Question: Who has the best memory in the whole wide world?
PR folks. Of course, it has to be them. Who else can recall names of 30+ journalists (from a list of thousands) so that you send your pitch to those most likely to open, engage, and write a story? These superhumans log every response they get from every journalist, on every pitch they ever sent out, in their mental hard disks. Week after week, month after month. Then they process it all to distill the very best list of journalists for you.
The truth is they get tired.
It is a big challenge to find the right reporters, who are easy to approach, write on topics related to your industry, and are keen to write about your brand. It is an even greater challenge to keep track of these reporters and remember how well they respond to your outreach efforts.
What if there was a way to measure how reporters respond to your outreach in a very objective way? And taking that a step further, how about doing that month on month by using a counter for each of them? Wouldn’t you want to first send your pitch to the ones who engaged with you most? This is where the ‘Reporter Engagement Score’ comes into play!
At its core, the journalist engagement score is a single metric that defines the depth of your relationship with the reporter – the higher the number, the happier and more engaged the journalist.
To derive the engagement score for reporters, we consider all the past engagements they have had with you on Wizikey. This includes things like the number of pitches opened, the number of times they showed interest, the number of times they replied back to you, whether or not they got you coverage, and more.
In phase 2 of the engagement score, we are also planning to include off-platform communication.
Since we can group journalists based on what industries they like to write about, having an engagement score helps us recollect and predict the right set of journalists for your brand. It helps you build and sustain media relationships and increase the output of your PR efforts.
This new Engagement Score metric is now available on Wizikey. If you are a customer, do check it out the next time you are sending a pitch!