INTRODUCTION
Communication professionals perform media monitoring to listen, watch and track media coverage and conversation about their organization, industry, competition and other topics. These mentions contain keywords that can be found on media channels like TV, forums, magazines, social media and blogs.
Ultimately, media monitoring can help your business by monitoring brand reputation, preventing crises, knowing your audience and measuring the results of a PR or marketing campaign, among many others.
Here is more information on how to track media mentions, the various tools to help do it effectively and tips to avoid irrelevant hits.
WHY TRACK MEDIA MENTIONS
Media monitoring can help your communication team keep up with brand mentions, press opportunities and relevant news that could influence your strategy. With how fast news spreads, it’s even more important to have a cohesive monitoring plan. This plan includes what you’re tracking, who is owning the monitoring process, how you’re reporting news that breaks and what tools will help track topics the best.
In the world of news, not all media mentions will be positive. You want to be alerted to any negative media coverage soon after it’s published so that you can respond right away. The longer the story stays out there by itself, the harder it becomes to counter its effects.
Monitoring the media can lead to positive coverage opportunities. For example, you may start to see trends in coverage of a certain industry and realize it’s a chance to insert your company or subject matter expert into the conversation.
It’s best to monitor keywords not only related to your company name but your product or service, branded hashtag and even the company CEO or other C-suite members. It’s also best practice to monitor your competitors to see how they’re being covered.
VARIOUS MEDIA TRACKING TOOLS
There are multiple tools, both free and paid, to use for tracking mentions. Google Alerts is one of the easiest to use, and it is free. By simply entering a word or phrase, you’ll be alerted by email whenever Google finds new mentions on the web. You can decide how often you want to receive the alerts, the language, etc. This can be a great tool for startups and companies that don’t have the budget to pay a monthly fee.
However, Google Alerts doesn’t catch all web mentions. Limitations include lack of social media search, minimal filtering system and the length of time (e.g., not instantaneous) it takes to receive alerts.
This is where a paid service like Cision, Muck Rack or Meltwater might be beneficial as they track your brand everywhere. For example, all of the aforementioned paid services platforms track mentions in social media and podcasts in addition to traditional and online media. The only downside to these services is price, as they can run anywhere from $4,000-$7,200 a year.
Tracking television hits is a little different because sometimes the TV segment is not put on the website. You’ll need to use tools like Critical Mention, TV Eyes and News Exposure to track media mentions.
TIPS TO AVOID IRRELEVANT HITS
When monitoring, it’s common to get irrelevant hits or false positives. For example, if you’re monitoring Madison University, you may get hits such as James Madison University. To partially avoid this, use quotation marks around any search phrase.
If your search terms are still coming up too general, narrow your search by adding a minus sign on the front of any search term, which tells Google not to show you any pages containing that word or phrase. You can exclude as many words as you want by using the minus sign in front of them. As an example, [jaguar -cars -football] will avoid the Jaguar vehicle and the NFL team in search results.
Other paid tools like Meltwater give users the option to hide or delete irrelevant results from their search. They may also provide a “negative keyword” search capability, giving users the ability to add keywords you don’t want to appear. For example, if you work for Apple, negative keywords might be “Granny Smith” or “Honeycrisp.”