Kirill is founder and CEO of White Label PR, a global PR agency within the game industry. He is an expert in crisis communication and brand strategy.
PR ten years ago versus now is something completely different. While it still has its challenges, we have many more tools to increase the efficiency and speed of our work.
PR technology offers many solutions, especially now that artificial intelligence (AI) is all the rage and is quickly being integrated into all kinds of products on the market. For example, the recent leap in natural language processing is incredibly helpful to those who work with text, including PR and marketing specialists.
However, digital services for public relations, marketing and advertising are not just about writing better and faster. They can also help solve the chaos that communication-related work often brings by organizing email inboxes, scheduling meetings, and helping deliver messages to a wider audience with precision and impact. Let’s take a closer look at the latest technology advancements that can help you extend your reach.
Tools for making copies
At the moment, creating texts for emails and social media posts are some of the most popular uses of AI besides image generation. There are already countless AI tools that can be used with different approaches.
ChatGPT, the most hyped of such services, is efficient at helping speed up the research process, brainstorm ideas, and overcome writer’s block. You can also go there for editing tips, SEO ideas or rewriting your text for a specific target group.
However, ChatGPT is not the only software worth trying. There are many other AI products for text generation, and I find some are better suited to smaller purposes. Applications such as Jasper AI, Rapide.ly and Copy.ai contain many templates so that you can more accurately create a business email, social media post or marketing copy.
There are also a ton of AI tools streamlined to help you find synonyms and paraphrase sentences to make your writing livelier and less monotonous. You can start exploring this category with applications such as Wordune, Quillbot, and Paraphrasingtool.ai.
If you have the resources, I recommend combining a number of AI tools to get better results. For example, you can combine ChatGPT with Paraphraser. This mix can help you put together a higher quality piece of text faster, as ChatGPT alone tends to use a limited vocabulary and is often quite repetitive in a text. If you also use Paraphraser, you can spend much less time editing and searching for synonyms.
Manage emails and meetings
These days it’s getting harder and harder to get through the mess of our inboxes. Even if you ignore the spam, you can get frustrated trying to prioritize emails and decide which ones are more urgent.
Fortunately, these issues are addressed by a number of products. For example, there is SaneBox. It automatically sorts all emails into folders, hides people and organizations you don’t want to communicate with, and offers a deep clean feature to remove all emails you don’t need to keep.
A feature that many email management products include is to help you follow up, something that PR people often have to do. Now it can also be automated with services like Followup, Calendly, and Polymail. You can schedule your addresses to be reached or set a reminder to reply to someone’s email.
In addition, Polymail assists its users in scheduling meetings as they are often arranged through email. Similar functionality can be found in Boomerang, a product designed specifically for Gmail users.
Track emails
If you’re even more of an email nerd, the tech world now offers analytic tools to get the most out of your electronic correspondence. For example, there is a service aptly named EmailAnalytics. It’s marketed to salespeople, but those of us in PR also need to know how well our emails perform.
Other services in this niche are Yesware, Bananatag and Mailtag. They help to get data on how your addresses interact with your emails. It gives you the necessary food for thought that you can use to brainstorm and improve your press releases and communication with journalists. It can also enable you to measure the effectiveness of a PR campaign in a new way.
Personally, I use the data to list the most engaged media contacts to make sure I follow them on Twitter and keep up on the topics they cover.
Transcribe audio
I probably wouldn’t use it for important interviews that are meant to be published, since AI transcription isn’t quite as accurate yet. Nevertheless, I find it a very efficient tool for taking notes during a meeting or from a recording.
It means you can focus on the conversation without having to multitask. I think this is exactly what a good strategic session or business discussion requires, as I often find taking notes in the communication process a distraction.
Tools like Speak AI, Trint, Otter, and Descript can turn your audios and videos into text quite quickly. In addition, some of these services are able to translate from one language to another, which can be especially useful within international teams.
To use Otter as an example, the company has a bot powered by Google Meet that can join any conversation you schedule and include a full transcript with timestamps and a neat to-do list. I like to download lectures and podcasts from YouTube, upload it to Otter and have a searchable transcript handy. Alternatively, Eightify can provide ChatGTP powered summaries for YouTube videos from within the browser.
To succeed in the business world, communication cannot be introverted. Rather, it should reach your target audience, as well as your current and future partners and employees. Today I discovered that there is a wide arsenal of technological tools that can help and improve our communication. These digital services can turn tasks into no-brainers and give us more room to be creative and inventive.
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Janice has been with businesskinda for 5 years, writing copy for client websites, blog posts, EDMs and other mediums to engage readers and encourage action. By collaborating with clients, our SEO manager and the wider businesskinda team, Janice seeks to understand an audience before creating memorable, persuasive copy.