Happy April, Meltwater Community!
I am excited to add to your regularly scheduled programing, a 3-part post for using Meltwater | Media Relations and Monitor to identify and follow people of interest - those journalists or other media contacts writing about topics germane to you and your organization.
Discovering and following relevant journalists and other media contacts is easy with Meltwater, but can be done in a variety of ways. Our three areas of focus this week will be the following:
- Using Media Relations Search to perform keyword and filter searches on contacts ‘writing about’ our topic of interest
- Using PR Assistant’s AI-powered ‘Suggested journalists’ feature as a complimentary search method
- Powering Monitor with Media Lists to keep abreast of people of interest
Creating a media list for authors of interest who are covering a specific beat or topic within that beat is easy. Following them to stay up to date on their activity is even easier. Let’s get started!
Using Media Relations Search to perform keyword and filter searches on contacts ‘writing about’ our topic of interest
Start by navigating to Media Relations | Search. When you’re there, you’ll have the option to search for contacts or sources. Today, it is possible only to add contacts to Media Lists. In the coming months, we will make it possible to add sources to media lists.
Let’s imagine we’re working at Boeing, and we’re looking to shape the conversation around consumer transportation safety and manufacturing best practices.
We could start with performing a ‘writing about’ search for Boeing:
Which for the last 14 days produces 2.1k results:
These results include everyone in the Meltwater media database that in the past 14 days has been attributed, in content, to use the keyword ‘Boeing.’
Note: that if we cannot detect an author name or do not have an author in our system, those counts are not included.
At this stage, we are probably not being specific enough. We could start adding people to lists now, but we can also get a little more targeted. We may choose to use the ‘beats’ and ‘location’ filters to narrow down to the specific beats, like ‘Aviation safety’ or ‘Aircraft.’ There are relevant child beats in ‘Government & Politics,’ ‘Travel & Tourism,’ ‘Manufacturing,’ and even ‘Legal.’
Even with the beat or location filters applied, we can continue to narrow down on keywords that are relevant to us, like ‘Boeing,’ ‘Safety,’ and ‘Manufacturing.’ If we detect a beat in your query, we’ll suggest adding the beat filter automatically - or, you can just use the keyword.
In this case, the difference in results is 8 versus about 200. This is because there are less people who are regularly writing about Manufacturing than those who are found to use the keyword in conjunction with the other keywords (Boeing and safety).
In this case, we have sufficiently narrowed down the results. But in the event that we have a larger quantity of applicable results, we might choose to review the ‘Relevant articles’ for the contact by clicking the button on their card:
All this being said, we can iterate on this procedure and add the most relevant journalists to my media lists for performing outreach and sending pitches.
Tomorrow, we will continue our discussion by detailing how we may use PR Assistant’s AI-powered ‘Suggested journalists’ feature as a complimentary search method.
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Until then, stay smart and sharp 
Blake Corman
Product Team
Have problems, ideas or feedback? Schedule time on my calendar: