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

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

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

Search is where you can:

Contacts is where you can:

Outreach is where you can:

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:

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.

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

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.

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:

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Learn more about using Monitor and powering its streams with Media & Author Lists.

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.

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.

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).

Outreach is where you can distribute press releases or pitch those in media lists. Here, you can customize outreach distribution templates, create, schedule, and send outreach distributions, and better understand the performance of given distributions. Outreach offers data insights to help you and your team understand and improve your earned media strategy.

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:

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

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.

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:

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.

💡 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.