Here at ReadWriteWeb, like other major blogs, we get a ton of email tips everyday from entrepreneurs, PR companies and the general public suggesting story ideas and requesting product reviews.
Surprisingly, considering the size of our site and the pervasiveness of spam in general, most of these emails are quite interesting and useful. Some of them, however, appear to be blasted out to a list of seemingly random blogs with little forethought, or worse, a political screed written in all caps.
For small businesses and startups especially, getting the word out to relevant media outlets, while important, can be a time-consuming task that competes with each day’s list of to-do’s.
So how can businesses streamline their media outreach? One answer is MediaSync, a service from Web marketing firm mBlast. MediaSync is a free database of media contacts that enables you to find individual journalists and bloggers based on the topics they tend to cover and the outlets they write for.
For example, a search for “social media” will return a list of bloggers for Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm, CNET and others.
Each writer has a profile containing basic contact info, a brief biography, links to their social networking profiles, as well as data about the topics and beats they cover.
MediaSync currently boasts 521,899 media contacts in its database, and that number is sure to be growing on a regular basis.
The database is evidently a work in progress, as not all media contact profiles are populated, including those of a few high-profile bloggers and journalists. Nonetheless, MediaSync remains a good way to do some initial research into which media professionals might be most receptive to a given request for coverage.
Most tech and business bloggers see a ton of emails fly across their desktop and mobile phones each day, so targeting the right ones might improve your message’s chances of getting read and, if you’re truly onto something, acted upon.
