Finding relevant journalists and influencers (featuring Samantha Deeks)

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Chip Griffin: You’re listening to Chats with Chip on the FIR Podcast Network, featuring conversations with agency owners and experts.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Chats with Chip. I’m your host, Chip Griffin, and my guest today is Samantha Deeks. She is the founder and CEO of PRgloo. Welcome to the show, Samantha.

Samantha Deeks: Hello. I knew I was going to wave. Where did I start with the wave?

Chip Griffin: Well, you know, for those, those watching on video, they’ll enjoy the wave.

For those, for those listening in audio, well, you can just know. She waved. That’s a good, it’s a good cheery way to start the show and and who can’t use a little bit of cheer here in New Hampshire. It’s it’s drizzly, rainy, cold this morning and I mean you’re over in England So that’s how it is pretty much every day, right?

Samantha Deeks: Yeah, I knew you were gonna say that. I was about to counter with it’s a beautiful spring day, but actually no, it’s pretty Yeah, you got it pretty spot on. It’s pretty clear. Yeah,

Chip Griffin: I mean, that said, I love London. I love the whole area around one. It’s just it’s it’s beautiful. And I don’t mind the rain and the clouds.

So and occasionally the sun does come out and then it seems particularly cheery.

Samantha Deeks: Exactly. Exactly. It’s it’s quality, not quantity. Indeed.

Chip Griffin: So Unfortunately, people didn’t tune in to listen to our discussion of the relative weather conditions, so we probably should dive into the meat of it. But before we do, why don’t you share a little bit about yourself and your background and a little bit about PRgloo itself.

Samantha Deeks: Yeah, sure. So, I’m Samantha Deeks. I’m the founder and CEO of PRgloo. PRgloo is a software platform aimed at PR and communications professionals. And our main purpose really is to make their lives a lot easier. so there’s a lot of technology, organizations out there to sort of help them. You know, maximize your understanding of your coverage and provide you with all sorts of wonderful analytics.

And we provide analytics too, but what we really focus on is giving you the tools in one place to get the stuff done you need to get done. So we’ve got tools to help you send out press releases, tools to help you research journalists, tools to help you deal with it. Billions of media inquiries, tools to help you market your own stuff on your newsroom.

So we really focus on easy to use tools, which will make your life, you know, that much less stressful and hopefully give you a lot of cool intelligence out of the back of it.

Chip Griffin: So that’s, that’s, I think that’s a very good place to start. I mean, why did you decide to start PRgloo? I mean, what, what motivated you to say, you know, this is what the market needs and I’m the one to do it.

Samantha Deeks: Yeah, well, that’s a really good question. And actually, we just realized that next month is our sixth year birthday. So it’s kind of a good time to start. Thank you. so yeah, why did we start to do it? Well, I’d actually been involved in a previous startup, which did this sort of thing, which, got bought by, NASDAQ.

This is, this is back, quite a few years now. And, we had a really great relationship with our customers. And we provided these tools that, you know, no one else provided and also no one else cared to provide because sometimes they weren’t seen as the particularly sexy area, but our customers loved it because it saved them so much time.

So after we got bought by NASDAQ, the, you know, the, as with any small company going into a larger corporate environment, there were a lot of challenges, a lot of changes. And I think the, kind of the. The real sort of ethos of what we were trying to do with the product got lost. So after a sort of a too complicated to go into process, we kind of extracted ourselves from, from NASDAQ and we decided.

I decided then to, found PRgloo to do things the way that I’d kind of always wanted to do. So I had hundreds of hours of, speaking with, our customers and finding out what made them tick and what their challenges were. And I just, I just felt like that. I’d never got a chance to put all of that kind of product gold into a platform, and have it designed and built the way I wanted it to be built.

So I took the opportunity. I’ve made some fantastic relationships with some great, great developers, fantastic designers, you know, some people I’d worked with under periods of high stress for the past. Four or five years that I just knew how well we would work together as a team. And we kicked off, we kicked off with nothing.

