What Is Media Monitoring?

Decades ago, organizations had to manually pour through countless newspapers, TV/radio stations, and more in order to understand if they received coverage of their brand. In today's online world, this is a significantly more complicated process - with potentially thousands of channels to keep track of.

With media monitoring software, you can easily track how, when, and where your brand is being discussed. In addition, tools allow you to gain valuable insights into online conversations about your brand, competitors, and even industry trends. With these insights, you can craft a more effective communications strategy based on real-time data.

The combined power of monitoring and analytics unlocks a broad variety of use cases, such as:

• Brand monitoring
• Competitive analysis
• Reputation management
• Crisis management
• Influencer identification
• Campaign tracking and analysis
• Market and industry research
• Customer sentiment analysis
• Media measurement and ROI calculation

The Importance of Brand Mentions and the ability to measure marketing performance

PR and earned media can drive massive amounts of traffic to a website and generate highly effective word-of-mouth marketing. If this results in negative coverage, however, it can be very destructive and spread quickly.

It's also highly beneficial for organizations to track other terms aside from their own brand. By using specially chosen keywords, for instance, organizations can watch areas of interest. So, a non-profit for Alzheimer's patients, for example, can catch all the latest news and chatter on the disease, cures, care, and other related topics.

Organizations may also want to monitor competition. With this information, it's possible to know what competitors are up to, what their target audience says about them, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and who they're marketing to. This knowledge will help organizations compete, but it's also a great way to spot opportunities.

What to look for in a media intelligence or social listening tool

1. The type of media that should be monitored

Media monitoring is more than just news monitoring. One of the first things you should look for is the ability to monitor all relevant news sources in real time and across every channel. One free way to get started is using Google Alerts but if you're a larger organization, you'll find that you'll quickly outgrow it.

Most enterprise media monitoring tools allow you to track media coverage in television, online news/blogs, podcasts, and social media channels. Specialty media monitoring tools watch alternative sources such as government feeds to find legislation changes, email newsletters, or even provide dark web monitoring.

2. The ability to provide context

Media monitoring tools need to do more than just find information using a name, keyword, or organization name. They need to provide additional information such as the context the mentions were made in and a link to the source. Some specialty tools, such as PeakMetrics, can also provide you valuable information on how credible a particular source is, the target audiences that are engaging with a particular narrative, or information on the journalist or influencer that wrote a particular article.

3. Audience insights, social media analytics, and earned media measurement

You should look for capabilities around analytics and insights that enable you to understand your media performance, customer sentiment, and industry trends. It may help to independently think about how you need weight particular coverage or media hits and understand the types of insights you require.

For example, do you need to understand the if a particular article is trending on social media? Is tracking volume of coverage over time important to you? We're also particularly fond of share of voice comparisons, so you can track how you perform against competitors.

3. Customizable reports, alerts and notifications

You should be able to receive real-time notifications when your brand is mentioned or when there are changes in your industry or market. More powerful tools allow you to create extremely complex notifications so you can focus on the content that matters. As an example, you may only want to receive a notification when an influential user posts about you so you can proactively respond and protect your brand reputation.

4. User-friendly interface & API availability

Finally, you should look for a media monitoring tool that is user-friendly, intuitive, and easy to use. For more complex use cases, it is also helpful to work with a platform that provides an easy-to-integrate API so you can centralize your marketing data strategy.

In conclusion, media monitoring and analytics are crucial for organizations in today's digital landscape and are more than a tool for public relations professionals.

A good media monitoring tool can help you stay on top of industry trends, monitor your brand and competitors, and provide valuable insights that inform your communications strategy.