Do you get daily or weekly media monitoring reports? If you are lucky enough to receive these kinds of intel reports, are you leveraging them for maximum benefit?
Since most of us are wearing multiple hats these days and running from one meeting to another, the answer is usually a resounding no. No worries — you are not alone, but there are simple ways you can generate and maximize your media monitoring.
From the beginning
Whether you use paid media monitoring services such as Cision or Meltwater, or you simply use Google Alerts, it all starts with search terms. Are you using the most relevant search terms? Have you reviewed and updated them recently? Are you using too many? Do you add search terms to supplement short-term press operations?
The more focused your search terms, the better your monitoring results. We do not need or want unnecessary results — we need more focused and relevant ones.
The report is not the thing
We see many elaborate media monitoring reports, and many people feel that the report is the thing. It’s not. Some feel the report should be big and offer elaborate charts and graphs. Dashboards showing total mentions, reach, ad equivalent values, sentiment, tone and share by media type are interesting. But if we cannot translate the report into strategic action, it’s useless and costly.
Pan for gold
When reviewing your next media monitoring report, try to determine:
- How can my client be featured in that publication?
- Why is our competitor being mentioned in that story and not us?
- Our competitor’s spokesperson is being quoted more than ours. What can we be doing better?
- Industry coverage features our competitors more than us. How can we change this?
- This publication covers my industry each year. Am I planning to be included this year?
Your media monitoring reports are simply information. If we do not analyze this information it yields no value. We must take our monitoring work to the next level and find the rich veins of gold hidden in the data.
Media monitoring sets the bar
Media monitoring may be relegated to junior staffers, but the data in these reports is viewed and reviewed by the C-suite. If we spend a little more time analyzing them, we will discover that they become extremely important for corporate and strategic PR planning. As PR professionals we must apply the data in the monitoring report as a key tool to set strategies and goals.
If we are simply searching for client mentions, we can use our reports to:
- Increase the number of client mentions versus the previous year
- Increase mentions in a certain media type — mainstream, business, trade, broadcast — versus the previous year
- Increase the number of quotes by the CEO or key spokesperson versus the previous year
If we are monitoring more complex metrics, we could be using our reports to:
- Increase the number of stories with positive sentiment and tone versus the previous year
- Increase share of voice through more mainstream coverage versus the previous year
- Increase mindshare, impact or prominence over a time period versus the previous year
Plan, measure, revise
Organizations should have a media monitoring strategic plan. As the year progresses, that plan should be evaluated. A review of a monitoring analytics dashboard provides a snapshot of PR performance over time. These metrics also reveal which PR activities generate results and which do not. Ongoing analysis usually reveals strengths and weaknesses, so we can revise the plan to exploit opportunities and avoid barriers.
If you have any media monitoring or social listening needs, please reach out to us for a free assessment and recommendations.
