We have a new home on Twitter!
After six months of perseverance with Twitter’s support staff, we were finally able to have @DotStarMedia transferred over to us on Saturday:
There was much rejoicing at Dot Star Media HQ.
If you were following us, no action is needed: you’ll receive the same quality content as before. If you’re not yet following us, now’s a great time to do so.
The next step for Dot Star Media is providing an option for journalists who want to contact our growing network of charities, universities, businesses and public relations agencies without having to post requests on social media.
A direct journalist enquiry form means that journalists who want to send more detailed briefs than Twitter allows, or prefer to avoid the public nature of social media, can use Dot Star Media directly. The form is ready to use here: dotstar.media/submit
We know that building up a network of journalists will take time. While we promote the new service to journalists and build request volumes we have decided to distribute direct requests free of charge to all subscribers. The instant request notifications sourced from social media are still only available with a Dot Star Media subscription.
To receive Dot Star Media requests register at https://dotstar.media/register
Journalists can submit direct requests at https://dotstar.media/submit
Just a few months after launch Dot Star Media has improved the way organisations monitor social media for journalist requests. We’re helping hundreds of individual subscribers jump on the ‘quick reaction’ media opportunities available on Twitter, without spending all day on Twitter.
Innovation in media requests
We’re also pleased to have introduced these innovations to the journalist enquiry service market:
We will continue to work with subscribers when developing further improvements.
Charity initiative
What Jonathan and I are most proud of, however, is the free ‘media request service for charities’ initiative. This is making a real and positive difference to the media relations activities of over 100 qualifying charities. Franchesca Allen from the press office at Macmillan Cancer Support said:
“Dot Star Media offers a simple, user friendly service which has allowed us to identify opportunities for our campaigns, which we were previously unable to benefit from due to limited resource to search for opportunities. It’s also allowed us to create and build new media relationships across consumer titles such as Refinery29, LadBible and VICE.”
Join us
To try Dot Star Media for yourself please register at https://dotstar.media/register
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).
If you’re not so interested in the brief history of email delivery, we have a summary of what you should do if you’re a client available here.
On the surface, email may seem simple. You type out a message, you put in a recipient, if you’re not a Person-Of-Mystery, you’ll put a relevant subject too and click ‘send’. A few seconds later, as if by magic, your recipient hears: ‘You’ve got mail!’.
Give or take a few technical details, that’s how it used to work. It was relatively simple, and many companies ran their own email servers, and many slightly-technically-inclined people would run their own personal email server for fun – and it was good fun.
But then came the spammers (and worse). They used every trick under the sun to get you to read their emails. They’d send an email and pretend to be someone else – possibly even someone you knew – and before you knew it, as much as 90% of all email going through the pipes was spam:
Something had to be done. In fact, many things were done. Over the years we saw the introduction of:
Dot Star Media have implemented SPF, DKIM and DMARC, but the one out of our control is heuristics – after all, we’re taking enquiries written by journalists and distributing them to you. Few people are versed in how to write something which doesn’t trigger a spam filter.
Fortunately, there’s one super easy way for you to help get our requests into your mailbox:
Whitelisting!
By ‘whitelisting’ Dot Star Media, you’re explicitly telling your email provider that you want to receive our email. That’s it. It’s entirely free and quick and easy to do. The email addresses to whitelist are hello@dotstar.media and notification@dotstar.media.
Each email client has its own way to do this and the Whitelist Guide contains most of them. Here are the quick links for Gmail or Outlook users.
Jonathan and I are really happy that we’ve already reached a stage where we can provide Dot Star Media service to charities free of charge.
At the risk of sounding cheesy, we both want Dot Star Media to make a difference in the world. Everyone benefits from the amazing work of charities (some areas that are especially close to our hearts are education, health and the environment). So – although we’re a new business and still have a lot of growing to do – we’re taking the opportunity to give something back as soon as we can.
If you’re a press officer at a charity in the UK or Ireland, you can find out more about why we’re doing this and how your charity can benefit here: https://dotstar.media/charities/. We’d love to hear what you think of the service.
For more detail, here’s the text of a press release we sent out today.
Dot Star Media launches free journalist request service for charities
Monday 12 April 2021
Media request monitoring and alerting service Dot Star Media announced today that it is making its service free of charge to UK and Irish registered charities.
Charity press officers use the Dot Star Media request service to receive and respond to journalist requests for comments, quotes, case studies and statistics for news articles and features.
