Archive for September, 2010
Selecting a Social Media Monitoring Service
Sep 24th
Part IV: How to Select a Media Monitoring Service
By William Comcowich
Social media monitoring is the focus of Part IV of the series “How to Select a Media Monitoring Service”.
In earlier articles, Determining Your Media Monitoring Needs, Print News Monitoring vs. Online News Monitoring, and Broadcast Monitoring for TV and Radio News, I describe the various approaches to news monitoring.
Definition: Social Media Monitoring
The social web is a fast-growing and fast-changing “platform” for consumers to discuss companies and products.
Social media monitoring is the process of listening to these online consumer reviews and conversations about your company, its brands and services.
The overarching goal of social media monitoring is to learn from listening – learn the consumer’s concerns about your company and its industry, and then use that knowledge to improve your products and services.
Social Media Monitoring Services
Your social media listening strategy should encompass all forms of word of mouth media and consumer discussion including but not limited to blogs, “complaint” sites, message boards, forums, Usenet news groups, and video sharing sites such as YouTube. You should also monitor social community sites like Facebook, MySpace and Linked-In, along with Twitter, the microblog.
Social media monitoring services monitor all forms of social media – but not all services monitor all media.
The services use specialized software to aggregate social media postings from multiple sources, index all the content on a near-continuous basis, query the index using the client’s key words and identify consumer posts of interest, and then deliver the relevant posts to the client.
Since it’s impossible to predict where or when important market intelligence will “pop up” on the Web — or where it will be repeated or “go viral”, it’s best to monitor the widest possible range of social media.
Market Intelligence vs. Worthless Chatter
Social media overflows with inane chatter. If McDonald’s monitors social media, over 90% of the corporate mentions will be similar to “I’m going to McDonald’s” or “I’m meeting (name) at McDonald’s” – not very useful for market intelligence purposes.
Sharply focused search queries help weed out idle chatter. As an example, McDonald’s could focus social media monitoring on specific product names (brands) instead of the corporate name. Or it could automatically delete clips by putting an “and not” Boolean operator on the phrase “going to” or “meet”. That type of clip avoidance strategy will likely delete a bit of worthwhile conversation, but will certainly minimize useless chatter to be reviewed.
If your company is using social media monitoring as a customer service tool, it’s important to see all mentions to sort out and act on complaints and compliments.
What should you be listening for?
As a starting point, monitor for your corporate name, your brands, the services you offer, and the names of key executives.
Initially, just start looking for complaints, compliments and questions about your company. Look for any serious issues that need to be corrected. Look for patterns or trends that are emerging – positive or negative. Initially, there is no need to perform any serious measurement, especially if your company is not large.
Later, you may want to expand your listening to encompass competitors and industry-specific issues – and also do some formal measurement of social media conversation.
Who in the organization should do the listening?
The answer to “who should listen?” will emerge from the central reason or the combination of reasons your organization wants to monitor social media.
Is it to find service complaints and rectify them? Then “customer service” should listen and react – often called “engagement” in social media circles.
Is the reason to identify issues with product performance? Then marketing or product development should be listening.
Is it to monitor corporate reputation? Then the public relations department should be listening.
In large corporations, multiple departments should be involved in the listening process.
How to listen?
Using free social media search engines can provide quite a good cross-section of word-of-mouth commentary by consumers on the Web. For blogs, try Technorati, Google Blogs and Ice Rocket. Searching multiple services causes a problem of duplicate content that you’ll need to filter out – something that commercial media monitoring services do automatically.
For message boards and forums (which may be even more important to monitor than blogs), try BoardReader which covers about 50,000 different online consumer discussion sites.
For Twitter, FaceBook and Linked-In, just sign up as a member and start using each service’s search engine.
The downside of free search services is the time required to conduct the searches. In fact, it may not be the most productive use of in-house staff. Staff time is better used for analyzing, not searching.
If there are a limited number of new posts each day, it may be acceptable to monitor less frequently. But at least occasional social media monitoring is mandatory to understand any consumer issues and to protect the business reputation.
Bottom Line: free social media search engines may well meet your needs if you have just a few search terms, typically receive only a few new postings each day, are willing to invest the time to conduct searches on a regular schedule using multiple free services, and have no need for advanced services to measure the quantity, reach, and tone of the social media postings. While it may not be perfect, free media monitoring performed by in-house staff may be “good enough”. You must recognize, however, that it isn’t truly “free”. The staff time investment must have an adequate return.
