name or a topic they write about.

  5. Choose "All Contacts named" or "All Contacts writing about" from the dropdown menu, depending on your search.

The results provide detailed information on the people or sources that match your search. It is possible to see the name, profile type, title, location, source, beats, lists, and social media profiles for each result.

Adding Journalists to Media Lists

  1. Perform your search

  2. For people of interest, click the checkbox next to their name

  3. For your selection, click 'Add to list' in the aqua actions bar at the top of the results stream.

You can review the source or journalist profiles to get more information on the results.

Be sure to check out the Media Lists pages for extensive features that help you organize, manage, understand and compare media lists and contacts.

Reviewing Journalists

  1. Click the journalist's name in the results to open their profile preview.

  2. Review their profile details, from beats, recent articles, and social media to contact information.

  3. Optionally, open the full journalist profile to personalize the profile or engage via email integration.

Reviewing Sources

  1. Click the name of the source in the results to open their profile

  2. Review source details from Beats, recent articles, people on staff, and contact information.

Possibly Sensitive Content warns you if the content populating in your journalists and source searches might not be suitable. Sensitive content can be automatically blurred. To expose the content, click Show or click the article. To opt out of this, please contact your Meltwater contact.


Following People of Interest

Media Lists

Media Lists include editorial authors, whereas Author Lists (created in Explore) contain social authors on X, formerly Twitter. These lists make it simple to track and categorize individuals of interest for your campaigns. Learn how to create and organize Media Lists.

When your campaign media lists are ready, you'll head to Outreach to send a press release or pitch.

Reviewing Content from Media Lists

You can create Monitor Streams to track mentions from key individuals on news and social. This feature enables you to review content shared and published by people important to you and your organization. Slice and dice by date, save your dashboard as a View, and never miss a mention.

Journalist and Source Profiles

Journalist and source profiles are found within Media Relations to provide context and more details about people or sources in the platform.

To navigate to a journalist's profile, click on the journalist's name in a content stream. For a source profile, click on the source name. The primary tabs are the overview and interactions tabs.

Meltwater uses a combination of automated and human-mediated systems to maintain information on journalists. However, if you have relevant information, you can personalize any journalist's profile with email addresses, phone numbers, and more - such personalizations are only visible to you and your team.

Finally, importing or creating profiles can add your journalists to Meltwater.

Follow People and Sources of Interest using Monitor

One of the great features in Monitor is the ability to power its streams of content with Media Lists and Author Lists. Media Lists contain editorial authors, whereas Author Lists (which can be made in Explore) contain social authors on X. By powering streams in Monitor with these lists, you can rest assured that you won't miss content published by people that are important to you and your organization.

In the above fictitious illustration, we can see that two streams are in this view. The one on the left is powered by a Media List composed of electric vehicle journalists, whereas the one on the right is for an Author List containing X authors that write on user experience and design.

What's more is that we can change the date range to since last viewed, which will make sure each time we return to our saved view, we only see content that has appeared since the last time we were here.

Finally, we can save our view from the top left of the toolbar. We just need to give it a relevant name, and voila!

The since last viewed feature is user-specific, which means that if there are other users on your account, they have a separate time range if they visited a saved view at a different point in time.


Managing Relationships

Shared Inbox & Email Integration

By efficiently recording and classifying your interactions with journalists, your PR rolodex becomes more powerful. That's why we built an email integration within Media Relations, so you can reach out and respond to people in Meltwater directly within the platform.

Integrating an email account

1. Navigate to Account, then Email Integration in the left-hand navigation bar.

Please note: We use a service called Nylas to sync emails into Meltwater, so you will be prompted to allow Nylas access as part of the authentication and connection process. Email Integration in Media Relations is supported for the following email providers: Google and Microsoft.

2. Select Connect your email today!

3. Select Add account

4. Confirm the Privacy Policy.

5. Type in your email and follow the prompts to connect your email as outlined in the gif below:

6. Your email account is now set up to use email integration

In Meltwater, your team can integrate as many email accounts as you want. Email integration differs from Outreach, as it allows you to engage with journalists directly from your email account within Meltwater. Once integrated, you can easily keep tabs on interactions with journalists in Meltwater by using the interactions tab on the journalists' profiles. You can also email directly from your email account on the profile itself.


