Media monitoring can be a great way to ensure that your brand reputation remains untarnished and that your marketing efforts are bringing in the necessary ROI. The latest in media monitoring tools can offer up details on your brand in offline and online media sources as well as competitive intelligence. Media monitoring allows you to track mentions of your brand, company name, and selected keywords in different types of media. There are many different companies that offer media monitoring services, do not be tempted to hire the least expensive company. Some services that appear to be the least expensive can cost you in the long run if they don’t supply the best value for your money. Today, we will be reviewing how to determine your media monitoring needs while making sure that you are getting the best value for your budget dollar.
Monitoring Social Media Mentions
When you think of media monitoring tools, social media monitoring probably comes to mind right away. It is very important to track what is being said about your brand and to your brand on social channels because so many consumers can also see what is being said. Negative information about your company on social media channels can be extremely damaging. Social media monitoring doesn’t just encompass social media channels, but also includes other channels that can affect word of mouth and your online reputation like blogs, complaint sites, message boards, forums, Usenet newsgroups, and complaint or review sites. The importance of monitoring social media is not just for the purpose of detecting negative comments, but also so that your social media team can react and interact with commenters and consumers. After all, one of the principles for social media engagement is to react and respond to comments from social media followers as soon as possible. Media monitoring helps you know when to respond and how to respond quickly and directly.
Monitoring Offline Media Mentions
Even offline news sources like print, media, and television are able to be monitored with the right tools and software programs. For the most part, even traditional media sources are still published online. Of course, it is easier to aggregate and monitor online media due to the digital aspect of it. Television and radio news is almost always transcribed for the hearing impaired. That makes them easily monitored via queries of the closed caption text feeds. This means that with the right media monitoring tools, you can keep track of a full range of all of your media mentions, both online and offline.
Two other important tips about monitoring news feeds is that if you decide to hire a media monitoring service, then you would not need to also pay for a press clipping service. Secondly, there are free news monitoring services available, like Google News; however, the coverage is not as specific as media monitoring software services from companies like Isentia, which offer data analysis in addition to the media monitoring. Plus, since you get what you pay for, it is very possible that sifting through the information provided with free news monitoring services can waste a good deal of time and still deliver incomplete and inefficient results.
Once you have determined which types of media you need to include in your media monitoring, then you can be specific when evaluating the different companies that offer these services. You will want to look for a company that offers data analysis, online and offline monitoring, and one that is knowledgeable about media monitoring all over the world. Since public relations and reputation management are very different based on unique cultures and economies across the world, you need a media monitoring service that provides a full spectrum of tools, knowledge, and advice.