We kicked off with, what they call sweat equity. So, we had a small core group of people. everyone, worked for equity in the company. We got our first prototype done in, Eight months. We had our first commercial model then, at about, 13 months old. and, and we kicked off with some pretty big customers here in the UK, which, which was great, because they had, I had worked with them before and they trusted kind of the approach that myself and my colleagues took to producing stuff and, and we went ahead and we built it.

So I think really the short answer was there was unfinished business. I had all these great ideas and great feedback, and they had no home, and I just had this stupid idea that if I built it, they would come.

Chip Griffin: Right. So, I mean, look, the PR community generally, the agency community, which is largely who listens to me, you know, they’ve used media databases and those kinds of things for a long time.

And I think that you and I can probably agree that historically people have sort of had a relationship with, with media databases. and it’s tough because, you know, we know, and someone who’s, I’ve been in the media intelligence business myself, I know how difficult it is to keep them up to date because people are always, you know, changing jobs and particularly in the current media environment.

So, you know, how do you overcome some of that and how have you thought about it differently from. You know, the, the old fashioned media databases that people sort of held their noses and purchased because they had to.

Samantha Deeks: Yeah, no, there’s a couple of pieces in that, that I’d sort of like to unpick. I mean, firstly, the PRgloo platform, we didn’t start off as a journalist contacts database.

we started off as a kind of a whole solution. So when you come into our, platform, you’re actually coming into our platform not just to search for a journalist. You’re actually coming into our platform to craft like media rich content. So you, create a great looking press release. you might create a social media post, and then afterwards, you would then go and select your journalists to send it out to, so you don’t just, like, look for journalists and download a list of journalists.

or you might come into our platform because you’ve had some media inquiries and you want to keep track of those. You want to keep track of everyone in the media you’ve been speaking with. And our system is very simple, then it links into our journalist contacts database. So if you’ve had a conversation with someone, you just look up their details, say the sort of things, so the sort of things that you, you know, keep track of the sort of things you’ve been speaking with them about, or you want to keep track of all the proactive sell ins that you’ve been doing so that you can provide, provide a report for your customer to say, look, this is everything we’ve done around this campaign.

We’ve spoken to these, you know, 15 people we’ve, held interviews with these three people. We’ve sent out these X many press releases. So the platform really takes a holistic approach as opposed to just saying, Here’s a media contacts database you can search through and export and send by our Outlook.

So, I would say that that is quite a different approach for us. the media contacts database is one part of the whole of our kind of workflow tool, which is aimed at, like I said before, making it easier for the PR person to get stuff done, to report over the stuff, because if you use our system, you don’t also then need to use rely on outlook.

You don’t also then need to rely on multiple spreadsheets. You don’t also then need to rely on, you know, a, CMS to manage your data. Your website, you’ve got all of that in one place. So actually you can start producing some really cool reports and you can, you can power multiple newsrooms from our, our, our platform.

So if you wanted a website for each one of your customers, you can do that. And we have some customers who do do that. So first thing is we’re not just a media contacts database. The media contacts is part of our whole platform. yeah. And that’s where we’re, we’re slightly different, but on the point of how do we keep stuff up to date, you know, it is problematic and we have, we actually have to adopt a regional approach.

so in UK, we will, and us, we will rely heavily on social media. So anytime anyone’s social media profile changes that gets flagged to our human researchers to, to research them, in, other countries like in Ireland, it’s. They’re generally less reliant on Twitter and social media. So we have people on the ground there that actually, you know, do a schedule of bringing people up.

It’s, you know, there isn’t a silver bullet, but, if you are sensitive to the needs. of the, of the community that you’re, you’re, you’re trying to serve. And also the, you know, the journalists in that, that region, then you come up with these regional strategies and nothing will be perfect. but we also don’t go into it with any sort of overblown sort of, You know, we have 5 million journalists in our database, even though registered, there’s only, you know, a fraction of that amount.

