Eight Ways to Maximize Media Monitoring Results

8 Ways to Maximize Media Monitoring Results How PR and Marketing Pros Can Go Beyond Tracking Company Mentions and Press Release Coverage to Improve ROI February 2007 by Chip Griffin Contents 1. Discover New, Earned Media Opportunities 2. Detect Early Warning Signs 3. Uncover New Markets and Customers 4. Listen to Conversations 5. Solidify Stakeholder Relationships 6. Track Trends 7. Examine How the Competition Stacks Up 8. Learn More About Your Industry Abstract Effective media monitoring means more than simply tracking your company name and seeing how your press releases are doing. To maximize success, you must go beyond the basics to explore other ways to expand your monitoring efforts to find new opportunities and communicate better with your customers, your employees, the public, and other valuable stakeholders. www.CustomScoop.com This report is provided to you courtesy of CustomScoop, a leader in customizable media monitoring technology and services. For more information about how CustomScoop can help your company with media monitoring, please call us at (800) 538-6420 or visit our Web site: www.CustomScoop.com. CustomScoopTM and ClipIQ are trademarks of eOutreach Solutions, LLC. 8 Ways to Maximize Media Monitoring Results |2 The Online News Clipping Breakthrough Tracking news coverage becomes easier every day as technology continues to offer considerable advances. Gone are the days when PR and marketing pros were forced to rely on slow, clunky newspaper clipping services that would deliver a stack of clips with no context weeks after the stories were published. Today, near real-time news monitoring allows companies of all sizes to develop effective media intelligence programs. Most media monitoring solutions now deliver results electronically with a considerable amount of information beyond simply saying, “Here’s your newsclip.” Topic information, geographic data, circulation numbers and more permit greater analysis to occur with minimal effort. In addition, the ability to rapidly “slice and dice” the data provided makes it that much more practical to look beyond direct media coverage of your company and to explore coverage of your industry, competitors, and key journalists. Especially savvy companies also use media monitoring to better communicate with stakeholders by understanding the issues that matter to them. From free services like Google News or Topix to more robust monitoring solutions from companies like Bacon’s, BurrellesLuce, Factiva, or CustomScoop, organizations now have the ability to tailor their programs to their own needs and resources. Virtually every company – from the Fortune 500 to mom and pop stores on Main Street USA – can benefit from some degree of media monitoring. In the space below, suggestions about how to go beyond company mentions and press release tracking will hopefully provide you with ideas that you can adapt to your own company’s situation. Volume of Online Media Creates Challenges, Drives Opportunity The explosion of new media outlets online drives a need to develop more effective monitoring programs, but also creates myriad opportunities to improve communications efforts. Coverage provided by online outlets of the mainstream media, as well as industry and trade publications, significantly expands the number of ways that current and potential customers and other interested parties may learn about your company and its competitors. Blogs and other social media outlets permit countless public conversations to occur that companies must be aware of to effectively communicate. Moreover, these conversations often create great opportunities to identify potential problems before they spiral out of control and to solidify relationships with key stakeholders. The key to successful monitoring lies in thinking creatively and not permitting yourself to be constrained by traditional notions of news clipping. Taking advantage of the power of electronic monitoring solutions will help you to maximize the ROI on your PR and marketing efforts by listening to journalists and the public, learning about your customers, employees, and stakeholders, and identifying threats and opportunities. Copyright 2007 8 Ways to Maximize Media Monitoring Results |3 1. Discover New, Earned Media Opportunities Most public relations professionals in companies and agencies engage in basic efforts to find new earned media opportunities. Checking editorial calendars, compiling targeted media lists, and tracking past successes in pitching have long been mainstays of the PR toolkit and will remain so well into the future. Traditionally, monitoring efforts have been used primarily to determine the success of outreach efforts and not as a way to identify new opportunities. With online news clipping services available today, the ability to track topics of interest becomes ever easier. By expanding your search horizons, you can find new earned media opportunities that enable you to reach a broader audience and develop relationships with new journalists you may otherwise have overlooked. Find New Journalists and Media Outlets Most PR pros develop media lists based on the known beats of specific reporters and the topics of major industry and trade publications. Frequently, there