FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions on CyberAlert Media Monitoring, News Monitoring, Broadcast Monitoring and Press Clipping Services

1. What media do you monitor?
2. Are there any news sources that you do not monitor?
3. Why should I use an online news monitoring service such as
   CyberAlert 5.0 instead of a traditional press clipping service?
4. Will you send me the list of online media you monitor?
5. Can you monitor just a list of specific sites for us?
6. Does CyberAlert 5.0 keep a news archive enabling searches for past articles?
7. Does CyberAlert 5.0 monitor radio news?
8. How do you deliver my clips?
9. Do you deliver paper clips?
10. What time will I receive my clips?
11. Can I get press clips delivered more than once a day?
12. Can my co-workers also view the clips you send me?
13. How accurate will my results be?
14. What is the cost of the different services?
15. Is there a per clip charge?
16. How many keywords can I use?
17. How do I change my keywords?
18. How can I add another email address to the distribution list for e-mail alerts?
19. Can I get only "important" clips of "major articles" delivered?
20. Do you include readership data with the clips?
21. Do you offer a free trial?
22. Is a long-term contract required?
23. How long does it take to start the service?
24. How does your service compare to the free Google News service?
25. Do you offer customization of services?

CyberAlert offers the most comprehensive media monitoring services now available. Here is the line-up of services:

1. CyberAlert 5.0 is a news monitoring and press clipping service that each day monitors the content of 55,000+ online news sources worldwide.
2. CyberAlert TV monitors the closed caption text of over 2,200 TV news programs each day on over 600 TV stations in the Top 100 U.S. markets.
3. NetPinions monitors consumer discussion (word-of-mouth) in 35,000 online message boards and forums including the big financial message boards and 65,000 Usenet news groups.
4. BlogSquirrel monitors the new content in 5+ million blog postings in 50+ million blogs (weblogs) each day. Clients can choose to monitor all sources, or may pick and choose desired search areas.

CyberAlert 5.0 monitors virtually all news sources that publish news content on their Web sites. The exception is Web sites that require paid subscriptions. These include the Wall Street Journal and a handful of specialty journals including some medical and engineering journals. It's important to note that CyberAlert 5.0 does monitor news sites that require registration, but not paid subscription. A few online news sites also block automated robots, prohibiting CyberAlert from monitoring them.
To receive clips from the Wall Street Journal, clients who subscribe to CyberAlert 5.0 also subscribe to the Wall Street Journal Online (www.wsj.com) and enter their search terms into the search engine for daily delivery of relevant WSJ articles.

CyberAlert 5.0 offers many advantages compared with traditional press clipping services that deliver paper clips.

1. The automated software of CyberAlert 5.0 misses fewer clips than human readers at traditional press clipping services.
2. CyberAlert 5.0 delivers all clips overnight. Paper clips from press clipping services often take two or three weeks to be delivered.
3. CyberAlert 5.0 achieves essentially the same rate of accuracy as human readers — less than 2% "bad" clips for most every client.
4. With CyberAlert 5.0, your press clips are stored online in an electronic database, making them easily accessible at any time from anywhere and making them much easier to distribute to multiple individuals within your company. They are also fully searchable, making the clips far easier to sort, manage and measure than paper clips.
5. CyberAlert 5.0 charges a flat, monthly fee with no per clip charges. In almost every case, it is substantially less expensive than traditional press clipping services that charge an additional fee for each clip — up to 71% less expensive for clients who get lots of clips per month.