We try to keep it, we try to keep it on target with actual proper, journalists and media and people who want to hear from you as a whole, a bunch, a whole bunch of fillers that really don’t.

Chip Griffin: Right. So, so basically you’re, you’ve stepped back and you’ve taken that broader view of, of how you’re going to help people communicate their messages more effectively.

And it’s not so much about being a phone book or a spam tool or something like that that allows them to, to simply report up that, you know, hey, we sent this out to X number of people or something like that. You’re really trying to help them think more strategically about communicating their messages.

Samantha Deeks: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, there’s, there’s definitely tools there to broadcast information out, but there’s tools there more importantly, I think, to build the relationship. And to support the building of those relationships and to support building, you know, a larger number of relationships than, than you could do if you didn’t have the technology to support you there.

but you know, definitely the relationships are key.

Chip Griffin: And so, you know, as, as you’re looking at, you know, the landscape, you know, are you, are you focused primarily on media? Have you, do you integrate? You know, influencers, which seems to be the hip term these days, right? And everybody’s trying to figure out how do I, how do I engage influencers?

I mean, how do you see that? And obviously the lines can get blurry there. So I’m curious how you address that and what you’re seeing in the marketplace.

Samantha Deeks: Yeah, the lines can get very blurry. So, we will, we, we do operate on a slightly gray area because we have, we have a very, we actually have a human, Research team.

So there’s, there’s lots of, organizations out there who are all about slashing the human research team. And we’re actually, we’re about to double the size of our research team. So, we have this sort of, we rely on technology to help us kind of, find the potentials for inclusion into our database.

And we also rely on technology to help us sort of, flag, which, contacts need. to be reviewed, but then we always have that that human approach on top of it. And, what we also want to do is we don’t want to add to the general kind of

So what we will try to do is we’ll say, right, this person actually, if they’re an influencer, they probably won’t receive press releases. So we add them into our system in a slightly different way so that they don’t become kind of spammed and therefore turn off and therefore it all becomes very counterproductive.

We will put people in there that you might want to communicate with directly or build a relationship with on social media and we’ll provide those sorts of information, but maybe we wouldn’t provide their, like, say, email address or wouldn’t provide it as part of something that you could then kind of do a big broadcast.

Because these people want to be approached on a one to one basis. So we tend, we tend to focus a little bit on the ones that are sort of media going over to influencers, pure influencer, databases. they aren’t really. You know, I think technology, can, can access those. They can summarize what’s been said about them and so on.

You still got to be able to approach them and build a relationship with them. They’re not going to just carry whatever that you send them. So those more one to one relationships, that’s where. You know, our platform would allow you to keep track of the amount of times you’ve spoken to them, put reminders as to when you need to reach out to them again, to keep that relationship warm.

And it becomes almost, if you like, more of a proactive kind of, you know, sales tool almost because you’re kind of selling that relationship and so on. So I don’t know if that quite answers your question. I think we leave, we leave the influencers side of stuff to the pure tech companies, but we’ve had a lot of organizations who just have.

Like, you know, the likes of your, tracker and, you know, the, not buzz sumo, but in the same group, you know, places that will go and find you these influences, they don’t then have the tools to help people nurture those relationships. And I suppose that’s where we come in. We help you nurture those relationships and track those relationships and.

And so forth,

Chip Griffin: and how, how, if at all, have you seen the way your tool is used, how have you seen it change in the last year as we’ve, as we’ve gone through a lot of change in the communication space and really society more generally, I’m curious if people are continuing to use PRgloo the same way that they were before, if you’ve seen any noticeable patterns of change over that time,

Samantha Deeks: I tell you what I have seen, I’ve seen more people use it.

So when lockdown kicked off, you know, We, we, we were trying to work out what we could do to help. so our platform is based on a sort of a concurrent license model. So you, you buy a certain amount of seats and that many people can log in. And what we found was that suddenly our, our, our customers would come into us and asking us for more licenses because they were enlisting people from, into the comms team from all around the rest of the parts of the business.