will be writers outside of these areas who may also have an interest in your company, product, or service. You can enhance your media list by identifying those writers who have written about your competitors, related products, or industry issues. Some monitoring services also permit you to find stories written by specific writers. By examining these “byline profiles,” you can get a better feel for the types of stories that drive certain reporters. For instance, if you notice that a specific science writer has penned six of her last ten stories about global warming, you now know much more than the typical media directory can tell you about that journalist. Bolster Relationships with Journalists Media monitoring can actually help you build better relationships with writers already on your media lists. If you pay attention to what they write about, you can roll that into your pitches by noting a relationship between your story and a recent article by that same individual. Or perhaps you may see a story of particular interest and can jot a quick note commending it without pitching anything of your own (remember, journalists are like anyone else and enjoy positive feedback). But to build truly effective relationships with writers, you will want to find stories that they haven’t already written about and that may be of interest to the reporter. These aren’t stories that you’re pitching for your own company or client, but merely ones that you believe the reporter may be interested in writing about and on which you can provide some information. We all know things we can share information about that are beyond our own organization’s direct interest. And by using a monitoring service to understand reporters’ interests and to identify stories or topics to share with them, the relationship becomes that much stronger. Copyright 2007 8 Ways to Maximize Media Monitoring Results |4 Establishing expertise and credibility with journalists goes a long way toward building the essential level of trust and respect that will help validate your pitches down the road. Identify New Story Opportunities By tracking topics beyond your own company and its products, you may be able to discover new angles for your pitches. Find out what related topics are being written about and figure out how you can become part of those storylines where appropriate. See what themes seem to generate the most coverage in your sector and tailor your pitch to put your story in the same context. You can achieve these things by exploring industry topics and stories about competitors. Better yet, try doing “concept searches.” Don’t just zero in on specific product or industry terms, but go broader. Many of the media monitoring products currently available permit users to sort by relevance. Even if a broad search brings back hundreds of clips a day, you can use the sorting feature to look at the top ten or so most relevant stories, and see what they tell you about possible opportunities. 2. Detect Early Warning Signs Media monitoring, especially in an era of high-speed electronic reporting, enables PR professionals to keep up with ever-shrinking news cycles. Keeping on top of areas of interest in a real-time fashion enables organizations to ensure that potentially important stories do not remain under the radar for long. And the proliferation of new online media outlets and blogs provides a greater opportunity for companies to detect problems before they mushroom into full-scale crises. Set Email Alerts Most services permit some form of email alert to be sent to notify you immediately of topics of particular concern. Typically, this might include mentions of the CEO or other top executives, reports of the company and key regulators in the same story, or any story that names the company more than three or four times. In most cases, you will want to know about these stories before your bosses hear about them from somewhere else. By receiving an immediate email alert, you can quickly pass along good news or provide a heads-up on bad news with an immediate recommendation for how to start handling it. Pay Attention to Blogs and Other Online Media You may be tempted to dismiss blogs or other online media outlets because they usually have far fewer readers than traditional broadcast or print outlets. That would be a mistake. Though raw audience numbers may be lower, influential individuals frequently comprise a disproportionate share of the readership. This includes reporters, who increasingly take cues from what bloggers talk about. Copyright 2007 8 Ways to Maximize Media Monitoring Results |5 With respect to potentially damaging stories, blogs serve a critical early warning role. By uncovering complaints or allegations in social media outlets quickly, companies can be quicker to respond to issues before they reach wider audiences through the mainstream media. For instance, discovering a product defect on a blog could lead to a better response, or may even enable the company to make changes quickly to ensure the fewest number of customers are impacted. Follow Industry and Competitor Challenges By expanding the scope of your monitoring to include industry issues and competitors, you will get advance notice of issues that may affect your company or client. For example, if