Our media list contains over 55,000+ news sources and 100,000 consumer discussion sites. It includes most every online newspaper (daily/weekly), news syndication service, consumer magazine, trade journal and online TV station within the U.S. It's the most comprehensive media list available today - one of our family jewels that competitors have tried to get their hands on. So, we take great care to protect it. Because it's so long and because of different names of news sources and different alphabetical approaches, it's quite difficult and time-consuming to cross-check for specific media sources. For instance, you may look for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but online it's St. Louis Today. The New York Times is NYTimes.com online or, alternatively nyt.com. A well-done cross-match of media sites requires quite a few search "tricks" that we've learned over the years. We therefore suggest that you send us your "must have" list and let us do the cross-search for you. We can run your list through our automated system and then let you know which of those publications/news sources, if any, that we currently do not monitor. In most every case, we'll be able to add those news sources to our media list immediately at no additional cost!

Absolutely! We can create a custom media list for you. You provide us with the list of sites (news sources/publications) that you want us to monitor. Your search results will then contain articles only from those specific publications. Your custom list of media sources can be changed at any time.

CyberAlert 5.0 news monitoring and clipping services stores only our clients' clips in "The Digital Clip Book™" for easy access. We do not store the contents of the news sources in an archive - and therefore cannot search for older articles. The best sources for archival searches are Lexis-Nexis, Factiva and Dialog.

CyberAlert 5.0 does not monitor radio news on a daily basis at the present time. If you are searching for a specific radio news clips, we can often track it down for you from outside sources if you supply us with the radio call letters and the date/time of the broadcast. The cost for this search service varies between $75 and $200 depending on the services rendered.

CyberAlert 5.0 delivers all your clips electronically. Standard delivery is once a day, in the morning, via e-mail. The daily e-mail alert contains a list of all your clips found during the previous 24 hours. Each clip alert contains a short extract of the article with your key words highlighted, a link to the entire article, and detailed readership data about the news source. In addition to the daily e-mail alert, CyberAlert 5.0 also delivers your clips each day into a password-protected online account on our website, so that your clips are available at anytime from anywhere to anyone to whom you have given the username and password. This online database of your clips, called the "Digital Clip Book", stores all your clips for as long as you are a client. Additional delivery options, such as XML, are available upon request.

No we do not deliver paper clips. We monitor the online edition of publications and deliver the article electronically in a searchable digital file. Most companies have switched over from paper clips to electronic clips because the digital format is more efficient, more timely, and easier to manage than paper clips — and less expensive too.

With our standard once-a-day delivery, you can expect to receive your daily e-mail alert before start of business, every single day, 7/365. The daily e-mail alert contains a list of all your clips found during the previous 24 hours.

Yes! We offer a rush service that delivers press clips multiple times per day throughout the business day (approximately every two hours) from approximately 4,500 leading news sources in the U.S. and a total of 7,500 news sources worldwide if you order our worldwide service.

We can include your co-workers on the distribution list for the daily e-mail alert. That way, they automatically see the same results you see. You also have the option within CyberAlert's Digital Clip Book to email selected articles (or entire folders) to anyone of your choosing. The email recipient will receive the full text of each article you send, as well as the URL of the location where the article was originally published.

CyberAlert 5.0 provides clients with today's most comprehensive and accurate news monitoring service. We run all results through a "triple filtering" process to achieve our extraordinary accuracy and relevance. For most clients, 98+% of delivered clips are "good clips" — no duplicates and few if any irrelevant clips. The accuracy of CyberAlert 5.0 is especially good for clients with difficult search terms - for instance, those that contain generic words, common surnames or acronyms like Smith, Johnson, Orange, Gap or GE. In addition, we provide clients with superior customer service and expert assistance to help set up your search profile (key word specification) so that it will produce optimal results.

CyberAlert 5.0 offers world-class media monitoring services at competitive prices. The CyberAlert 5.0 news monitoring service is $249/month per search with up to 15 key words for national news coverage — monitoring up to 22,000+ news sources each day in the U.S. The international news service is $349 per month to Monitor up to 55,000+ news sources each day. All subscription services are month-to-month; no long-term contract is required. Contact your Account Representative at 800-461-7353 for additional pricing information. You can also email us at info@cyberalert.com.

There are no per clip charges for the first 1,000 clips per month. After 1,000 clips there is an incremental charge of $50 for each additional set of up to 500 clips.