Journalists and the media benefit from a media request service that provides access to a wide range of sources with a good balance of commercial and not-for-profit organisations participating.
Charities will have access to the full set of features, which include keyword filtering, digest options and delivery to Slack or Microsoft Teams. Dot Star Media allows charity press teams to receive a relevant feed of journalist request notifications without having to spend hours scouring social media.
Dan Griffiths, co-founder, said: “Journalists tell us they need a diverse range of voices. Charities (especially smaller ones) are often denied a voice because they can’t afford the fees for traditional media request services. By offering Dot Star Media free to registered charities, we want to make a difference to as many people as possible.”
Jonathan Tullett, co-founder, said: “Right from the beginning, we pledged a percentage of Dot Star Media’s profits to green causes, because we want to build a socially and environmentally conscientious organisation. I strongly feel we should always be trying to do more and this is another step towards that goal.”
Free access to Dot Star Media for charities will initially be limited to the first 1,000 qualifying charities registering.
Registered charities can sign up to try the service at https://dotstar.media/charities/
About Dot Star Media
Dot Star Media supports professional journalists and broadcasters by distributing their media requests to a diverse range of organisations. Charities, universities, businesses, and public relations professionals all benefit from an efficient way of monitoring, receiving, and responding to the best journalist requests shared on social media – without having to spend hours wading through noise and spam. The company was established in January 2021 by PRTech industry veterans Jonathan Tullett and Dan Griffiths. For more information visit https://dotstar.media/about
It’s been a few weeks since our last ‘you spoke, and we listened,’ post, so we’ve made this one a corker!
Here at Dot Star Media Studios, we’ve been going on and on about how much noise and spam there is on the wonderful journorequest hashtag, along with all the real gems. In the last seven days, there were 2011 ‘requests’ (that’s excluding the 6029 retweets!). Just 441 of those passed the Dot Star Media Litmus Test Of Greatness. Here’s one of our graphs to help you visualise:
With our ‘real-time alert’ emails, one request equals one email. This is superb for the hot-off-the-press nature of most journalist requests. It’s also perfect if you want to be at the head of the queue with your response. However, some of our subscribers told us ‘the service is great, but I can’t deal with so many emails!’
You can of course reduce this substantially by using selective topics and adding some relevant keywords. All the same, some customers were still wanting…well, less.
So, you spoke, and we listened! Dan and I are delighted to introduce Journalist Enquiry Digests. These are groups of enquiries – filtered to your topics and keywords, of course – presented in a single email and sent at pre-determined times. They look a lot like this:
The digest settings are available on your profile page, and look like this:
This should cater for even the busiest people. By the way, the morning digest includes all requests since the previous day’s last email, so you won’t miss any of the overnight action.
As always, we’d be delighted to know what you think so please send us an email, or call.
If you’ve previously had a trial but want to check this out, please drop us a line and we’ll get you set up with another brand new, totally free, no obligation trial.
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!
One of the goals of Dot Star Media is to make journalist requests on social media work for you.
To help businesses achieve that aim, we watch social media channels for requests from bona fide journalists, we then classify those enquiries into one or more relevant topics and then fire them off into your email, MSTeams or Slack channels.
When we designed the registration system, our goal was to make it as simple as possible to start receiving these enquiries. To start a trial, all we required was a name, email, and company name (fun fact: the very first implementation was based around per-user subscriptions so we didn’t even ask for an organisation name. On review, we quickly decided that per-company billing was the way forward so we added the extra field. I know I’ve stretched the definition of ‘fun’ there, but hey).
One of the common bits of feedback was ‘we’ve had some great requests come through but there’s a lot which aren’t relevant too.’ and that’s because when signing up for a trial, by default we were subscribing you to all 29 topics.
Dan and I talked through various options and none of them were appealing. Adding 29 checkboxes to the registration page could intimidate some (including me; I’d take one look at a form like that and find somewhere else!)
We’ve settled on adding our broad topic groupings to the registration page and we feel this is a fair balance between usability and function:
So if you choose ‘Lifestyle’, you’ll get Fashion & Beauty through to Travel & Holidays. Of course, having registered you can always fine tune your topics, or even add some keyword filters to further target your feed.
Since we put this live, we’ve seen every single person customise their topic selections, compared to just one in ten before this so we’re confident this change is improving the service for new users.