many in your industry are being criticized for a particular practice, it would behoove you to work with your colleagues to ensure that your company has no exposure in the same area. If regulators are targeting a competitor, make sure that your own compliance people are aware of it and prepared for likely media questions that may arise even if your company is not directly implicated. Being aware of these hot button issues going on around you is just as important. You will be better prepared for dealing with reporters by understanding what’s on their minds. It will help get you ready for any possible minefields or potholes you may encounter in your dealings with them. These early warning activities can help your own crisis communications preparations and may provide you with insight into how to update your own crisis plan (you do have one, right?). 3. Uncover New Markets and Customers No doubt you have a pretty good understanding of who your core customers are and what publications they are likely to read. But have you ever given any thought to expanding your horizons and educating consumers who may have similar needs about what your company has to offer? Consider your own reading habits. It is entirely likely that you read a lot of traditional and online media sources that would seem obvious to anyone around you and to the makers of the products and services you find most valuable. Look for Non-Obvious Media Outlets Perhaps you have some related interests that aren’t as obvious but might still allow marketers to draw your attention to something that you may find helpful. Now, I’m not suggesting that if you have a product you’re selling to the Department of Defense that you target Jane instead of Jane’s Defence. But consider the PR industry. While many would be likely to read PR Week and Steve Rubel’s Micropersuasion blog and listen to Neville Hobson Copyright 2007 8 Ways to Maximize Media Monitoring Results |6 and Shel Holtz’s For Immediate Release PR podcast, there are probably others who have interest in publications more focused on nearby industries, like BrandWeek magazine or the AdRants blog. You may wonder how to find these markets and outlets using a monitoring service. It actually isn’t all that difficult. It simply requires thinking beyond your own interests to those of your customers and stakeholders. For instance, in the PR example above, you might give some thought to the specific challenges that today’s practitioners face. Examples might include blog advocacy, YouTube marketing, or VNR attribution. If you augment your search terms with your monitoring service to include ones that might capture these interests, you will likely find a number of potential new outlets to include on your target list. Be Open to New Uses for Your Product or Service Just as important as finding new ways to reach your target audience, these efforts may well result in tapping into new customer segments. If the customers you want to reach read these somewhat related publications, perhaps there is an opportunity for other readers of those outlets to find a need for your product or service as well – even if you hadn’t initially considered that need as one you could fill. This is something we see every day at CustomScoop as customers come on board and use our service to accomplish goals we would never have anticipated. 4. Listen to Conversations The evolution of online media – especially blogs – provides companies with the unique opportunity to listen to the conversations of customers and prospects. The best part is that it does not require any high-tech spy gear, dumpster diving, or other unsavory tactics. The blogosphere encourages candid and transparent conversations. Bloggers post their opinions and allow others to react. For organizations large and small, this presents a tremendous chance to learn about how various strategies, tactics, products, and services are perceived by interested parties. By listening to these conversations and digesting the meaning of them, companies can work to improve their communications, as well as the products themselves. The Blogosphere Isn’t as Big and Scary as It May Seem For many, blog monitoring seems like an unmanageable task. It seems that every other week a report comes out touting more and more blogs that need to be monitored. In just the past year, we have seen published reports of the number of blogs climb from 30 million to 55 million or more. Most people agree these numbers are actually low for the number of blogs being created, and that many more are being missed as the worldwide urge to blog grows. Copyright 2007 8 Ways to Maximize Media Monitoring Results |7 Of course, only a small fraction of these blogs are updated regularly. And, depending on the nature of your organization, there are even fewer that will likely contain relevant content. Blog monitoring solutions remain relatively simplistic today. A number of search engines exist that will produce decent results, including Google Blog Search, Technorati, and IceRocket. And most of the news monitoring providers in the industry also offer solutions as part of their suite of services, including Factiva, eWatch, CyberAlert, and CustomScoop. All of these do face challenges today. The large, public and free solutions typically contain a