The ability to instantly get a seasonal idea of when people are interested in topics is hugely valuable, especially when that data challenges conventional wisdom.
The suggestions that Google make when you type in a search query give you a great, and sometimes scary, insight into the pysche of people searching online.
Being able to quickly get together lots of ideas for content using a tool like Ubersuggest, which captures those Google Suggestions, is a great place for a PR team to start brainstorming press release ideas.
IFTTT offers a visual data mash-up service. On a simple level it offers functionality like ‘if I publish a blog post, tweet it’, or ‘if I publish or upload a video to facebook, save it to dropbox’ but you can very easily set up more complex ‘recipes’ that sift through PR opportunities like #journorequest.
If you know the first and last name plus the domain of the person you’re hoping to outreach to, this can help you ‘guess’ their valid address. It uses Gravatar and can be a great way of finding people who either have a contact form on their site or you’ve found through LinkedIn.
FollowerWonk is a really powerful search engine based upon the biography information people provide through Twitter. At a base level it’ll allow you to search biographies on searches like “keyword journalist”.
The real value is in the advanced search functionality. E.g. you can see all of the people who use a company’s url in their bio, hopefully finding their employees
