At Meltwater we’re always exploring new ways to integrate AI into our products to make life easier for our customers. The PR Assistant is a new ChatGPT-powered feature that helps PR executives to write impactful media pitches and press releases much more quickly, by creating a high-quality first draft based on some basic information.
Although extremely powerful, the PR Assistant is incredibly simple to use. As you can see from this screenshot, most of the options are largely self-explanatory, but we’ll run through an example to demonstrate how it all works.
Tip: Read about the AI ethics we're following.
To begin with, let’s use a fictional brief for a new product announcement we want to push out to the media, using the following text:
“Fluffee Stuff is a soft-furnishings manufacturer. We are launching a new range of giant cushions with popular internet memes printed on them, and plan to target college students and young adults as the key market for this product. These jumbo meme cushions are ideal for adding a little fun to any living space, lounge or bedroom, and they make great gifts. At launch, the cushions will be available with a selection of 10 of the most popular memes in history, including Success Kid, Distracted Boyfriend, and Sad Keanu, but going forward we also plan to include the top memes from each year in time for the holiday shopping season.”
This is a relatively short description. The PR Assistant can accept prompts of up to 4200 characters, and the more detail you can add to your prompt, the better the results will be. Nevertheless, this short prompt is enough for the assistant to create something we can work with.
First we’ll ask it to generate a media pitch that we can put into an email to journalists.
We’ve set the length to “short” because we know journalists prefer email pitches to get right to the point, and the tone is “persuasive” because we really want to convince them to ask for more information. Next, we just need to click the Generate button and wait a moment for the results:
Not bad at all! You could use this text as is in your email outreach, although we always recommend taking a little time to personalize the output and add your own tone of voice to it. That can be done right in the app by simply clicking onto the output window and editing the text directly.
Let’s imagine the reporters have asked for more information. As well as the product photography and samples, we also want to send them a press release with all of the extra detail missing from the pitch email.
Using the same prompt, we can simply select the Press Release option, choose a longer length, and for the purposes of this example we’ll change the tone to “Enthusiastic” to keep the release more engaging.
Here we can see that the PR Assistant has generated a full medium-length press release, and taken a good guess at filling in information we didn’t include in the prompt, such as the website address, and quote from a spokesperson. You can simply add in the name of a spokesperson and keep the quote, or use the “Add/Edit Quotes” feature to ensure that the Assistant uses real quotes that you specify.
You can add as many quotes as you like, each attributed to a different spokesperson if required. Once you’ve done this, the PR Assistant will be sure to include them all in the press release or brief that it generates.
If you’re not happy with the output, you can simply ask the PR Assistant to regenerate it, and the AI will make another attempt, as many times as you want.
It’s really that simple. The PR Assistant helps you to generate media pitches and press releases much more quickly, delivering a good quality first draft which can then be edited into the final document far quicker than writing the whole thing from scratch.
Want to see the AI-Powered Meltwater PR Writing Assistant in action? Simply fill in the form below and we'll show you.
