Media Monitoring News
December 2009

Media Monitoring Check-Up

With the tumult of today's financial crisis affecting virtually every company and organization in some way, it's a good time to review corporate media monitoring processes, procedures, and costs so that you can make appropriate changes before the turn of the year.

The scope of coverage by traditional media, blogs and broadcasters has changed dramatically since the economic situation exploded in September. Media that hardly ever paid attention to economic issues now trumpet their expertise in business coverage.

Media coverage and commentary that could affect your business could come from the most unlikely sources. Bloggers or commentators who primarily focused on products could suddenly make a passing reference to the financial stability of a company. Once something is reported, the web and the blogosphere can swiftly give it a life of its own. As a result, you need to be on top of everything or you'll find yourself playing catch-up to the 24/7 news cycle.

Here are four steps to consider to ensure you don't get blindsided.

•	Re-evaluate your search terms and key words. Look closely at how you're monitoring your coverage to make sure you're not missing anything. If you're just tracking coverage of your products and those of your competitors, consider developing key words that will provide you with intelligence on your entire industry. The fixed monthly pricing of online news monitoring services enables you to broaden your key words without incurring additional cost. With fixed monthly pricing, you can use your media monitoring service to gather "market intelligence" as well as company clips. If there are key analysts that follow your company, make sure they are on your radar screen. Your monitoring service provider should be able to help you develop a comprehensive search list customized for this difficult environment.
•	Consider monitoring television. The financial crisis has resulted in major increases in business coverage on all TV outlets, network, local affiliates and cable alike, particularly the major business networks. Every publicly-traded company should be monitoring TV — especially the business TV networks. CNBC, Fox Business and Bloomberg have expanded their coverage into day parts. Shows that previously didn't cover breaking business news now do, so make sure you're following them closely. You'll particularly need to pay close attention to CNBC shows like "Jim Cramer's Mad Money" and "Fast Money" where a wide range of companies are mentioned briefly and the tendency is to give a quick-and blunt-assessment of a company's prospects. Audiences for these business and investing shows have skyrocketed since the crisis began in September. Once thought to be the province of "investor relations", the shows now affect the entire corporate communications spectrum.
•	Monitor blogs and consumer boards. Consumers made anxious by the economic situation are paying even greater attention to blogs they trust to obtain information about products and companies. Bloggers themselves are expanding their focus; many tech bloggers, for example, appear to be adding commentary about a company's business prospects as well as commenting on their new products. If you haven't been monitoring blogs and consumer postings, now is the time to start. The additional cost of monitoring blogs and other consumer-generated media is quite low if combined with news monitoring.
•	Check media monitoring costs. The financial crisis will undoubtedly tighten public relations and media monitoring budgets for 2009, prompting most companies and not-for-profit organizations to evaluate alternatives to current suppliers before year end. In many cases, lower priced media monitoring services can deliver equal or better clip results. If you are paying per clip charges, you are probably paying too much for your media monitoring services. If you are using paid staff to monitor media with search engines, you're also probably wasting money and staff productivity - and missing clips. Online media monitoring services offer extraordinary coverage of news (local, national, and worldwide) and the word-of-mouth media (blogs, message boards, forums and online video.) CyberAlert (www.cyberalert.com) for instance covers 35,000+ news sources worldwide in 25+ languages including most every print news source in the U.S. Today, most all content in print media (newspapers, consumer magazines, trade journals) is published online with rare exceptions. In addition, online monitoring covers extraordinary amounts of news content that isn't published in print. CyberAlert also monitors 50+ million blogs, 100,000+ message boards and forums, and 200+ online video sharing services. Online media monitoring services such as CyberAlert offer fixed monthly pricing for virtually unlimited clips per month. They also offer discount monitoring packages of online news, broadcast news, and consumer discussion at low fixed monthly rates. Until the end of the year, CyberAlert is offering a 3 for 1 media monitoring special — online news, TV news, and word-of-mouth (blogs, message boards, forums, video) for $379 per month.

Bottom Line: The financial crisis offers an opportunity to improve media coverage and lower costs. Now is the time to act.