Commercial Social Media Monitoring Services
The paid subscription services for social media monitoring provide more comprehensive coverage, save staff time, and provide many bells & whistles including online clip archives to manage the social media posts, and automated quantitative and qualitative measurement of the posts.
Prominent social media monitoring services include Radian6, Alterian M2, Trackur, and Scout Labs. Presently, more than 50 companies compete in the social media monitoring and measurement space. There is a “wiki” of social media monitoring solutions at Ken Burbary that continually updates the growing number of social media monitoring services. The Yahoo! Directory also contains a comprehensive list of social media monitoring services.
Many of the well-established news monitoring services provide integrated social media monitoring. CyberAlert, for instance, in addition to its online news monitoring service, provides comprehensive daily coverage of 50+ million blogs; 100,000+ message boards, forums, complaint sites, and Usenet news groups; 200+ video sharing sites like YouTube; and all Twitter postings for the previous 24 hours.
The social media monitoring services vary widely in their “raison d’etre” and in their deliverables. In screening the companies, it’s vital to match their mission with your need. It’s vital to do your homework in advance and narrow down your vendor list before contacting services.
Assessing Social Media Monitoring Services
Questions to ask in assessing social media monitoring services:
What’s the primary purpose of your service?
Who are your key customers? What internal department is the primary client contact point for your service?
What’s your service best at doing?
Exactly what social media do you cover? How do you aggregate content? May I add blogs or message boards of special interest to our company?
Do you cover “complaint” sites? Which ones?
Do you monitor Twitter?
Do you cover and exactly what content do you harvest from Facebook, MySpace, and Linked-In?
Can your search engine perform Boolean queries? What Boolean operands does it use? Is it capable of using regular expressions? How many keywords may I use in my queries?
Does your service include a searchable archive of social media posts? What are its features? Ask for a demo of the archive.
How do you differ from (another service you are evaluating)?
Who is your best competitor? Why are you better than they are?
What enhancements do you plan to your service in the next 60 days? Six months? One year?
Many of the services offer a comprehensive demo or, even better, a “test drive” of the service. That’s unquestionably the best way to sort through the features and benefits of the various vendors.
Summary
As a new and rapidly evolving media, online consumer discussion and social communities form the “wild west” of monitoring. No solution is perfect. But for most every company, some social media monitoring solution is necessary. The temptation is to jump into the social media landscape full bore. But, the “full service” solution of listening, measuring and engagement may not be the best solution to meet your needs. Determining your needs before contacting or meeting with vendors is the most effective way to start the process. Even with general specifications in hand, you’re far more apt to contract with an appropriate service – and not buy more than you need.
© Copyright 2010, CyberAlert, Inc.
Article may be reprinted in whole or in part with proper attribution and a hyperlink to CyberAlert, Inc. (www.cyberalert.com)
Broadcast Monitoring for TV & Radio News
Sep 22nd
Part III: How to Select a Media Monitoring Service
By William Comcowich
What’s the role of broadcast news monitoring, sometimes referred to as TV news monitoring, in an overall corporate media monitoring program? When should you use a broadcast monitor? How do you go about selecting a broadcast monitoring service?
Broadcast Monitoring: TV News
While most print publications now publish online, the same is not true of live TV news broadcasts.
Online news monitoring services can track and deliver news articles on the websites of TV networks and local TV stations – but not live TV newscasts, at least not with the same online software.
Live newscasts in the U.S. are best monitored through closed caption feeds or full video recordings. Live TV newscast monitoring is available from specialist broadcast monitoring companies.
In the U.S., the broadcast monitoring specialists are Video Monitoring Service (VMS), TVEyes, and Critical Mention. The News Data Service (NDS) cooperative of local independent broadcast monitors also offers access to news broadcasts and magazine/talk shows of TV networks and local TV affiliates. Each of the independent local NDS affiliates can access the entire video database of 210 markets. All the broadcast monitors offer some form of streaming video clips of TV news programs.
Some online news services including CyberAlert monitor the closed caption text of TV stations and deliver a text file of all clips, not streaming video. They can also order video clips of specific news stories. The online services offer the advantage of integrated news monitoring where you receive both online and TV news clips in the same daily clip report with the same clip archive, typically at lower cost than the dedicated broadcast monitors.
The major press clipping services, Burrelle’sLuce and Cision, offer TV news monitoring in affiliation with VMS and Critical Mention, respectively.