lot of “splogs” (spam blogs) and don’t permit easy differentiation of results. At the same time, the professional offerings tend to examine only a fraction of the total blog content to ensure that the results returned are of the highest quality. Blog Monitoring Will Continue to Improve Significantly Over the course of the next year, the quality of the offerings from both types of providers will likely improve. At CustomScoop, this remains an area that we devote considerable R&D time to because we believe in the value of these conversations. I have no doubt that our competitors are doing the same. This is, of course, good news for customers as the choices will continue to improve as time passes. Even without technological advances you would do well to begin to monitor blogs to be able to understand the conversations that are taking place. As noted before, blogs can provide critical early warning of problems. But they can also provide great insight into new ways that your product or service may be used, and may give you ideas on how to better promote your offering. At a minimum, you should be monitoring for conversations that directly impact your organization. While I advocate “concept” searches in mainstream media monitoring, I think that would be difficult in blogs today given the sheer volume of material being generated. Let the Blogs Come to You Therefore, a successful blog monitoring program should incorporate reading key industry blogs that affect your sector. As you search the blogosphere, you will likely find a handful of blogs that frequently cover topics of interest to you and your colleagues. Make it a habit to read these by subscribing to their feeds by email or RSS (if you don’t know what RSS is, I encourage you to explore it further as it is a great way to easily stay up to date with online Copyright 2007 8 Ways to Maximize Media Monitoring Results |8 media content). In addition, there may be blog aggregators like TechMeme or TailRank that may prove to be helpful to you in staying on top of key trends and discussions. At a minimum, you should begin to listening to these key online conversations. Then, once you are comfortable with the medium, you can begin to take a more active role in participating in these discussions yourself to help better communicate to customers, prospects, and other key stakeholders. 5. Solidify Stakeholder Relationships For any organization, maintaining strong relationships with customers, prospects, supporters, employees, investors and other stakeholders represents an important leadership function. Most organizations deeply value their own reputation, and part of that comes from building strong ties to the individuals that provide real value to them. Media monitoring can play a vital role in this regard. The most obvious way – and the one you likely already employ today – is to find positive mentions of the company and share them with these individuals. You may even pass along critical stories along with information presenting a more balanced view, or even correcting mistakes that may have appeared in print or on the air. Help Make Your CEO Look Good There are many more opportunities to take advantage of to strengthen key relationships. You might monitor for mentions of your board members – not simply in their role as a board member, but perhaps as it relates to their other activities. If a board member is an executive at another company, for example, you may monitor for mentions of that entity in order to enable your CEO to send notes of congratulations when the other company reaches some significant milestone. Or maybe that board member is engaged in philanthropic activities – imagine how pleased she might be to receive a note mentioning that the CEO had seen a story about the board member’s donation to a local hospital. Embrace Your Customers and Supporters Similarly, monitoring for mentions of key customers in the media will allow your sales force to better understand the forces that may drive purchasing decisions at those companies. A company facing layoffs may need to invest in services that relieve internal staff burdens, while a company being acquired may require a little extra TLC to ensure existing relationships remain strong and sales continue to flow. Non-profit organizations, in particular, can benefit from these monitoring efforts to bolster relationships with existing or potential donors. In those instances, a company being acquired may create an opportunity to increase funding levels from executives who may find themselves newly flush with cash. By monitoring the activities of these donors in the media, Copyright 2007 8 Ways to Maximize Media Monitoring Results |9 a fundraising team will learn more about the interests that drive those individuals to contribute. Build Positive Investor Relationships For those most interested in communicating with current and potential investors – whether they be stockholders of a public company or venture investors in a startup – monitoring the media can provide a valuable resource for nurturing those relationships. Understanding what public company shareholders are reading about – not just in relation to your own company, but the industry and competitors – will help drive more effective investor relations communications planning. These IR efforts can prove especially valuable if a strong relationship of trust and transparency has been created before challenges or opportunities arise. In the case of venture investors, knowing what else is happening in the VC’s portfolios will help you and your executives to better understand the pressures that may drive their latest demand. And it may provide better insight into the needs that you can address for them going forward. 