The Good, The Bad, The Spin

A while back I touted the virtues of Gmail for public relations uses. To recap, Gmail offers the ability to tag (label) messages with multiple tags. This, as opposed to MS Outlook which uses folders, allows PR pros to apply multiple labels to their emails. In short, the ability to store and retrieve messages by keywords allows us to better manage our online conversations. Also, other email accounts can be forwarded to Gmail without others knowing you’re using Gmail as your primary email interface.

Google offers far more than just Gmail. There are four other important features Google offers that give us increased potential to enhance our effectiveness for public relations.

1. Google News Alerts are a critical tool for every PR person who monitors news coverage. News Alerts have basic, important features, and you can easily get into your inbox real-time, daily or weekly links to news related to search terms of your choice. The drawback is of course that Google News Alerts will only send you news that appears in Google News. This is a mixed blessing. By searching for specific terms, words or phrases, you can apply a news alert to be sent to your email, but if specific news outlets are not submitting to Google News, you may miss some critcal coverage; for example, niche and speciality publications (or in my case, rural Nevada newspapers). It’s best to also continue monitoring news by specific media outlets in addition to adding regular news alerts to your media monitoring. Google News also allows for Blog Alerts, which function in the exact same way as news. A caveat: choosing search terms may take some practice. You will notice which terms work and which do not. Experiment.
2. Google Docs & Spreadsheets allow for easy sharing of documents (e.g., press release drafts) online. You can set up permissions for specific people to view/edit your documents. The benefit of this is self explanatory. One drawback is saving Google Docs as Word documents, wherein the formatting gets funky in the translation. The Google Docs & Spreadsheets interface also takes some getting used to and pales in comparison to the feature-rich Microsoft Word. But for developing online access to share with clients and so on, Google Docs & Spreadsheets is an easy and inexpensive way to go. Simply, it allows for remote access to files. (The draft of this post was saved as a Google document to be edited later on my laptop.)
3. Google Reader is about as important as Google News Alerts, and it allows the monitoring of Web content in real time in a central location—your Google Reader interface, or on your iGoogle page as explained below. The Reader lets you to create a personalized list of RSS feeds. I primarily track other blogs of interest, as well as niche media outlets. Using Reader is invaluable and much of my blog content, or ideas for content, comes from items that show up in my Reader.
4. Google’s new iGoogle allows you to customize your Web interface, essentially putting all of the above in one place. I use iGoogle as my default homepage on my Internet browsers at work, home and on my laptop (iGoogle also works on my Motorola Q). iGoogle allows you to customize your screen ‘gadgets,’ or mini windows within your larger screen window, for easy retrieval. (Click the thumbnail image above for a full-size view of the iGoogle page). Tabs also allow you to create multiple screen interfaces to quickly gain access to needed information. For example, my default homepage has five tabs: Home, Local News, National News, Design and Science News. Clicking on each give me my customized gadgets under each category. Clicking on Science News, I get my latest Science Friday links, with this as the top one—yesterday’s Science Friday podcast on NPR: NASA Troubles - SciFri Podcast - 2007072711. Play with iGoogle, and you will see what I mean as far as customizability. It’s suitable for multiple interests: personal, work related and so on. My “Home” gadgets include this blog’s posts, driving directions, a dictionary/thesaurus, the free CallWave Text Messaging gadget, local weather and my Google Reader gadget. From just my default homepage, I can get access to 90 percent of what I need on a regular basis.

[Disclaimer: this post is intended to provide advice on using Google for public relations productivity, not expert user advice, which others are far better suited to provide. Also, though I use Google ads on this blog, my recommendations for using Google come from personal experience. I am not getting paid to recommend Google's services. I welcome feedback on other online tools for public relations use and will readily recommend those found useful, especially if those services are free.] 

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 29th, 2007 at 2:15 pm and is filed under gmail, google, press releases, productivity, public relations, science, web 2.0, web sites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.