ITDatabase aims to make tech PR a smarter place

How many tech PR pros actually regularly read the content produced by the journalists they're pitching? Based on all the inappropriate e-mails I get, I'm guessing not many. And based on other journalists' feedback, the tools that PR pros use to identify targets aren't very intelligent either.

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine decided to tackle this challenge of making tech PR pros smarter about how they identify and track appropriate tech authors for publicity purposes. It turns out it's a data problem--not stupidity or laziness (OK, maybe a *little* laziness)--that explains why PR people are so often completely off the mark when targeting and communicating with authors.

ITDatabase is launching Monday and tackling a very specific opportunity--get all tech news indexed in one place, and make it much easier for tech industry pros to analyze/aggregate trends about what's being said across all tech news. The company is starting with tech PR pros as the initial target customers, but believes the product offers a lot of research value to product managers and sales roles as well.

"There are thousands of tech authors covering tens of thousands of vendors and themes," said Travis Van, founder of ITDatabase. "Multiply them all together and you get a huge unstructured data mess, which largely accounts for why tech PR folks are often hitting the wrong journalists with the wrong content."

Like the vast majority of online start-ups, ITDatabase is built on an open-source stack:

• Wicket--a Java-based Web app framework
• Hibernate--Object/Relational Mapping (ORM) framework & JPA (Java Persistence API) provider
• Hibernate Search--provides ORM integration with Lucene
• Lucene--search engine
• MySQL
• Tomcat (behind Apache)

Van admits there's an enormous universe of data and that ITDatabase is still finding new/missing tech industry authors every day. "That's just the nature of an information product--we're always going to be finding new tech industry authors and sources," he said.

I think we often give too much credit to Google alerts and portals, expecting them to bring us all of the information. Services like ITDatabase can offer a wealth of actionable data to make you more efficient.

Disclosure: I am an informal adviser to ITDatabase.

Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom

[MrGoogleAlerts]

That's an awful lot of technology you listed here to solve a relatively simple problem. We have found a solution with our AlertRank.com site that is based on Google Alerts. We collect all the alerts for a specific topic you need to track, and then cross reference all the sources. I've written about this procedure on my blog. Here is an example that shows how simple reviewing sources for a specific topic can be:
http://www.alertrank.com/mrgooglealerts/2009/05/06/journalists-google-alerts-find-expert-sources/

This post is written from the point of view of journalists looking for experts, but it can just as easily be applied to PR people looking for journalists.

[madflacker]

MrGoogleAlerts - as anyone who has ever subscribed to Google Alerts is well aware of, there are a ton of false positives. Google Alerts also doesn't know that "web services," "J2EE" and "Tibco" appearing in close proximity probably equals a story about "Integration." Cobbling together a bunch of Google Alerts is great if you like sifting through false positives, missing a ton of tech content that matters to your company and "marketing like it's 1999." The fact that you think indexing all of tech content is a "relatively simple problem" shows that you don't grok the complexities of truly indexing all of tech content. Glad to have learned about you guys, and I'll check it out. But when you summarily dismiss a new tech without having checked it out or really understanding the scope of the problem you claim to solve better, it seems a little disingenuous.