IT Data Centered

Today ITDatabase rolled out a new editorial calendar tracking feature for tech marketing / PR pros.

The UI is very simple / minimalist (we strive for speed / ease of discovery with the product in general).  We give the user the full list of edit cals (which they can of course just browse, reverse-chron by deadline date or by publish date of the respective items).  And we allow the user to either search by keyword or by source.  Clicking on a specific edcal opportunity will display the respective contact person(s) at the publication.

As we said in today’s HARO ad – the “editorial calendar” as a tech PR entity certainly does not hold the degree of importance that it once did.  But you don’t want to miss relevant publicity opportunities in publications you care about.

Whether you’re in-house or at an agency – It’s a major pain to have to manually keep a list of opportunities in excel (I remember working at a PR firm that managed edcals in the company “Intranet” – which would take about 30 seconds to load every time you did a page refresh … wheee!).  If you’re doing this manually, the pain is three-fold:  (1) building a comprehensive list of all of the publications that have editorial calendars in the tech industry (2) remembering to visit them frequently to look for updates, and (3) remembering to contact the publications far enough in advance of the deadline.

Hopefully we’ve eliminated some of that pain in the editorial calendar process for our users.

Note:  our timing in releasing this is a bit unfortunate, approaching Q4.  Editorial calendars can tend to be a little stale at the end of the year, considering that it was nine months ago that these editorial teams huddled around and drew these up.  Generally editorial calendar opportunities are richest at the beginning of the calendar year.  We’ll be working hard over the next few months to make sure that the 2010 tech editorial calendars that we index for you are as comprehensive as possible.