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Media Monitoring: Methods to Determine Your Needs

With the developing need to demonstrate return on investment in corporate communications departments, an effective media monitoring service in now essential to improve media intelligence and to demonstrate the success of the organization's public relations and social media programs.

In an earlier article entitled Media Monitoring: What It Is. How It Evolved. How It's Done Now, I defined media monitoring, explained how the industry started and evolved, and examined how each form of media monitoring is done at the present time.

So, let's assume your organization has decided to start a media monitoring program....

How do you determine which media to monitor?

One key is to establish in which media your organization appears and how you plan to use the media intelligence resulting from the media clips.

News Monitoring

For most organizations, news monitoring is the core service. Monitoring news can provide insights on what's being said about your organization and its products. It also provides a good yardstick into the success of your media relations program.

News can be segmented for monitoring by geography, language, media type or industry.

Geography and language are the easiest to segment. Do you want to monitor just local (state), national, a selected set of countries, or worldwide?

Do you want media clips only in your home language or multiple languages? In the U.S., news is published in over 50 languages. Many publications worldwide publish online articles in multiple languages on the same website.

What media do you want to cover? General news includes daily/weekly newspapers, consumer magazines and news syndication services. If you use an online news monitoring service, general news also includes news portals like Yahoo! News and the websites of national TV and radio networks (CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, NPR) and local broadcast stations.

What trade journals do you want to monitor in what industry? In most media monitoring services, you can select general business publications and industry trade journals to monitor.

Except for businesses that are local, most organizations monitor all news sources nationally for all mentions about their organization and its brands and services. Many larger organizations only want to clip "important" articles or only one copy of a syndicated article. Some major companies confine media monitoring to major news sources - both consumer and trade.

Organizations with international operations will want to monitor media in the countries in which they operate and in the native languages. Articles in foreign languages can be translated almost instantly using software-mediated translation or, if more accurate translation is required, by translation services or native-language employees.

To monitor "print" news, you can choose a traditional press clipping service or an online news monitoring service. In a subsequent article, I'll examine the features and benefits of each approach. In general, online news monitoring services offer the best news coverage and the best value. With online media monitoring services, major international companies no longer have to contract with local press clipping services in each country.

In "Print News Monitoring vs. Online News Monitoring", Part II analyzes the differences between press clipping services and online news monitoring services. Online News Monitoring."

TV News Monitoring

In spite of the growth of news on the Internet, most people still rely on TV to get the day's news.

In many ways, monitoring TV news is more difficult than monitoring print publications. While print media are now available online, TV newscasts are rarely accessible through the Internet.

For TV news monitoring, broadcast monitoring companies record the closed caption text and the video/audio signals of national TV networks and local TV stations. They then use search software to identify a client's key words in the closed caption text.

While network broadcasts can be monitoring from a central location, local TV newscasts must be monitored from within the geographical area they serve.

If your organization does not appear on TV news very often, there is little or no need to pay for an ongoing broadcast monitoring service. You can order individual clips from a broadcast monitoring company on an ad-hoc basis. Broadcast monitoring companies will themselves alert you that they have found a story about your company or brand.

For major national or international companies, TV news monitoring is as vital as print/online monitoring in order to know what's being said about them on national news and talk programs and in local markets, especially local markets where they operate.

Part III of this series examines "Broadcast Monitoring for TV & Radio News."

Monitoring Radio News & Talk

Radio is even more difficult to monitor than TV. There are far more stations more widely dispersed. There is no closed caption text.

As a result, monitoring news and talk on radio for corporate and brand mentions is problematic. Very few companies continuously monitor radio newscasts - and they provide less than comprehensive coverage (mostly all news and talk stations). As a result, radio news monitoring is largely confined to having recordings done of radio interviews that you know about in advance.

Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring is the process of "listening" to what consumers are saying on the Internet. Social media are sometimes referred to as "word of mouth", "consumer discussion", or "user generated content".

The different elements to online social media include blogs, complaint sites, message boards, forums, Usenet news groups, and video sharing sites such as YouTube. Social media also include community sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Linked-In - and the microblog Twitter. Product review sites like Amazon are also important.

Because social media exert significant influence on corporate and brand reputation, most business organizations now recognize the need for and value of monitoring social media.

Since it's impossible to predict where or when important market intelligence will surface in social media — or where it will be repeated, it's best to monitor all elements of social media.

Many companies use in-house staff to monitor social media using online search tools such as Technorati, Google Blogs, BoardReader and the search engines of social communities.

Subscription services for social media monitoring provide more comprehensive coverage, save staff time, and provide many bells & whistles to manage social media clips. Many social media monitoring services include automated measurement and analysis of consumer discussion.

Part IV of this series "Selecting a Social Media Monitoring Service" offers in-depth analysis what social media to monitor and how best to do it.

Integrated Media Monitoring

Most client organizations currently use separate monitoring services for news, broadcast, and social media, largely because the media monitoring companies created silos by specializing in one of the three services. Now, however, the trend is clearly toward integrated services in which one company provides all three media intelligence services: news, broadcast, and social media.

In order to be able to offer fully integrated media monitoring (online news + broadcast news + social media), the industry is entering into a period of co-opetition. That is, both cooperation and competition. Specialist companies use their own systems to perform one facet of media monitoring - broadcast monitoring, for instance - and then contract the other services from a competitor. They then package the purchased services for resale in their own integrated service under their own brand name.

By way of example, media monitoring organizations and public relations agencies are able to private brand the Omnibus News Service which monitors over 50,0000 online news articles each day as the news monitoring service for their clients.

Are "free" online media monitoring services good enough?

For many small and mid-size organizations, news search engines such as Google News or Yahoo News provide sufficient coverage and features. For user-generated content online, free social media search engines may indeed provide adequate coverage and search features. The free search services, however, can be costly in terms of staff time required to do daily searches.

For any organization with even a modest number of media clips per month, an integrated media monitoring service is more time efficient and may be more cost-effective, considering the cost of staff time.

Once you have decided what you want to cover, you can start contacting and vetting potential vendors.

Subsequent articles on "Print News Monitoring vs. Online News Monitoring", "Broadcast TV and Radio News Monitoring", and "Social Media Monitoring Solutions" examine media monitoring solutions for each major media segment. The articles provides in-depth information on how to sort through the various promotional claims of commercial media monitoring services - and how to decide on the best service to meet your specific needs.

William J. (Bill) Comcowich is President & CEO of CyberAlert, Inc., (www.cyberalert.com) a worldwide media monitoring company for online news, broadcast news and social media. Each day, CyberAlert monitors 50,000+ online news sources in 75+ languages in 189 countries along with most all social media. CyberAlert offers a 14-day no-risk free media monitoring trial of all its services at https://secure.cyberalert.com/ftorder_sya.html

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