The specialized broadcast monitoring services all offer essentially the same service – but vary in market coverage and bells & whistles features.
Essentially, the services monitor the news programs on all the TV news networks and most local TV stations in all (or most all) 210 U.S. markets. The broadcast monitoring companies record the closed caption text of the news program – that’s the federally mandated text of the audio for use by the hearing impaired that you often see on sports programs in bars where it’s not possible to hear the audio — and they record the full video and audio tracks.
The broadcast monitors then assemble the closed caption text into a searchable database for each day’s news programming. With software similar to Google’s online search engine, they can search that text database for virtually any key word or phrase including but not limited to corporate, brand or executive names each day, then find and deliver the video clips to their subscribers.
The technology of broadcast monitoring is quite good, but it does have some glitches. The quality of the closed caption searching capabilities differs from monitor to monitor. About 80% of any given newscast will be covered by closed caption text, including all of the commentary that the news anchor is reading from a Teleprompter. Closed caption text is often missing on live remote commentary by field reporters. If a key word is mentioned during a “live remote”, the monitoring service may miss the clip. Since the services monitor text, they usually miss any visual references, the McDonald’s sign or Nike symbols on uniforms, for instance.
Unlike online news monitoring where misspellings are rare, closed caption text – usually typed by humans often on the fly in real time – contains quite a few misspellings. In broadcast monitoring, it’s therefore important to search for common misspellings of corporate, brand and executive names.
Most broadcast monitors now offer streaming video and online search engines for their subscriber clients. With streaming video, the recorded audio/video tracks are available to be seen online by subscribers very shortly after the live broadcast. The broadcast monitoring service automatically monitors for key words requested by clients and delivers e-mail or text alerts when it identifies a new clip. In addition, most services permit subscribers themselves to enter search terms to quickly find stories on additional topics.
Who Should Subscribe to a Broadcast Monitoring Service?
Not all organizations require an ongoing subscription to a broadcast monitoring service – which typically cost $500/mo or more.
If your organization typically appears only on local TV news programs a few times per year, then a subscription service is probably unnecessary. In these cases, you’ll likely know about the TV news story in advance or one of your employees or friends will have seen the TV news story. In addition to employees, friends and family, the online news monitoring service you use may also pick up on online reference to the story from the website of the local TV station.
If you learn about a TV news story that has appeared about your organization and you’d like to see it, you can contact one of the broadcast monitoring services and ask if the have the story and can supply you with a clip. Typically, the local broadcast monitoring affiliate of the News Data Service is the most likely to have the story since they are closest to the local market, will be the most cooperative in finding the story and copying the clip, and likely charge the lowest price.
There will be a charge for the transcript of the closed caption text and a larger fee for a video clip, usually delivered as a downloadable MP3 file or on a DVD.
For national organizations with more than a modest number of TV media clips per month, an ongoing subscription to a broadcast monitoring service is likely a good investment to assure the organization is up to date on all the news being broadcast about the organization and its brands in U.S. markets. In times of PR crisis such as a product recall, broadcast monitoring is an essential service to keep up-to-the-minute on all reports and be able to respond in a timely way.
For companies with large numbers of TV clips each year, subscription services that charge a fixed monthly rate with no per clip fee offer the best value.
Broadcast Monitoring: Radio News & Talk
Radio is more difficult to monitor than TV. There are far more stations more widely dispersed. There is no closed caption text.
If you know a person is going to appear on a radio talk show and you want a recording, the interviewee can ask the station for a copy, or you can contact National Aircheck in advance and they will arrange to record the interview over the air. National Aircheck also records all the news programming on all news stations in major cities and many of the nationally syndicated talk radio shows, as does Video Monitoring Service (VMS). If you know what you want – say the Sunday 10:00 am news on WCBS all news radio in New York – they can probably deliver it.
Monitoring on a continuing basis for corporate or brand mentions, however, is more problematic. The companies use speech to text software to produce transcriptions of the news – but… and there are buts: the software, though it has gotten much better in the past few years, is still less than 80% accurate (even less if the speaker has an accent) and, in the whole scheme of things, the radio monitoring services don’t monitor very many stations, concentrating on all news/talk radio stations in major markets.
Once you have decided what you want to cover – and have made a list of the broadcast monitoring services of interest to you – you can start contacting and vetting potential vendors.