6. Track Trends Modern media monitoring solutions do so much more than provide a stack or list of clips that meet certain criteria. The electronic monitoring and delivery tools developed to serve shrinking news cycles also provide a wealth of data at the fingertips of every subscriber. Many of the professional monitoring services offered today permit subscribers to create ondemand charts and graphs detailing the media coverage volume over time. Ideally, these charts can be customized to zero in on particular search terms, geographic areas, or even the tone of the story. By creating these charts and graphs, one can more easily discern trends over time that may help in proving ROI or developing strategy and tactics. On-Demand Trend Tracking Through Charts & Graphs Now Possible Using old-fashioned clipping methods, trend tracking was a painful and inexact exercise that would often rely on manually key punching story data into a spreadsheet or simply guessing at trends based on anecdotal evidence gleaned from reading piles of clips on a regular basis. Neither of these “solutions” was especially resource efficient or effective. Therefore, some organizations turned toward high-end media measurement consultants to provide periodic reports that would distill the information into easily digestible memos and reports. There remains a role for this high-end analysis, but the tools available Copyright 2007 8 Ways to Maximize Media Monitoring Results | 10 have dramatically improved even those offerings. The most remarkable advances have come on the DIY side of the media measurement industry. By integrating on-demand charts and graphs with online news clipping services, a client can now easily see trends sprouting up virtually overnight. No longer does one need to wait for the monthly analysis to come in; today, an organization can review trend charts daily to spot early upticks in various storylines that may demand attention. Measuring Tonality of News Available at All Price Points Moreover, many services today permit users to rate clips themselves and generate charts that illuminate trends in the positive or negative flow of the coverage. By integrating these tools with your planning process, you can ensure more effective promotion efforts and better prepared crisis communications activities. Trend tools these days cover traditional media as well as blogs. Limited versions even exist in some of the free search engine services, though the ones provided by higher-end solutions remain much more robust and customizable. Either way, organizations would be wise to take advantage of whatever trend tracking tools they can to effectively manage communications programs. 7. Examine How the Competition Stacks Up It continues to amaze me how little attention many companies pay to their competitors’ news coverage. Frequently, one hears the argument that with everything that has to be done on a daily basis, there simply isn’t enough time to focus on what the other guy is doing. Instead, the focus must be on doing one’s own job well. Certainly one shouldn’t lose sight of the ball and become distracted by the competition. But being well-educated about how your competitors are covered will prove to be a real asset in your own PR and marketing efforts. As noted elsewhere in this publication, there are numerous advantages to monitoring the competition, as it relates to finding new earned media opportunities, journalists, and news outlets. Competitive Intelligence Can Help Your PR/Marketing Budget Understanding how you stack up against the competition can also be a very valuable tool in proving ROI internally and in seeking additional resources. By sharing the intelligence you gather with others in your organization, you can help educate a wide range of your colleagues about the value you provide, and help them understand what the competition is doing right and wrong. We can all stand to learn from the success and mistakes of others. Given the ability of modern media monitoring solutions to easily segregate clip results, monitoring the competition need not be a burden. Obviously, you must prioritize your own Copyright 2007 8 Ways to Maximize Media Monitoring Results | 11 coverage when reviewing your account, but assessing the trends in your competitors’ coverage will enable you to more effectively plan and act. Your Competition May Tip You Off to New Opportunities You may also find valuable strategic opportunities by following what your competition is doing. For instance, if they launch important marketing partnerships, you may find the chance to work with competing groups to establish your own partnerships. And, as noted elsewhere in this document, finding out who writes or speaks about your competition will provide you with important leads to use in making pitches down the road. Finally, understanding the way in