Beyond The Press Release: PR Newswire Launches Agility Dashboard

PR isn’t dead (as some pundits like to claim), but it is changing. PR Newswire (a.k.a. “the site that I use to search for press releases”) is responding to those changes by launching a new product called Agility.

Nicole Guillot, PR Newswire’s senior vice president of global product management, says that Agility is largely built around things that the company already offers, such as its press release distribution service and its journalist database. However, it updates those services and unites everything in a single dashboard, rather than forcing requiring companies to jump from one service to another.

So with Agility, PR pros can access a database of 300,000 journalist contacts, complete with social data like their Klout score and latest tweets. They can also track mentions of their companies and competitors in traditional and social media, then respond or share from the dashboard. And yes, they can distribute press releases.

We’ve moved beyond the “news release world,” so Guillot adds, and Agility is designed to reflect those changes. It’s not just about shooting a release to a small group of journalists, but finding anyone who’s influential on a given subject matter and engaging them, whether it’s with a press release or a tweet. If it sounds like PR is starting to blur into things like customer service and marketing, well, that’s the idea.

PR Newswire has been testing Agility with about 300 early customers, but it’s making the product available to everyone tomorrow. Guillot says her eventual goal is to move all of the company’s customers to the new platform.