Managing Campaigns and Issues

Success in PR is measured by engagement, not distribution. That's why targeting relevant people and personalizing your pitches is essential. Our data indicates that doing so improves open rates and conversion rates (securing the story).

Media Relations Outreach

Using Outreach:

Before sending a release, ensure you have saved the journalists you'd like to contact within a media list.

Follow the steps outlined below on how to send a press release:

  1. Go to Media Relations from the left-hand side navigation bar

  2. Select Outreach

  3. Select Create outreach via the purple Action button (if you do not see this, check your user settings to make sure you're set up as an administrator)

    If you receive a Set Up Email pop-up, you must first add your email address as an approved sender before composing your release. Learn more in this article here.

  4. Select your Template. The dropdown list will include templates your team has previously saved; learn more about saving outreach templates below.

  5. Select your email sender. If your desired sending address isn't listed, refer to the 'Set Up Email' details above.

  6. Add your media lists or other recipients. This can be done via the dropdown list on the side or by typing in the name. You can also add email addresses directly.

  7. Format your release. We recommend writing this in a Word document and then copying/pasting it into this window. You can even duplicate this release later to use the same formatting again for future releases.

  8. Send yourself a preview.

  9. Once you've completed editing the release, follow the distribution buttons in the bottom right to either Send later by selecting a schedule date and time or Send now.

Note: If you'd like assistance formatting your press release template or design, please contact our team via Live Chat.


Crafting Effective Pitches

The Importance of Targeting

Both editors and journalists place great importance on receiving relevant content that demonstrates a personal connection. Mass-sending a generic press release to hundreds is less effective than tailored communications. Our data strongly supports the effectiveness of this personalized approach.

PR Assistant

With the help of artificial intelligence, PR Assistant can take draft press releases and generate a corresponding email pitch in seconds (it will also give you an excellent press release). Not only this but thanks to the breadth of content to which Meltwater has access, it can recommend journalists based on the unique context of your writing.

Using PR Assistant:

  1. Navigate to the Media Relations tab in the left-hand navigation bar. Select “PR Assistant”

  2. Click the text box and enter your key messages or a first draft. Select the format option to apply a pitch or a press release format.

  3. Next, you can modify the length from the options “Short, Medium, and Long,” add or edit quotes, and attribute them to a named person. Though a quote is not required to build the pitch or press release, we recommend you use quotes if you have them.

  4. While the output language text will reflect your application language, you can select from 14 languages.

  5. The text output will appear on the right side when you select Generate.

  6. Next, customize further by clicking into the text block. You can also click Regenerate at the bottom of the text block before copying the draft text. Remember, the PR Assistant’s accuracy is not guaranteed. Similar to ChatGPT, this is meant to be a drafting tool - it is not meant to provide a final version. You should review and fact-check any outputs, just like you would with a junior staffer.

  7. After it gives you a draft, edit it to fit your personal voice and double-check for inaccurate information.

  8. Additionally, you may click on the Suggested journalists tab in order to see those journalists that are a good fit for your generated pitch or press release.

  9. Easily identify relevant people to vet and pitch from this view. Click their names to see a preview of their journalist profile. Additionally, click the 'Relevant articles' button to see the unique articles that made us think they're a good fit for you.


How to reach out for help:

We recommend taking our Media Relations course; customers who complete training double their usage and clicks within our products.

We also recommend interacting with our AI-powered chatbot, Mel. Mel is powered by our help center content and programmed to answer frequently asked questions.

To interact with Mel, you can open the chatbot window in the bottom right-hand side of Meltwater, click on messages, and start a chat. If you find that Mel could be more helpful, just ask to speak with a support team member.


Other resources


💡 Tip

Need more help? Feel free to reach out to us via Live Chat or check out our Customer Community.

Find answers and get help from Meltwater Support and Community Experts.


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