If you work for a large PR agency, chances are your clients’ budgets allow you to subscribe to the trade publications relevant to their industries. (I’m referring of course to that pile of magazines sitting on your desk with the routing slip that you’re supposed to have passed on weeks ago.) If you work for a small shop or are an independent, you probably can’t afford the high cost of subscribing to trade magazines and are often scrambling to find good, timely information.

In either case, your clients expect you to not only know PR; they expect you to know their business by becoming subject matter experts. Now I ask you, who has time in between pitch calls to read lengthy articles on everything from power tools to cancer breakthroughs? That’s right, no one. And I’m here to tell you, you don’t have to.

Wield the Web
By harnessing the power of the Internet, you can have the latest news that is important to your client come right to your Inbox. It’s timely, usually free and easily shared. Sound too good to be true? It’s not.

Your clients want trends, growth and forecast statistics and they want you to be one step ahead of the competition. The best part about it is, you can get ahead of your clients by sending them articles of interest and importance and they’ll think you do nothing all day but think about them. I’ve gathered some of my favorite Web services that will use the keywords you enter and pull relevant stories for just about every industry and then send them to you via e-mail.

It’s Practically Free

Google (http://news.google.com/) – Google can be a daunting site if you don’t define your search parameters. The mega search engine offers a free News Alerts service that you can opt to have delivered once a day or as it happens. You’ll have to create one for each topic you are interested in, but the search terms are included in the subject line of the emails you’ll receive so there’s no mistaking the topic of the story. You’ll receive a link to the story online as well as the first sentence from the story that contains your search term.

Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com/) – Do you Yahoo!? If you don’t, you should. Yahoo! Also offers a free News Alerts service that you can elect to receive via Yahoo! Messenger, email, text messaging on your PC, phone or PDA. You can even choose to only monitor certain media outlets, wires or Websites. One of the nice things about Yahoo! is that they include press releases from corporations so you’ll know instantly if a client’s competitor has issued some big news.

TracerLock (http://www.tracerlock.com/) – TracerLock can monitor search engines, Usenet groups and more and notify you by e-mail when a new instance of a search term is found. It can cost as little as $4 per month and in addition to its standard fairly extensive database of sites, you can enter up to 20 URLs that you want TracerLock to monitor for you. A cool feature of this service is that your past search results are archived and retained online for future access.
A few other sites that offer free news alerts are NewsMax (www.newsmax.com) that provides a free, email news alert, ZDNet (http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/html/z/alerts.html) which offers daily summaries or instantaneous alerts when IT news happens. The key is to find the one that best fits your needs based on the frequency and method of delivery.

Some Services are Not So Free

If you already subscribe to a service to a news distribution or media database service, chances are you have access to media monitoring that may or may not be included in your subscription fee. For example, PRNewswire offers eWatch (http://www.ewatch.com/), Bacon’s offers MediaSource Monitoring Module (www.bacons.com), Vocus customers have the option of having stories from Google News placed directly into their system and U.S. Newswire (http://www.usnewswire.com/) offers News Monitoring and Research Services. Many of these services are under the guise of “media monitoring” for stories that YOU have placed. Be sure that if what you want are stories about the industry and competitors, that you get just that.

Sharing is Caring
Once you’ve set-up your free news alerts and your inbox starts filling up with great information, don’t just sit back and watch your email count rise. Do something with your new found wealth of knowledge and decide how and when you are going to share this information with your client. And don’t forget that the world is constantly changing so be sure to change your search terms as old ones become irrelevant and new ones emerge. Having the news come to you and then sharing it with your clients is the perfect way to show them that understanding their business is your business.

By Wendy Goldman Scherer
Wendy Goldman Scherer is President of Scherer Cybrarian, is a secondary research firm, providing information and analysis to companies, investors and individuals. Anything from industry profiles and competitive overviews and detailed information about companies to fact finding and statistical details. For more information or to discuss your information needs, call 443-535-0642 or email research@wscherer.com.