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Up-to-date in PR? There’s an App for that (or several)

Apple dominates the Smartphone market today because of its 100,000 plus applications, but other Smartphones are catching up. With all the available apps, why not take advantage of the great resources held in your hand? There are apps available for your Smartphone of choice featuring everything from making a to-do list to translating languages, and there are several tools that can specifically help public relations students or professionals. Mobile devices drive much of the value we receive from social media. Being away from the computer doesn’t limit students and professionals who use Smartphones to stay productive.

What are PR professionals using to stay informed, send information and stay on the media’s radar? Of course you have all your social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others, but there are more ways to utilize social media with apps like Asap – Social Media. Asap – Social Media contains predefined news feeds such as Mashable, Soshable and socialmediatoday.com.

There are several apps for recording. Apps such as VR+ are convenient when recording interviews or leaving yourself a reminder on the go. VR+ for BlackBerry and iPhone/iPod Touch can send voice e-mails and share your voice to social networks for play-back on any Mac, PC or mobile device. YouNote makes it easy to take notes with covered–audio, text, and image notes and adds the ability to draw notes and bookmark Web pages with notes. Timewerks features data export and multiple active stopwatches.

A Personal Assistant app allows you to access and manage all online accounts in one place for free. After adding your accounts (such as bank accounts, social networks and online shopping accounts), the app allows users to manage them password-free.

The AP style app features searchable listings for the main, sports, business and punctuation sections. This app is obviously helpful for public relations writers when communicating with the news media because a solid grasp of AP style not only adds credibility to your work but also prevents excessive editing.

Public relations students and professionals should use apps that keep them informed. A good blog and RSS feed reader are great for PR people. Viigo for BlackBerry tweets articles, shares them with contacts, stays connected and receives real-time alerts when keywords you’ve selected appear in your channels. Ping.fm lets you post updates from your mobile device to more than 40 social networking sites. Plenty of mobile apps exist for Web tools, including WordPress for blogging, YouTube for video and Flickr for photos. You can access, create and share content from anywhere, anytime.

The apps mentioned are just a handful of the great resources for a PR person. Browse through the app store and you can find several apps that can make your life easier and keep you on top of the PR industry. Before installing an app, read users’ comments; they can be very helpful and save time if an app isn’t working correctly or isn’t what it claims to be.

What apps improve your PR knowledge?

by Autumn Winsett

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