Today, I came across an interesting post on Lindsay Olson’s blog by public relations columnist, Alison Kenney, on how social media can make PR collaboration easier. I also tuned into a webinar hosted by Sam Whitmore on social media monitoring tools that help make us PR professionals work more efficiently.

Alison offers a few examples of services that are free and also leverage social media to help PR pros collaborate– making work easier and more effective:

• Help A Reporter Out (HARO)–  Connects journalists with the right source and grants everyone access to reporters who may write about them. HARO has proved to be a great way to build relationships with journalists and lets PR people know exactly what the reporters are looking for.
• PitchWithMe — This helps PR people collaborate on pitches to discover potential resources and offer journalists more multiple resources. I haven’t tried this one out, but it seems like a great way to network with other people in the industry.
• BloggerLinkUp– A resource for bloggers who are looking for expert sources, products to review or guest posts and for PR reps who have products they’d like reviewed or guest blog posts they’d like to see published. This site seems especially great for networking and blog syndication so I’m interested in learning more about it.

In Sam Whitmore’s webinar, he mentioned some free social media monitoring tools that caught my attention. The first is called TweetStats, which shows how active a person is on Twitter and the people they reply to often. He also discussed TweetReach, which can show you people who have retweeted you and shows how influential they are– this can be a great way to add followers who will be interested in your content.

PR can be a stressful job at times, but these tools can make our lives much easier. Is there anything you find useful in your day to day activities?