Kristien Vermoesen 
Web Summit 2015 PR tools and apps
The Mustr team attended the Web Summit in Dublin this year – the place to be for ambitious start-ups to present their work to the world. We talked to a lot of colleagues and discovered how tools are becoming ever more customizable, easier to use and… cheaper. Here is our selection of brand new start-up PR tools and apps that PR pro’s can use to innovate and optimize their PR practice. Have fun discovering them and don’t hesitate to send your feedback to the entrepreneurs behind them – I’m sure they will appreciate.
1. Newscatching: Personalized newsfeed from Bloomberg to Reuters
Newstag, a Swedish start-up with offices in Stockholm, Singapore and Cairo, offers its users a personalized video stream of news items that are relevant to their brand or business and can be shared online. You can tag news items and use the tags of others to select the most pertinent footage from AP, Reuters, AFP, Bloomberg, and many others. The feature ‘all angles of a story’ enables you to discover how people around the globe look (differently) at current affairs such as #RussianPlaneCrashSinai or #TurkeyElections.
2. Live streaming press conferences: all you need is your smartphone
I discovered two live streaming tools that might be interesting for livestreaming press conferences. Both offer extreme ease of use: the only thing you need is your smartphone to film the conference and their app to broadcast. Onlive.tv, a Polish start-up, offers you the choice to limit access to your footage to journalists only, or to publish it for all to see. Plussh, ‘Made in France’ as the team proudly puts on their business cards, has another extra feature: it lets you broadcast a loop of the preparations before the actual streaming begins.
3. Polls: quick and dirty
Still in beta, Askwhich1.com (UK) gives you the possibility to do quick and fun polls among your friends, followers or other groups of stakeholders. The idea is that you offer your audience a choice between a number of options, each with a different visual if you can. Askwhich1 will not replace a thorough survey about the expectations and deepest feelings of your customers and stakeholders, but might open up possibilities for testing messages, visuals, or to quickly gauge sentiment on a certain topic for owned content.
4. Content marketing: develop apps yourself
Evrybit (US) is a storytelling tool (with freemium subscription option) allowing you to embed owned content, basically pictures, audio and video with short comments, to your website. A less ‘informal’ solution is Newsroom, founded by a group of former Swiss journalists, offering the possibility to embed a professionally looking newsroom with blogs and social feeds to your website. They even offer the option to ‘sell’ sponsored posts, which makes this definitely an interesting solution for federations, who can offer advertising to their members.
Pandasuite (France) was my personal favourite – it was the only app where I had an ‘Aha’ moment. It’s the grownup version of Daisy the Dinosaur for those who have kids: a geeky tool that lets you build apps yourself, in a very intuitive and user-friendly way. Definitely going to try this out for sales brochures, presentations, and why not: press files.
5. Monitoring & clipping reports: fancy stuff
Ride O’Meter makes fancy clipping reports of your online and offline clippings, with mention of advertising value, reach, and a whole range of parameters on which to measure your press coverage, e.g. what the value is of each of your ‘riders’ (for action sports brands) . The company is based in France, but claims to be able to offer the service throughout Europe.
For creating fashionable customized magazines, check out Papermine (Italy): you can upload all kinds of images, add texts and comments in order to make a booklet, folder or why not – a fashionable clipping overview.
6. PR tools for agency management: Belgian efficiency
For those of us running agencies: here are two Belgian start-ups that made some noise on Web Summit 2015 and that can make your management work easier. Talentsquare is a hiring and recruitment tool that matches current job openings with candidates that have applied before or are applying now at your company, completing your own database with third parties such as LinkedIn or Monster. Teamleader is an easy to use, all-in-one CRM, project management and invoicing tool that integrates with other popular tools such as Mailchimp, Dropbox, Google, etc. And then there is our own CRM tool Mustr, aimed at eliminating all waste in PR efforts, which lets you develop your network of influencers, target them very precisely and monitor the results.
Note: we were invited to Web Summit by Sofina, a Belgian investment company, as a promising female entrepreneur. Many thanks to Sofina, and thank you Web Summit for your efforts to bring more women into tech! By the way: for its next conference in 2016, Web Summit is committed to inviting 10,000 female entrepreneurs. You can send a free ticket to a female entrepreneur of your choice here.
