5 Best Practices for Effective Media Monitoring

Jacob Smith of West Unified Communications introduces us to “media monitoring” and how to do it well.

Want to know how to do media monitoring right?

From media scanning and clipping reports to real-time listening solutions, media monitoring is not a new concept. In fact, it’s been around for over a hundred years.

It’s the only way to understand what’s being said about your company and industry, and by whom. With the growth of social media and online publications, media monitoring is essential for public relations and marketing teams.

Overall, an effective media monitoring strategy contains many intricacies. It’s difficult to know what to look for and how to find the right types of content. But don’t worry – we have five best practices to help you, whether you’re just starting monitoring or you’ve been doing it for some time.

1. Cast a Wide Net

Top-tier media outlets and Twitter aren’t the only channels that matter when it comes to an efficient media monitoring strategy. New bloggers, journalists and publications come about often.

Along with their arrival, so do new and important audiences. Use the knowledge gained from these new sources to build more dialogue within their respective communities, using content that will resonate with new audiences.

This insight can come from many different sources. You can monitor mentions of your brand, but always pay attention to topics adjacent to your brand.

Tracking your competitors and industry segments will reveal threats, open new opportunities with consumers, inform your product roadmap and future campaign success.

2. Benchmark, Benchmark, Benchmark

“What happened yesterday will impact tomorrow.” This rings true for your content strategy as well.

Year over year, quarter over quarter, month over month, or week over week, benchmarking your content performance through monitoring will give you a unique perspective vs. the competition. It opens you up to establish success criteria, best practices and opportunities for improvement.

Focus on specific time periods and trends to see how your audiences interacted with competitor products, industry trends and your owned content. Listen to what the media was saying and predicting. This research will help inform your communications strategy.

3. Automate Your Workflow

Listening and reporting takes time. A lot of it. Which is why the media monitoring industry is growing rapidly.

That growth has come with incredible technology and services. No matter if you’re a marketer, PR or communications professional, sales manager or customer support representative, what’s said online and how your company reacts will reflect upon your brand and, potentially, even your industry.

Email alerts and outsourced reports are a great way to streamline any monitoring workflow. With the right technology or reporting partner, you can create many types of automated reports.

Peak or volume threshold alerts will keep you updated with any trending content, potential crises or any other topic with increased volumes. Real-time alerts will automatically notify you of any outlets or social authors mentioning important topics.

Scheduled alerts and daily coverage reporting will save hours a day and are vitally important in your internal and external communications.

4. Support Other Departments

Each organization is different and success criteria will change throughout the year. It’s important to stay informed as to what different teams are expecting in your reporting. Your daily coverage needs to stay relevant and your analysis accurate.

For example: For those speaking negatively about your brand online, what are they saying? Are their conversations similar? Is it a larger service issue? Use this information to inform your customer support teams to build more proactive support strategies.

Your competitors are also going to change their strategies from time to time. Keep a close eye on what they are doing and use that content with your sales team. Identify and pounce on new opportunities and build on any momentum your industry is generating.

5. Be Agile

As your audiences moves into new topics and trends, you need to understand how you’re going to interact with that audience and constantly revise your outbound strategy.

Whether you just completed a campaign, product launch or a successful conference, use these events as an opportunity to review your process and overall PR/marketing plan.

Work closely with your media monitoring partner to ensure that both the services and technologies are working at their full potential. If you are utilizing alerts or a technology, ensure that you are watching for new hashtags and keywords that may affect your content strategy.