Include in your assessment the national broadcast monitoring companies such as Critical Mention, TVEyes, and Video Monitoring Service. The broadcast monitoring service located in your city may be a good place to start, especially if it’s affiliated with News Data Service which enables the local company to provide national coverage. Unfortunately, the websites of the International Association of Broadcast Monitors and News Data Service do not allow customers to search for the names of the local broadcast monitoring companies by city. At the moment, the best way to find a local independent broadcast monitor is the Google search engine with the search term “broadcast monitoring services” AND “name of city”.
© Copyright 2010, CyberAlert, Inc.
Article may be reprinted in whole or in part with proper attribution and a hyperlink to CyberAlert, Inc. (www.cyberalert.com)
Print News Monitoring vs. Online News Monitoring
Sep 16th
Part II: How to Select a Media Monitoring Service
By William Comcowich
So you’ve decided you need a media monitoring program for your organization.
How do you go about selecting from the different approaches to news monitoring and the many media monitoring subscription services?
With the Great Recession still lurking, the temptation may be to seek out the media monitoring service that appears to be least expensive. As with many B2B (business-to-business) services, however, what appears inexpensive on the surface is often not the most effective, best value or the best use of internal public relations and marketing resources.
“Print” News Monitoring vs. Online News Monitoring
For most organizations, news monitoring is the core service. Today, news in traditional media (newspapers, consumer magazines, trade journals, news syndication services) is best monitored on the Internet. The truth of the matter is that, with rare exceptions, most every article that appears in newspapers, magazines and trade journals also appears in the publication’s online edition.
In addition to monitoring and clipping most every print publication, online news monitoring services capture clips from thousands of online news sources that don’t exist in print. These include widely viewed online news sources such as Yahoo! News and Yahoo! Finance, CNN and CNBC. In addition, Internet news monitoring offers worldwide coverage in most every language.
The online news monitoring software misses fewer clips than human readers or digital scanners of print publications, especially broadsheet newspapers. On balance, then, you get far more coverage and clips by monitoring online sources than through traditional press clipping services.
Online news monitoring is also timelier than press clippings since many publications publish stories on the Website long before the print version reaches newsstands or post offices. (Check the New York Times in the afternoon to see many of the next day’s stories in the print edition.)
Press clipping services typically charge a monthly “reading” fee and an additional fee for each clip delivered. The per clip charges can mount up quickly. The monthly bills can cause billing hassles and budgeting issues because of widely varying monthly charges. In contrast, online media monitoring services usually charge only a predictable fixed monthly fee with no per clip fee. In most every case, then, online news monitoring services are less expensive and offer greater value than traditional press clipping services.
For online news monitoring, you have a wide choice of services.
Free Online News Monitoring Services
First, there are free online news monitoring services – usually supported by advertising. The leader is Google News. It offers reasonably good coverage of news sources, but not as extensive as the paid subscription services. The Google News service will send you daily news alerts via e-mail with articles containing the keywords you specify.
But there are drawbacks to free online news monitoring services that require users to invest substantial time in finding clips.
With Google News, neither the e-mail alerts nor the organic searches deliver all the clips. Google uses its algorithms to deliver only what it considers the most relevant or important articles (clips). For “market intelligence” purposes this may be adequate. For public relations monitoring and measurement, it is seriously lacking.
To get all the international clips in Google News or to monitor more than 10 key words or phrases, you have to conduct multiple daily searches -– a time-consuming and tedious process for staff. And if you enter multiple searches each day, you will undoubtedly get redundant clips in your search results. Staff will have to filter out duplicate clips manually.
The Boolean search capabilities in Google News are not as advanced as most of the paid subscription services. As a result, the free service often delivers extraneous or irrelevant articles, especially if you are searching corporate or brand names that are similar to other companies in other industries. Google News also limits searches to a maximum of 10 key words.
Google News and other free news monitoring services do not include a way to store the delivered clips. To store the clips, a staff person will have to cut and paste the clips into a database or spreadsheet – a tedious and time-consuming task – or print out each article, an expensive proposition (especially in color).
Google News also does not provide measurement/circulation data so measurement of PR success (except numbers of clips, the least important PR metric) is near impossible.
Nonetheless, for many small and mid-size organizations, news search engines such as Google News or Yahoo News provide sufficient coverage and features.
A free search engine may well meet your needs if you have just a few search terms, typically receive only a few clips each day, have no need for measurement data or tools, and are willing to invest the time to conduct multiple searches each day.
