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)

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)

Part 2
By William J. Comcowich

In Part 1 of How to Select a Media Monitoring Service, I discussed how client organizations can determine their specific media monitoring needs, how to select the best approach for your organization, and what commercial services are available for news monitoring, broadcast monitoring and social media monitoring.

In Part 2, I will discuss how you can vet individual companies and weigh the various promotional claims.

In evaluating media monitoring services, you want to focus on the following attributes:

· Media coverage
· Search capability / clip accuracy
· Delivery methods / timelines
· Ability / willingness to customize service
· Clip archive / clip management features
· Measurement data
· Price / cost / value

Now, here’s six key questions to focus on as you go through the process of searching for and evaluating media monitoring services:

Media Coverage

What media is covered? Are they the media you need covered? Get the service to pinpoint exactly what news sources, blogs, and word of mouth media they cover. If you’re interested in specialty publications, make sure all your key news sources are included or will be added upon request. CyberAlert , for instance, is willing to check your list of “must have” media against its own media list and add any news sources that it does not already monitor — and it does that within 24 hours of receiving your order.

Some online news monitoring services include thousands of “mouthpiece” news sources in their media coverage. That is, they deliver news articles posted on corporate and/or government sites. Do you want those clips or do you want clips only from legitimate independent news sources and wire services?

If you’re a global company, get the details on the news sources the service covers worldwide (especially in the countries your organization does business) and how those news clips are delivered. Make sure the service can search, index and deliver articles in foreign language with non-English and non-Latin characters such as Arabic, Russian, and Chinese. Special tip for international coverage: check to be sure the service can search your key words in the native language including languages with non-English or kanji characters.

Query Capability / Clip Accuracy

Dirty little secret #1: Traditional press clipping services with human readers miss 35 to 40% of valid clips. Scanners of print publications are only marginally better. Because they miss so many clips, some large corporations subscribe to two press clipping services to assure complete coverage, effectively doubling the cost of service. As noted above, reading and clipping the hard copy of publications is probably not necessary and is certainly not cost effective compared with online news monitoring services.

Dirty little secret #2: Some online media monitoring services do not discriminate well between valid and irrelevant clips — especially if your company or brand name is a generic word like Orange (a telecom company) or Gap (the clothing retailer), or a common proper name like Sears (the department store). The last thing busy communications professionals need are irrelevant clips filling the in-box.

To avoid these problems, make sure the service will help you develop the most accurate, incisive search terms. Have them explain in non-technical terms how their software works, how they assure comprehensive media coverage, and how they guard against inaccurate articles being forwarded to you. To avoid extraneous clips, most online services use Boolean searches employing multiple words. Example: “Orange” AND (telecom OR cellular OR mobile OR phone) AND NOT “Orange Crush”.

To optimize clip accuracy, the better online media monitoring services also specify “proximity” of search terms within a specified number of characters, words or sentences. The best services utilize Rex statements that tell the software that, for instance, the first letter of “Orange” or all letters of SPA must be capitalized. With these advanced searching methods, online news monitoring services such as CyberAlert 4.0 can achieve 97%+ clip delivery accuracy, even for difficult search terms.

Key questions to assure advanced search capabilities: Does you system accommodate Boolean queries? What Boolean operators does you system accommodate? And? Or? And not? Near? Does your system accommodate the use of regular expressions (REX statements). If you’re dealing with a sales representative, s/he may not even know that term.

Especially if you have a hard-to-search-accurately company or brand name such as “Orange” or “Gap” or “Sears”, ask the company to perform some tests or provide you with a limited time trial. Make sure the company uses exactly the same procedure in the trial that they’ll use in the paid service. In other words, take pains to make sure the company is not using human editors to weed out bad clips before sending the results to you during the trial.

Dirty Little Secret #3: Some media monitoring services are not able to search query terms that contain non-English characters. If your search term or any of your foreign language query terms contain an accented character or non-Latin characters (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Arabic, Greek), the services are unable to perform those searches with any reliable level of accuracy and completeness. If international media coverage is important to you, ask about and test the capability to query, index and deliver non-English and non-Latin languages.

Delivery

In what format? Take a look at a sample delivery to be sure it meets your requirements. Does it include key data including name of news source, location, headline, extract, key words highlighted and any other feature you require. Are there other optional delivery formats?

Ask the service: “At the price you are quoting to me, if a story is published today in (name of newspaper) or (name of trade journal) and mentions my company or brand, when will I receive the clip?” Traditional hard-copy press clips from newspapers in outlying cities or trade journals often take two to three weeks to deliver from date of publication. Online clips are delivered overnight or in near real time.

Some online services deliver only a link to the article and a short extract. Others deliver full article text. Ask: “Do the clips in the online archive have full text of the article for searching purposes?” Some services deliver “cluttered” clips that contain extraneous copy from menus or contiguous articles. (This unwanted text often results in delivery of irrelevant clips.) The best services delete superfluous content adjacent to the main body of the article. Take a look at sample clips. Is the text clean?

If clip deliver is once a day, ask about delivery times in your time zone.

Ask how many people can be included on the daily e-mail clip delivery at no extra charge.

If you have special delivery requirements, ask about other formats such as XML or FTP delivery.

Customization

You should not have to settle for an “off the shelf” service. Explain what matters most to you and have the service describe how they can meet your requirements.