And they were recruiting as well, because I think what happened was comms, Comms, I don’t think it has ever played such a front and center role. I mean, I think it’s comms and people who make PPE and the doctors, you know, it’s that kind of, because there’s so much information and it’s so crucial that that information gets, get pushed out there to the right people in a timely fashion and all this sort of stuff.

So, for the, for the whole, whole year, we, we just removed license. We just said, look, add as many people as you want in to use your platform. That’s fine. We understand the insane pressures that everyone is on. also, an increase in kind of the internal communication. So a lot of people have been using our platform actually to craft.

You know, communicators are the best people to communicate. So, they’re, they’re also doing a lot of internal communications, through our platform and a lot of what we would call sort of stakeholder communications. So not necessarily the media, but politicians or, people within the community that they serve or, you know, whoever’s sort of important to the comms agenda, but not, you know, a member of the media.

And again, we, we supported all of that. So, so for us, I think that the, the trend was just actually comms taking a massive, front and center role. And then everyone working from their kitchen table or their garden shed, or, you know, in their bedroom because they’re in a, you know, a small apartment. So then suddenly we also got started getting more, new business in because, before, you know, people would, You know, people, would, would see our tour, but they’d say, Oh, there’s only four of us and we’re all in the office.

So if we need to know what someone said, we just shout across the office. And now everyone’s working from home and that model seems to continue. The majority of our customers have all been told, you don’t need to come back into the office. We’ve had, you know, offices being sold and that type of thing. so then a platform like ours, which allows one PR person to see what the other PR person is doing and to quickly find something that was said and.

Not have to have the billions of zoom calls to work out what’s and it’s just there on PRgloo.

That was the other that so we actually saw a sort of an increase in customers going, we should have had something like this

Chip Griffin: before. Whoops. Right.

Samantha Deeks: We need to get this in now. So, so yeah, those, those are, those are my, my, my big trends from our customer base.

Chip Griffin: And how do agencies typically use your tool? I mean, is it, are they, do they use it any differently than your in house clients? Or is it, is it really just a similar usage?

Samantha Deeks: it is slightly different. and the, how the agencies would use our, our system would be. So for example, we have, We have a good few agencies, they have multiple clients, so they will use our system to push out press releases branded in different ways for the different clients.

They will then support that by different, you know, lists that they build, and quite often they will support that also with multiple websites that they will, that they will manage on behalf of. So let’s say, for example, you, you’re, you’re an agency and you have, I don’t know, a particular, I don’t know, watchmaker is, you know, luxury watch, brand.

As one of your customers, then what they would do is within PRgloo, they’d have a fully branded up set of email templates that can be pushed out. Those will then power a fully branded, little micro sites where all of the images and the videos and the press releases and the contacts and any other information about that brand will live.

Yeah. But it will actually be managed, the content and everything will be managed by the PR agency. So it’s a really sticky tool for the PR agency to, you know, to give to the customer. it also kind of showcases their work. So our agencies would tend to use it along those lines around kind of the content marketing and, you know, the pushing of that.

whereas our in house customers will often use it for that. so like, likes of 2K Games and the likes of, I don’t know, over here Nationwide and, you know, this, we have some big organizations using it to power out, their website, Siemens, people like that, but those organizations. especially when it’s an in house team, they will also use our platform to keep track of all of the media inquiries that they get and to keep like a, a, a centralized place where all of their approved sort of statements or kind of lines to take would be hold to really help on the whole kind of reputation management, issue management, side of things, whereas our PR agencies tend to be more kind of proactive.

Sort of comms are in house teams are a mixture of reactive and proactive. They’re basically under the massively scrutinized. so they have to deal with all of the, the horrible issues, but then they use the proactive elements to push out their kind of proactive stories.

Chip Griffin: Now you’ve mentioned that you obviously got started in the UK market, but you’ve also talked about the U S and Ireland.