The free search services, however, are not truly free. They can be quite costly in terms of time required to do daily searches. Since the free news monitoring services do not store your clips, as do most subscription media monitoring services, there is also the cost of transferring the clips from the search engine results to a database or spreadsheet and the cost of then printing out clips. Searching and managing those paper-based clips is more difficult and time-consuming than the digital clips subscription services store in a fully searchable online database. Using RSS feeds will help minimize staff time devoted to media monitoring.
Paid Subscription Online News Monitoring Services
The subscription online news monitoring services including the leaders CyberAlert, CustomScoop, and Meltwater offer many features not offered by free services including: a) more comprehensive news coverage including virtually all the daily and weekly newspapers, consumer magazines, trade journals, news syndication services, news portals on the Web, websites of broadcast news organizations worldwide – all in multiple languages b) automated daily search queries in multiple languages for multiple countries with virtually unlimited search terms c) advanced Boolean logic to minimize extraneous or irrelevant clips d) online digital clip archive to store, search and manage clips e) instant software-based translation of foreign language clips f) PR measurement data attached to each news media clip g) dynamically created media measurement charts and graphs g) custom features to meet special needs.
The customized news monitoring features can assure that you get exactly the news coverage you want with a minimum investment of staff time. Do you want clips only from a custom list of specific publications — not all news sources? Do you want only “important” articles, not all mentions of your key search terms? Do you have special delivery requirements such as clip delivery throughout the business day or XML format? Do you prefer RSS delivery? Do you want the clips delivered at a specific or unusual time each day? Do you want only one copy of the same story — a press release for instance? Do you want the clips delivered to multiple people? Do you want clips automatically inserted into separate e-mails and archive folders for different clients or brands? Do you want the clips edited and packaged into a daily or weekly news briefing for executives? Do you want all news clips edited by human readers before delivery to absolutely, positively eliminate unwanted clips? Most of the specialists in online news monitoring offer these customized services.
The traditional press clipping services such as Burrelle’sLuce or Cision also offer online news monitoring services.
But don’t let the press clipping services sell you both press clipping and online news monitoring. Most every article in print editions of newspapers, magazines and trade journals also appears in that publication’s online edition. Some small community newspapers (mostly weeklies) and some trade journals (mostly medical and academic) do not publish all their print content on the Internet — but that’s rare. In fact, abstracts of all medical journals are also available online at PubMed, a free service of the National Library of Medicine. If there are print publications that are really important to you and are not published on the web, then ask the press clipping service to monitor only those publications in print – and everything else online – in order to avoid duplicate clips and escalating variable costs.
Once you have decided what custom features you want – and have made a list of the commercial media monitoring services of interest to you – you can start contacting and vetting potential vendors.
© Copyright 2010, CyberAlert, Inc.
Article may be reprinted in whole or in part with proper attribution and a hyperlink to CyberAlert, Inc. (www.cyberalert.com)
Determining Your Media Monitoring Needs
Sep 14th
Part I: How to Select a Media Monitoring Service
By William Comcowich
With the increased emphasis on return on investment for corporate communications, an effective media monitoring service is essential as both a media intelligence service and to demonstrate the success of the organization’s public relations and social media programs.
With the Great Recession still lurking, the temptation may be to seek out the media monitoring service that appears to be least expensive. As with many B2B (business-to-business) services, however, what appears inexpensive on the surface is often not the best value or the best use of internal public relations and marketing resources.
In an earlier article entitled Media Monitoring: What It Is. How It Evolved. How It’s Done Now, I described the various approaches to news monitoring and social media monitoring. I also argued that online news monitoring was superior to traditional press clipping or in-house staff monitoring because it was a) more comprehensive, monitoring more news sources in more languages in more countries b) more accurate than human readers with fewer missed clips c) more timely in its delivery of news clips either overnight or in near-real time d) more efficient clip storage in digital files instead of paper clips in folders e) additional features such as instant translation of foreign language clips, and finally, f) less costly than either traditional press clipping services that charge a monthly fee plus a per clip fee, or in-house staff using online search engines to identify news clips.
So, let’s assume you have decided to subscribe to an online news monitoring service….
How do you go about selecting from the mélange of media monitoring approaches and subscription services?
Even before you contact and assess any of the commercial media monitoring services, here are three key questions to ask yourself.
The answers to these questions will help you identify the most appropriate potential suppliers.
Q1: What do I want to monitor?