Do you want to limit clips to a specific geography or industry – or to a custom list of publications? Do you want only articles where your key words appear in the headline – and ignore all passing mentions? Do you want only one copy of any specific story — a press release for instance?

Do you have special delivery requirements such as continuous clip delivery throughout the business day or file delivery in XML format? Do you want the clips delivered at a specific or unusual time each day? Do you want the clips delivered to multiple people? Do you want certain types of clips sent to certain people – country managers or brand managers, for instance?

Do you want special archiving features such as clips automatically inserted into folders for different clients or brands? Would you benefit from having 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 best know for customizing services to meet specific client requirements, including the special requirements of measurement and analysis services.

Clip Storage / Archive

Obtain details on the clip storage choices the service offers. And ask exactly what information they store. Do they store the full text of the clip or just a link and an abstract? What is the storage format? Does the clip storage offer full text search to find stored clips? How are clips protected and accessed? How many people can access clips simultaneously? For how long are clips stored.

Most importantly, ask to see the clip archive in a live online demonstration.

Here’s what to look for.

What clip filtering features are available? Can clips be filtered by date period? By key word? By country? By language? By publication? What are the searching features? Does it search only the extract/abstract or the full article text? Are queries limited to key words or can you use Boolean queries?

What are the sorting features? Can clips be put into different folders by key word such as client name, brand, country or other criteria? How easily can the sorting be done? Can the sorting/filtering be done on groups of clips as well as individual clips? Can the software automatically sort clips into folders?

What clip sharing tools are available? Can you e-mail individual clips? Share the clip? Annotate a clip? Assemble clips into an e-mail and send to a group? Assemble and edit clips into a Clip Report or Executive Briefing?

A full-featured online archive (in the cloud by today’s nomenclature) should allow you to do most anything you want with your clips.

PR Measurement

If you are using a media monitoring service only to obtain market intelligence, then measurement data may not be so important. But if you’re gathering news clips to demonstrate the value of your public relations services, then measurement data on each clip is vital.

There are three levels of media measurement services for PR and marketing.

Basic measurement often comes bundled as part of the media monitoring service for news or social media. It includes quite a substantial amount of quantitative measurement charts and graphs – usually for fixed periods of time such as week, month and quarter. The charts often include fixed period charts and trending charts on number of clips, average clip size, total reach (opportunities to see/circulation), geographical distribution by country or state, clips by media type, top media sources, and more.

Mid-range services are also available from monitoring services, usually at additional cost. The mid-range services often include a printed monthly measurement report, the ability to configure date ranges and dynamically create charts for clips within the date range, and a greater range of charts including qualitative analysis charts on tone, messages, and other qualitative factors.

The mid-range measurement features are not as full-featured and flexible as the high-end services from media measurement companies such as Kantor Media (Cymfony), Biz360, Symscio and Carma International for news. Most of the high end media measurement focus on their measurement software as their core strength and purchase their news clips from the news monitoring services and the social media clips from services such as CyberAlert, Radian6, SM2 by Alterian, and ScoutLabs.

Small and mid-size organizations, however, don’t particularly need or can’t afford all the bells & whistles of the high end measurement services. The PR measurement features included with the monitoring services or the step-up mid-range measurement services are more than adequate.

In vetting the measurement capabilities within monitoring services, ask: “What media measurement data is included on each news clip? On social media clips? What is the source of the data? How valid and consistent is it? What quantitative measurement charts are included in the standard fee? What qualitative charts, such as “tone”, are included? What additional measurement charts are available? How much flexibility is there in the charts – formats, color palette, combinations?

You should of course ask for a live online demo of the measurement to assure yourself that it meets your needs.

Price / Cost / Value

There are many different pricing structures ranging from pay-per-clip to annual contracts. Have the service explain how the options work – and make absolutely certain you have clarified all possible charges beyond the basic monthly fee.

Specific questions: What is the fixed monthly fee? Is there an additional per clip charge? Is there an extra charge for overnight delivery? Is there an additional charge for access to the online clip archive? Is there an extra charge for additional people to access the clip storage portal simultaneously?

What is the limit on key words? (If a salesman tells you, no limit – hand him a dictionary and say that’s what you want to monitor.) Is there a limit on the number of clips per month for the standard monthly fee? What is the surcharge for additional clips?

Catchall question: Are there any other charges we have not discussed?

Is a long-term contract required? If the service insists on a yearly contract — be wary, and ask for a free trial period to judge the quality of the service or an opt-out period so you can withdraw without penalty in the first 60-90 days if the service is unsatisfactory.

Finally, get a written price quote with a description of the service you will be receiving. The price quote should specify that there are no additional charges.

Many of these important questions can be answered easily if the service will let you kick the tires before you sign up. CyberAlert offers a 14-day free media monitoring trial and allows you to be a client on a month-to-month basis. No long term contract is required and there are no per clip fees.

Choosing a media monitoring service is an important decision. No one needs to settle for a pre-packaged, inferior or overpriced media monitoring service in today’s competitive online age.

In making your decision – like all purchase decisions – you must weigh quality of service and price to attain the best overall value.

By determining your needs in advance and by asking the right questions of media monitoring services, you’ll get the service you need and can afford with no unexpected surprises.

In Part 3, soon to come, we will provide a chart (spreadsheet) you can use in interviewing potential media monitoring vendors.