As a PR professional it can be challenging keeping up with the onslaught of tools and resources available to help uncover editorial opportunities, pitch and distribute news, measure and monitor social media campaigns and gather information on speaking and award opportunities.

Beyond the HAROs and Cisions’ of the world, we thought it would be useful to put together our top picks for unique tools every PR professional should consider having in their arsenal to efficiently and effectively add value to PR campaigns and initiatives.

MatchPoint – MatchPoint allows PR professionals to search for journalists who write about what they’re pitching, by adding the pitch to the search box. For a monthly subscription fee, users can identify reporters and bloggers based on what they actually have written, not solely on their beat or title as listed in many online media databases.

Press Kit’n – Press Kit’n is a tool for publishing social media releases and maintaining an online news presence. While many organizations typically have a website designer/master, this is a great tool for smaller companies or start-ups that are looking to affordably create a newsroom. The service features a variety of customizable templates, an RSS feed, which enables journalists to easily subscribe to the newsroom and Twitter functionality so readers can easily tweet news from the newsroom.

Backtweets – A free tool that provides a quick snapshot of every tweet that has ever contained a link or reference to a particular URL. As a test, I did a search for all tweets that include the Communiqué PR blog URL and found more than 52 links to the blog via Twitter. Backtweets could be incredibly valuable to track a particular campaign to see how much traffic has been driven to a website as a result of Twitter activity.

MediaOnTwitter – MediaOnTwitter is similar to other lists such as MuckRack and JournalistTweets which are excellent tools for finding journalists on to follow on Twitter. The reason I like this particular site is it is simple and straightforward to use. You can easily sort the list by name, publication, title or country making it simple to quickly find journalists. Additionally, you can add media to the list and also search for journalists in other countries including Canada, Australia, U.K., France, Russia, South Africa and more.

AwardSync – We’ve written about AwardSync previously, but it’s worth mentioning again. It is a free database of awards opportunities. This free service enables award organizers to post information and publicize industry award programs making it easy for organizations and PR professionals to find awards relevant to their specific industry and vertical market. We recently tested the service and found it offers intuitive search functionalities much like Google and can be a valuable resource when developing awards programs for clients.

Alltop – I use this search engine from time to time to get a quick snapshot of what’s being written about around a particular topic. According to its website, Alltop, “The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you.” I did a quick search for “iPhone” which brought back stories from the top blogs covering the iPhone. While it does not bring back results for everything, if you’re looking for stories/blog posts around a general topic you can usually get a good snapshot here.

Not all tools are created alike and as technology evolves, I anticipate these tools will only become more comprehensive. It will be important for PR professionals to continue experimenting with these tools, providing feedback and selecting the tools that make the most sense for their objectives.

Do you have a ‘must-have’ PR tool to share? Let us know about it!