“Print” News Monitoring vs. Online News Monitoring
For most organizations, news monitoring is the core service. Today, news in traditional media (newspapers, consumer magazines, trade journals, news syndication services) is best monitored on the Internet. In addition to monitoring and clipping most every print publication, online news monitoring services capture clips from thousands of online news sources that don’t exist in print. These include widely viewed online news sources such as Yahoo! News and Yahoo! Finance, CNN and CNBC. In addition, Internet news monitoring offers worldwide coverage in most every language. The online news monitoring software also misses fewer clips than human readers or digital scanners of print publications, especially broadsheet newspapers.
On balance, then, you get far more coverage and clips by monitoring online sources than through traditional press clipping services.
Online monitoring is also timelier than press clippings since many publications publish stories on the Website long before the print version reaches newsstands or post offices. (Check the New York Times in the afternoon to see many of the next day’s stories in the print edition.)
Press clipping services typically charge a monthly “reading” fee and an additional fee for each clip delivered. The per clip charges can mount up quickly. The monthly bills can cause billing hassles and budgeting nightmares because of the widely varying monthly charges. In contrast, online media monitoring services usually charge only at predictable fixed monthly fee with no per clip fee.
For online news monitoring, you have a wide choice of services.
First, there are free online news monitoring services – usually supported by advertising. The leader is Google News. It offers reasonably good coverage of news sources, but not as extensive as the subscription services. The Google News service will send you news alerts via e-mail with articles containing the keywords you specify.
But there are drawbacks to the free online news monitoring services. Neither the e-mail alerts nor the organic searches you enter online deliver all the clips. Google uses its algorithms to deliver only what they consider the most relevant or important articles (clips).
For “market intelligence” purposes this may be quite sufficient. For public relations monitoring and measurement, it is seriously lacking.
To get all the international clips in Google News or if you need to monitor multiple key words or phrases, you will have to conduct multiple daily searches -– a time-consuming and tedious process for staff. And if you enter multiple searches each day, you will undoubtedly get redundant clips in your search results. You’ll have to filter out duplicate clips by hand.
The Boolean search capabilities in Google News are not as advanced as some of the paid subscription services. As a result, the free service often delivers extraneous or irrelevant articles, especially if you are searching corporate or brand names that are duplicated by other companies in other industries. Within Google News, it’s difficult to sort out each day’s clips, especially if the staff member misses a day or two of entering search terms and processing clips.
Google News does not include a way to store the clips it delivers. To store the clips, a staff person will have to cut and paste the clips into a database or spreadsheet – a tedious and time-consuming task – or print out each article, an expensive proposition (especially in color).
Google News also does not provide measurement/circulation data so measurement of PR success (except numbers of clips) is near impossible.
The subscription online news monitoring services such as the leaders CyberAlert, CustomScoop, and Meltwater offer most all of those features and more including a) automated daily search queries b) advanced Boolean logic to minimize extraneous or irrelevant clips c) online digital clip archive to store, search and manage clips d) instant software-based translation of foreign language clips and e) dynamically-created media measurement charts and graphs.
The traditional press clipping services such as Burrelle’sLuce or Cision also offer online news monitoring services with similar features.
But don’t let the press clipping services sell you both press clipping and online news monitoring. The truth of the matter is that most every article that appears in newspapers, magazines and trade journals also appears in the publication’s online edition. Some small community newspapers (mostly weeklies) and some trade journals (mostly medical and academic) do not publish all their print content on the Internet — but that’s rare. In fact, abstracts of all medical journals are also available online at PubMed, a service of the National Library of Medicine. If there are print publications that are really important to you and are not published on the web, then ask the press clipping service to monitor only those publications in print – and everything else online – in order to avoid duplicate clips and escalating variable costs.
TV News
While most print publications are almost entirely online now, the same is not true of live TV news broadcasts.
Online news monitoring services can track and deliver news articles on the websites of TV networks and local TV stations – but not live TV newscasts, at least not with the same online software.
Live newscasts are best monitored through closed caption feeds or full video recordings.
Often, however, TV networks and local TV stations convert the live news program into text articles that they post on their Websites. These will be found by the online news monitoring services – signaling that your company or brand was probably mentioned on the live broadcast and might want to take a look at the closed caption text or the video. To get a copy, just call a broadcast monitoring service and ask them to find it for you. There will be a small charge for the closed caption text and a larger charge for a video clip, depending on length, usually delivered within hours as a downloadable video file or streaming video.
This is an alternative to paying a recurring monthly fee for a TV News Monitoring service. For small and mid-size businesses (SMB) that seldom get mentioned on TV news programs, an on-going subscription to a live TV news monitoring service may not be necessary or cost-effective.
