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)