Author: Jonathan Tullett

In the Dot Star Media laboratories, we’re always trying new experiments to see what we can do to improve the relevance of enquiries you receive. Most don’t see light of day – rigorous testing disproves many theories. Sometimes, however, the results are good enough that they’re added for customers to use.

A recent theory was that follower count could be used as a rough proxy of how well a journalist is established, and their influence. With the idea that some organisations would prefer to respond to enquiries from more established journalists than those new to the beat. This idea was given some further weight with some feedback received on the service.

We’ve added a new subscriber filter option. The ‘journalist follower threshold’ allows a subscriber to filter journalist request alerts based on the number of followers a journalist has. It looks remarkably like this:

You may well be wondering what sort of effect this would have on the number of alerts received, so we spent time doing some calculations and produced a graph which demonstrates how effective this can be:

If you want to see the impact of each setting with your topics and keywords, choose a new journalist follower threshold and click ‘save’; you will then see how many requests would have come your way in the previous week:

There are exceptions to the theory: specialist trade journalists, for example, so it’ll be a personal choice based on your circumstances ultimately.

Your new client, Snuffles the Singing Cat, has engaged your services to boost their media profile. They’re interested in providing expert comment on anything singing-cat related, and have a particular interest in Broadway shows – after all, they did study at the BRIT school!

You’re confident that with the help of Dot Star Media, you can keep an eye out for journalist requests which are relevant for Snuffles, and with the power of instant alerts, you can do it without spending all day on Twitter!

You choose your topics – Pets & Animals, of course, and perhaps Entertainment & the Arts – and throw in some glorious cat related keywords (and enhance them with the AI suggested options to be even more effective). Then with a glass of kale juice, you sit back and wait for the opportunities to present themselves.

Gah, what’s this?! You keep receiving requests from Jonathan Griffiths who’s writing for the ‘Cats and Guinea Pigs In Industry’ magazine. From checking his profile, you’re confident these requests will never be relevant. What can you do?

This is the sort of user story which keeps Dan and I awake at night. How can we help make the requests you receive more relevant to your interests? Topics and keywords go a long way, but sometimes more is needed.

Today we’re happy to make this a reality and we’ve added the ability to unsubscribe from requests from specific journalists. By simply clicking on the link at the bottom of one of their requests, they’ll be added to your exclusion list and you’ll never hear from them again:

Added someone by mistake? Click the trash-can by their name and you’ll receive their enquiries again. It is that simple:

Keyword filtering is a powerful way of streamlining exactly which requests make it into your mailbox. It’s a feature we added just a week after launching, and is incredibly popular with our customers who have email alerts enabled.

As well as email alerts – an industry staple for decades – Dot Star Media has pioneered the use of the workflow management tools MS Teams and Slack as a delivery mechanism, and it’s growing in popularity amongst our users.

Because these delivery methods are at the organisation level, they were developed only with topic filtering in mind; keywords were not considered appropriate at the global (organisation) level.

From the feedback we received, this was an incorrect assumption! Keywords are desirable when using workflow management tools.

So (and you must have known this was coming): You spoke, and we listened.

Organisation keywords are here! The page looks remarkably like your personal keyword page and it works in the same way. The only difference is the keywords entered are only used for enquiries which are delivered via MS Teams and Slack. This does make it a Gold level only feature:

While talking about keyword filtering, we have some articles on the importance of a good list, and seeing how effective your keywords are which may be of interest.

We love getting feedback about these developments. It’s your feedback which helps us plan the future of this service so please let us know what’s important to you.

Since we opened up keyword filtering for everyone, nearly 25% of our customers are using the feature. It’s an incredibly powerful way to streamline the journalist requests you receive in your mailbox.

However, there are challenges to crafting a good keyword list: not everyone thinks the way you do.

For example: Perhaps you or your client are in the vodka making business. You’re eager to hear about opportunities for your latest summer blend, you add a keyword of ‘vodka’ to your keyword filter.

A few days later, a request comes in through Twitter which would be PERFECT for you:

Sadly it doesn’t include your magic word, so the opportunity never hits your mailbox. Gah! If only you’d thought to add ‘drink’ too.

This problem has been on our minds a lot – we’ve spent time with a number of clients working on their lists and we thought there must be a better way to do this. So we’ve been hard at work in the Dot Star Media Laboratory seeing what we can conjure up to help everyone in this situation. We think it’s ready for Prime Time and so it’s just gone live.

From today, when you add a keyword to your list, you’ll see some suggestions presented:

If you like the suggestions, add them. If not, they can be ignored. Every time you add a keyword, the total number of matching enquiries from the previous week will be displayed so you can see how effective it’ll be:

Now for the small print: We use a AI-Powered Semantic Network Robot for determining related words. Usually it does a good job, but sometimes it takes a tea-break or engages ‘Friday Mode’ and will return some silly answers. C’est la vie.*

*(if anything particularly incongruous comes up, let us know on hello@dotstar.media – there might not be much we can do but all feedback helps us develop new features for you).

Since we launched keywords for everyone, it’s become one of our most-used features, providing that extra bit of noise filtering from the main topic feeds.

When choosing your keyword selection, it was difficult to see the effect it would have had; there was no indicator as to how many recent enquiries your keywords would have matched. This lead to the unfortunate situation where a couple of customers ended with a set so niche, they matched nothing.

With this feedback in mind, our weekend development was to include on the keywords page, a banner which says how many enquiries over the past few days you’d have received, if they were in place:

As you add and remove keywords, you’ll get immediate feedback on the number of enquiries matched and if you’re interested in the detail, simply click the banner to see the enquiries in full.

It’s your feedback which helps direct our development, so let us know what’s working for you, and what isn’t, and we’ll see what we can do!