What, what markets are you currently serving from a client based perspective? And obviously also from your data perspective.

Samantha Deeks: Yeah, you’ve just pretty much listed them, to be fair. So it’s UK, Ireland, and the US.

Chip Griffin: I actually can listen. I mean, regular listeners are stunned to know that I actually listen when I’m having these conversations and I don’t just spout off my thoughts.

So I’m glad I was paying enough attention to get that.

Samantha Deeks: I mean, you know, that, that very much is us. And we, we also very much pride ourselves. actually we’ve just had, one of our founder members has just moved to Australia. So she’s now currently starting up kind of PRgloo Australia, which is also quite good for us because it means like time zone wise, we have quite a wide range of coverage for customer service and, and so on.

but yeah, so those are, those are our, these are our, our main. Markets at the moment.

Chip Griffin: yeah, since, since, since you just brought up that, that, you know, Australia may be in your future. What, what else is in the future for PRgloo? And, and it’s just the two of us. So you can share your, you know, your deepest, most secret plans.

Samantha Deeks: Yeah, yeah, yeah. no. So, so for us, it’s, it’s all along this, this same, same route. What can we put in the platform that would help people do the things they need to do? Okay. So we’ve got kind of these reactive tools for, managing issues and crises and stuff like that and the ebb and flow of journalists asking you mad questions or you trying to, to get your stories, you know, pushed out to the journalists.

We’ve got the, kind of the, the content piece where you can push stuff out to your newsrooms and you can push stuff out via email. We’ve got the journalist piece. we are currently building out our U. S. So we should have around about, we’re looking to have around about 90, 000 or so U. S. journalists, by, sort of September time.

So that’s a big thing for us. That’s why we’re increasing our research team. And then, in the next two months, we’ll also be launching a social media scheduler. So that you can, as well as pushing out your stories, you can push stuff out to social media. So Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and things like that.

So that’s in the pipeline at the moment. And then it’s really about this piece that’s a little bit been missing for us. So, you do all this great stuff with PRgloo. You know, you build your relationships, you push out your content, and then you need to see if Any of it resulted in anything at all. So at the moment, what we do is we link in with third party kind of coverage providers.

So the coverage comes into the platform. and you can link that coverage up to a press release that you thought maybe generated it. and you can do a little bit of analytics on the coverage, but not that not a great deal. so the next big thing for us is that when that coverage comes into the platform, we’ve got a tool which will automatically link it to the press release or the statement that we think generated it.

and then also we want to, we’re building out a full analytics dashboard for that coverage. So irrespective of what you want to do, if you want to do deep dive, Dive coverage analytics. If you want to do, beautiful content creation, if you want to sort out your social media campaign, or if you just want to keep track of, all of the weird and wonderful requests you get, you’ll be able to do this all in one platform.

And then there’s lots of cool linkups between them all. So you look at a journalist details and you’ll be able to see everything you’ve sent to them and what they’ve opened, everything you’ve said to them. Everything that they’ve written about you and hopefully every kind of social media interaction they’ve had with you.

So then that’s where you start seeing that all these disparate parts all come together really about building those relationships and seeing which relationships are working well for you.

Chip Griffin: And actually, I guess that last bit, you know, brings about a question, you know, how do you do all of this in the new world of GDPR and, and California’s rules and all the various things that really are regulating the kind of information you’re storing?

I’m curious, you know, has that been something that’s been a hindrance to your business, just something you have to be aware of? You know, talk a little bit about that because I know there are a lot of folks in both media and communications who are concerned about this. Yeah.

Samantha Deeks: Yeah. Well, GDPR is not new to us.

and in fact, data protection was something that I was very, very, concerned about from absolutely the beginning. So, one of the ways in which we get, contacts into our system is by our customers suggesting them. So our customer may log an inquiry they just had from a journalist and that journalist isn’t in our system.