The CyberAlert 5.0 service allows up to 15 keywords or multiword phrases per search. A phrase counts as a single key word. "And Not" words do not count toward the 15 word limit.

Clients can change or make additions to their keywords at any time by contacting their Account Representative. Changes made before close of business will take effect for the next day's delivery.

Provide your CyberAlert Account Representative with a list of email addresses that you would like to add to the distribution list for your daily e-mail alert. Your Account Rep will then make the necessary changes.

Yes! As an optional service, we offer the "Intelliclips™" news monitoring feature that delivers only articles that include substantive coverage of your company, brand, or other key words, ignoring/deleting "mere mentions". You can also specify that the articles be clipped only from the media sources you list.

CyberAlert 5.0 supplies detailed media measurement/circulation data with all clips from the news monitoring service. Each news clip you receive includes a uniform set of measurement data for both the Web site and the print edition of the news source. The following data categories are included in the CyberAlert 5.0 media measurement data: news rank, web rank, reach per million, print circulation (if a U.S. print edition exists) and national opportunities to see, which is the online datapoint most analogous to the print circulation figure. Additional information about the readership data is available at http://www.cyberalert.com/measurementdata.html.

We do! Potential clients may take advantage of our free 14 day Free Trial by filling out the trial order form on our website at https://secure.cyberalert.com/news_and_social_media_monitoring_service_free_trial.html, or if you prefer, your CyberAlert Account Representative will take your free trial order over the phone (800-461-7353). You can choose the service and coverage level and monitor with your own keywords for a full two weeks at no charge whatsoever. No credit card information is required to take advantage of the free trial. You are billed only if you specifically order the service at the end of your free trial.

No! CyberAlert 5.0 is a monthly service that does not require an annual contract. Clients are free to cancel at any time after the first 30 days of service.

Almost any search received in our office before close of business will be up and running for the next day. In other words, clients receive their first e-mail clip report the morning after they submit the order.

Many companies who once praised Google Alerts are now beginning to realize that free services are free for a reason. While the service once proved useful to small companies who only received several clips per day and needed just a limited number of keywords to search, the service has begun to show issues since Google killed Google Reader in early March 2013. Dedicated users immediately noticed. The Financial Brand spoke out against Google Alerts' declining effectiveness, even retracting its previous approval of the product: "Google Alerts was once a very important and efficient tool to monitor mentions of your brand on the web. It is now so unreliable that it has been rendered effectively useless."

Whether Google Alerts ever improves or not, all companies and businesses dedicated to protecting its reputation should be assured that there are still cost-effective monitoring services that are much more reliable and provide more features. Free monitoring services always have shortcomings; even before Google Alerts ran into issues, it still wasn't producing clips in social media, email alerts or organic search results. Right now, 56% of people in the U.S. have a social networking profile - and 22% of them use it several times per day. Companies can't afford to miss out on that vital portion of consumers who might have something to say about their brand.

Nor should they have to sort through a cluster of clips to get the ones they want. But CyberAlert's customized media lists allows clients to limit clips only to the publications that matter to them. At the client's request, we add online news sources to our media monitoring list to assure that the media most important to you are being monitored - including industry journals. And each news clip includes detailed measurement data for thorough analysis on audience reach and market penetration. Google Alerts never had such a feature.

CyberAlert offers a 14-day free trial so you can see how our service promises COMPLETE, TIMELY and RELIABLE news clips, all in a completely customizable dashboard. And we don't just offer flexible and comprehensive monitoring services and packages; we also provide you with solutions to share that coverage with your customers, whether it be via RSS feeds or social media.

CyberAlert welcomes feedback and client inquiries on specialized or customized media monitoring services. We are happy to discuss your needs and try to adjust the CyberAlert 5.0 services to meet your specialized requirements. Contact us at info@cyberalert.com or 800-461-7353.