which your competition communicates may help you to better tailor your language to reach a broader audience. Just as your press releases, marketing materials, and other documents probably rely on certain key turns of phrase, so do your competitors’. By watching how they communicate, you may generate ideas that may assist you in everything from search engine marketing to press release dissemination or investor recruitment. Simply put, use media monitoring as an education tool to go to school on your competitors. It’s an effort that will pay off. 8. Learn More about Your Industry Far too often we all put on blinders and become so focused on our own jobs that we don’t look up to better understand the context of everything we’re doing. That often plays itself out by failing to pay attention to the trends in the broader industry in which our own company or organization may operate. But paying attention to those trends and learning about the overall industry pays dividends by providing fresh ideas and insights that we can all apply in our daily work. Tap Sophisticated Search Technology to Find Easily Overlooked Articles So-called “concept” searches are perhaps the most difficult kind to execute using media monitoring solutions, but they can have potentially significant payoffs by allowing us to read stories we would likely have missed. These searches can be crafted by looking for articles that mention key industry terms a number of times, or two key terms in close proximity to each other. Services that provide these unique search qualifiers allow users to find stories that most engines can’t easily uncover. Pairing that functionality with relevancy-based sorting opens the door to effective concept searching. If each day you were to read just two or three stories about topics of interest to your industry, you would quite quickly build your industry knowledge. This will help you in communicating with your peers, journalists, your executive team, and key stakeholders. But it will also help guide you to valuable opportunities. You may get ideas on how to better use Copyright 2007 8 Ways to Maximize Media Monitoring Results | 12 language, or new ways to pitch your organization. Or perhaps you may find an interesting blogger with whom you’d like to build a relationship. Or, as noted earlier, you might find a nugget of information that you could share with a reporter with whom you are trying to build a relationship – even though the nugget may not directly benefit your company or client. Share This New Industry Knowledge with Your Colleagues You will also likely discover that there are many others within your organization who do not proactively remain abreast of key industry developments. Consider distributing an internal newsletter (it doesn’t have to be anything fancy – just a simple email with links and story summaries will work) on a daily or weekly basis to educate your colleagues about important happenings and interesting stories. Knowledge remains an important driver of success. The more you can do to share that knowledge internally and externally, the more invaluable you become. # # # About the Author Chip Griffin serves as the CEO of CustomScoop. He has more than 15 years experience in the business of public relations and public affairs. In that time, he has specialized in marrying technology and innovation with sound communications practices. He has developed a range of knowledge by working on crisis communications, grassroots PR, internet advocacy, and marketing communications. In addition, his background includes stints in government, with a PR agency, and as an independent consultant. He has been blogging since 1999 and has been published in a wide range of traditional and new media publications, including the Washington Post, New York Times, Miami Herald, and numerous magazines and web sites. A serial entrepreneur, he has been a founder or co-founder of more than a half dozen different companies. In addition, he is currently the Managing Director of AOS Ventures, a small group of angel investors that targets seed stage companies in New England. He is a graduate and active supporter of American University. He splits his time between Washington, DC and New Hampshire, where he lives with his wife and two sons. About CustomScoop CustomScoop, a leader in customizable media monitoring technology and services, delivers relevant market intelligence to its customers in public relations, marketing, sales, investor relations, and competitive intelligence. CustomScoop’s solution utilizes proprietary software and an extensive database of sources to deliver in the areas where traditional news clipping services fall short: speed, accuracy, and detailed reporting. CustomScoop is headquartered in Concord, NH. For More Information or to Try CustomScoop for Free CustomScoop offers a 2 week free trial of ClipIQ, its robust online news clipping service. Sign up to receive customized news briefings, daily. Stay informed without needing to stay glued to your desk. Take advantage of our reliable, cost-effective system that reviews online news sites around the country. We gather the latest relevant information 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and deliver it right to your desktop. http://www.customscoop.com Copyright 2007