So they type in their name, they say they’re a member of the media, and then that goes off to our research team. So from the absolute get go, and for us actually, GDPR has been a real massive benefit. Because, and I am our data protection officer, so you’re going to have to keep me a limit here on how much I talk about GDPR.

But essentially this, right, if you think about your data like they were your children, right, then you’re going to be on the right side of GDPR. So you’ve got to keep your kids safe.

Chip Griffin: You don’t know my kids then. Yeah,

Samantha Deeks: hopefully, you’ve got to try at least, okay? Okay, all right. The intention, the intention has to be, you’ve got to keep them safe.

You know, you’ve got to, you’ve got to keep them up to date with the latest stuff, you know. you’ve got to make sure that you, you only keep them for so long and then you let them go. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s If you treat your data like a good parent, shall we say, will treat their children.

Chip Griffin: There’s where you’ve lost me.

Samantha Deeks: You don’t go too far wrong. So for us, what that means is we don’t put in people’s details that don’t need it. We do have unsubscribes. We keep a full audit trail of where we’ve got this data. If we’re unsure. Like, you know, if we see something online that’s outed a journalist for being a supporter of, I don’t know, some left wing thing, we won’t use that as a source of getting, collecting their data, okay?

So, we, we just take a very kind of human approach to the fact that if we, we only want to add people into the system who will be of value to our customers, therefore we only want to add people into the system who will want to interact with you in some way, and GDPR just falls right into that. Thanks. As far as I’m concerned, GDPR is a massive boon.

And for us, it’s a reason why you should use a platform like ours, as opposed to keeping a bunch of spreadsheets hanging about, which will get out of date, which won’t be compliant with GDPR. you can’t show why you have it, how you use the data. You can’t do any of that. So for us. GDPR and me love each other.

Chip Griffin: Excellent. Well, you, you talk about the importance of, of, building relationships where people want to interact with you. If someone wants to interact with you or PRgloo, where can they find you online?

Samantha Deeks: You’re going to have to really search hard for me. it’s just PRgloo. com. I’m always on LinkedIn as well.

and we, we, we put up some very, cool videos and some funny videos to do follow me, even if you just want to, have a laugh, you know, a few moments. we’re a pretty nice, not hugely corporate organization. So if you, want to reach out, just get hold of me on LinkedIn or, come along to our websites and we’ll be happy to have a.

a good talk about what you need.

Chip Griffin: Excellent. And just to be clear, it’s PRgloo with two O’s, right?

Samantha Deeks: So, yes, that’s right.

Chip Griffin: But, and I know oftentimes across the Atlantic, we spell things differently, but, but I, you know, this is, I’m not even sure that this is not how you spell glue over in the UK. Is it?

Samantha Deeks: No, no, it isn’t.

No. So, so PRgloo, GLOO. Yes. you, you have no idea how hard it is when you start a business to think of a. Goddamn good name.

Chip Griffin: I’ve started many businesses. So I’m quite familiar with it, actually. Although in fairness, I think people spend way too much time worrying about business names because there are so many companies where you would say, well, that’s a dumb name.

I mean, think about it. Yahoo, Amazon, Google, who would sit there and say, yeah, you should name your company those things. I think they’re doing okay. Or at least two out of those three are.

Samantha Deeks: Yeah, no, no, no, definitely. And I would 100 percent agree with you there. But I still have the piece of paper where we wrote down all the different suggestions.

And there were some real awful ones, real awful ones in there, but this one, and I’m sorry for the pun, was the only one that stuck. so, so there you go.

Chip Griffin: On that note, Samantha Deeks, the founder and CEO of PRgloo, P R G L O O, has been my guest today. It has been a great conversation, Samantha. Thank you for joining me and thank you everyone for listening.

I encourage you to check out PRgloo to learn more and I encourage you to come back and listen to next week’s episode.

Samantha Deeks: Thank you so much.

Chip Griffin: You’ve been listening to Chats with Chip. For more information about this show or to listen to previous episodes, visit chatswithchip.com.