PR software is the set of tools a public relations (PR) team uses to reach journalists, send out press releases and measure the news coverage that follows. PR is the team that manages how the press and the public see a company. A press release is an official written statement that a company sends to the news media, for example about a new product or its financial results.
The software has three main parts. The first is the media database. It is a directory of journalists, with the publication each one writes for, the subjects they cover and how to contact them. A PR executive uses it to build a list, such as "business journalists who cover cement and construction". The second part is the newswire. A newswire is a service that sends a press release to thousands of newsrooms and news websites at the same moment. The third part is media measurement. After a release goes out, the software counts the articles about it, estimates how many people saw them, and reads whether each one was positive or negative.
Some PR software also serves investor relations. Investor relations is the team that communicates with a company's shareholders. For a company whose shares are traded on a stock exchange, it runs the earnings webcast. This is a live online broadcast in which the company's leaders present the quarterly results and answer questions from analysts.
Say a listed cement company in Ahmedabad announces its quarterly results. When the board approves them, the company first sends the results to the stock exchanges, as SEBI rules require. Only then does the PR team send out its press release. It goes through the newswire to business newsrooms, and by email to the 80 journalists on the team's list. At 4 p.m., the company holds its earnings webcast, and 300 analysts and investors join. By the next morning, the software has found 140 articles about the results. Most of them are neutral. Six of them mention a new plant, which the company had hoped journalists would notice.
PR software and social listening are often sold by the same companies. PR software sends the company's own message out. Social listening reads what everyone says about the company afterwards, on social media as well as in the news. News agencies that sell stories to newspapers are a separate business, a news agency. Trade publications and award events for one industry are covered under B2B media and events. A company launching a product to customers in person uses an event management platform for the event itself.