Live TV newscast monitoring is available from specialist broadcast monitoring companies. In the U.S., the broadcast monitoring specialists are Video Monitoring Service (VMS), TVEyes, and Critical Mention. The News Data Service (NDS) cooperative of local broadcast monitors also offers access to news broadcasts and magazine/talk shows of TV networks and local TV affiliates. Each of the NDS affiliates can access the entire video database of 210 markets. All the services offer streaming video clips of TV news programs.
Some online news services including CyberAlert monitor the closed caption text of TV stations and deliver a text file of all clips. They can also order video clips of specific news stories. The online services offer the advantage of integrated news monitoring where you receive both online and TV news clips in the same daily clip report with the same clip archive, sortable by media type.
The major press clipping services, Burrelle’sLuce and Cision, offer TV news monitoring in affiliation with VMS and Critical Mention, respectively.
Radio News & Talk?
Radio is more difficult to monitor than TV. There are far more stations more widely dispersed. There is no closed caption text.
If you know a person is going to appear on a radio talk show and you want a recording, the interviewee can ask the station for a copy, or can contact National Aircheck in advance and they will arrange to record the interview. National Aircheck also records the news on many all news stations in major cities and many of the nationally syndicated talk radio shows, as does Video Monitoring Service (VMS). If you know what you want – say the 10:00 am news on WCBS all news radio in New York – they can deliver it.
Monitoring on a continuing basis for corporate or brand mentions, however, is more problematic. The companies use speech to text software to produce transcriptions of the news – but… and there are buts: the software, though it has gotten much better in the past few years, is still less than 80% accurate (even less if the speaker has an accent) and, in the whole scheme of things, the radio monitoring services don’t monitor very many stations, concentrating on all news/talk radio stations in major markets.
Social Media?
If your organization wants to track what consumers are saying on the Internet about your company or brands, it’s worthwhile to monitor all forms of word-of-mouth media including but not limited to blogs, “complaint” sites, message boards, forums, Usenet news groups, and video sharing sites such as YouTube.
Since it’s impossible to predict where or when important market intelligence will “pop up” on the Web — or where it will be repeated, it’s best to do comprehensive monitoring of all possible social media sites.
You may also want to monitor community sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Linked-In. At the present time, this is best done manually by staff since you must be each writer’s “friend” to gain access to most of the worthwhile content.
Many of the media monitoring companies monitor Twitter tweets as part of their social media monitoring services.
Unlike news monitoring where most every clipped article has some media intelligence value, social media is overflowing with inane chatter that contains little or no market intelligence. If McDonald’s monitors social media, over 90% of the corporate mentions will be similar to “I’m going to McDonald’s” or “I’m meeting (name) at McDonald’s” – not very useful.
Sharply focused search queries help weed out commentary with little or no market intelligence. As an example, McDonald’s could focus social media monitoring on specific product names (brands) instead of the corporate name. Or it could automatically delete clips by putting an “and not” operator on the phrase “going to” or “meet”. That type of clip avoidance strategy will likely delete a bit of worthwhile conversation, but will certainly minimize useless chatter to be reviewed.
That is certainly not the strategy to use, however, if the company is using social media monitoring as a customer service tool. In that case, it’s important to see all mentions to sort out and act on complaints and compliments. The travel industry has become quite adept at using social media to improve customer service.
Using free social media search engines can provide quite a good cross-section of word-of-mouth commentary by consumers on the Web. For blogs, try Technorati, Blog Pulse and Google Blogs. Since no one free blog search engine covers all blogs, it’s best to conduct searches for your key words on multiple search engines. The problem there is that you’ll have to filter out duplicate content – something that the commercial media monitoring services do automatically. For message boards and forums, try BoardReader. Be warned, though: the BoardReader free service delivers a limited number of postings. Twitter also offers a search engine on its site, as does FaceBook and Linked-In, available to all members of the community.
The paid subscription services for social media monitoring provide more comprehensive coverage, save staff time, and provide many bells & whistles including online clip archives to manage the social media posts, and automated measurement of the posts.
Prominent social media monitoring services include Radian6, Alterian M2, and Scout Labs. Presently, more than 50 companies compete in the social media monitoring space. In screening the companies, it’s vital to match their mission with your need.
Many of the news monitoring services also provide integrated social media monitoring. CyberAlert, for instance, provides comprehensive daily coverage of 50+ million blogs; 100,000+ message boards, forums, complaint sites, and Usenet news groups; 200+ video sharing sites; and all Twitter postings for the previous 24 hours.
Integrated Media Monitoring
Most client organizations currently use different monitoring services for news, broadcast, and social media, partly because the monitoring companies created silos by specializing in one of the three services. Now, however, the trend is clearly toward integrated services in which one media monitoring company provides all three media intelligence services: news, broadcast, and social media.
In order to be able to offer fully integrated media monitoring of online news plus broadcast news plus social media, the industry is entering into an interesting business model of co-opetition. That is, both cooperation/partnering and competition. Specialist companies use their own proprietary systems to do one facet of media monitoring – broadcast monitoring, for instance – and then purchase online news monitoring or social media monitoring from a competitor that specializes in that service. They then package the purchased services for resale in their own integrated media monitoring service.
As one example, CyberAlert, the online news monitoring specialist, makes available to other media monitoring and public relations services its Omnibus News Service comprising all new news articles each day from over 50,000 independent news sources worldwide.
Q2: What custom features do I need?
Some of the better online media monitoring services can customize their service to meet your specific requirements. Do you want clips only from a custom list of specific publications — not all news sources? Do you want only “important” articles, not all mentions of your key search terms? Do you have special delivery requirements such as clip delivery throughout the business day or XML format? Do you prefer RSS delivery? Do you want the clips delivered at a specific or unusual time each day? Do you want only one copy of the same story — a press release for instance? Do you want the clips delivered to multiple people? Do you want clips automatically inserted into separate e-mails and archive folders for different clients or brands? Do you want the clips edited and packaged into a daily or weekly news briefing for executives? Do you want all news clips edited by human readers before delivery to absolutely, positively eliminate unwanted clips? Among the media monitoring services, CyberAlert is well known for customizing services to meet specific client requirements, including the special requirements of measurement and analysis services.
Q3: Is a “free” online media monitoring service 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 online word-of-mouth and social media monitoring, the free blog search engines may provide sufficient coverage and search features.
A free search engine may well meet your needs if you have just a few search terms, typically receive only a few clips each day, have no need for measurement data or tools, and are willing to invest the time to conduct searches each day on multiple free services.
The free search services, however, can be costly in terms of time required to do daily searches. Since the free services do not store your clips, as do most subscription media monitoring services, there is also the cost of transferring the clips from the search engine results to a database or spreadsheet and the cost of then printing out clips. Searching and managing those paper-based clips is more difficult and time-consuming than the digital clips subscription services store in a fully searchable online database. Using RSS feeds will minimize staff time devoted to monitoring.
For any organization with even a modest number of media clips per month, an online subscription news monitoring service is more time efficient and may be more cost-effective than free online media monitoring services, considering the cost of staff time with in-house monitoring. That value equation is especially true of the online media monitoring services that do not charge an additional fee for each clip delivered.
Once you have decided what you want to cover – and have made a list of the commercial media monitoring services of interest to you – you can start contacting and vetting potential vendors.
Part 2 of How to Select a Media Monitoring Service will provide in-depth information on how to sort out the various promotional claims of commercial media monitoring services – and how to decide on the best service to meet your needs.
© Copyright 2010, CyberAlert, Inc.
Article may be reprinted in whole or in part with proper attribution and a hyperlink to CyberAlert, Inc. (www.cyberalert.com)
2011 PR Grants Available for Not-for-Profit Organizations
Sep 9th
CyberAlert will award a minimum of 15 public relations grants to not-for-profit organizations for 2011. Each PR grant award consists of one full year of free news monitoring / press clipping services or social media monitoring service, ranging in value from $3,000 to $4,500.
From 2004 to 2010, CyberAlert awarded 144 media monitoring grants to not-for-profit organizations, including 20 grants in 2010, with an aggregate value of over $300,000. Among the grant recipients for 2010 were American Association on Health and Disability, Coaching Association of Canada, Environmental Law & Policy Center, Mercy Ships, National Law Enforcement Officer Memorial, National Wildlife Federation, Redlight Children’s Campaign, Vascular Disease Foundation and Young Americans.
In past years, the PR grants were restricted to organizations in the United States and Canada. This year all not-for-profit organizations worldwide are eligible to apply for a grant, except for previous grant recipients.
CyberAlert is accepting grant applications until December 31 and will announce the grant recipients in January. More information and a simple and secure grant application is available online at PR Grants.
