Media monitoring includes reading, viewing or streaming editorial content from media sources (including newspapers, magazines, industry magazines, broadcasters, and the Internet), as well as identifying, storing and analyzing content related to media sources, keywords, or specific topics.
Monitoring editorial content from news sources, including newspapers, magazines, industry magazines, television and radio stations, is the most common form of media monitoring. This type of call is called “news monitoring.”
Most businesses, government agencies, non-profit organizations (e.g. hospitals, universities, associations, etc.) and individuals, such as authors and celebrities, use media monitoring as a tool to identify references to their organization, its brands and its leaders in the media. . Some organizations also use media monitoring tools to track the success of their press releases, find information about competitors and specific issues related to the organization, compare performance with competitors, improve the reputation of the company or brand. Manage, gather industry information to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of business communication, identify new business opportunities and other purposes.
In addition to monitoring news, many organizations now also monitor social networks on the Internet, and rumors about their organizations are tracked on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, message boards and forums. This is commonly referred to as social media monitoring, sundress radio or news monitoring.
Media view profile and search terms
The monitoring process begins with a search profile and search terms, keywords, or phrases. The study profile contains terms of service: media for monitoring, the type of items and/or records that need to be delivered, the tracking period and the way items are delivered.
Search terms are keywords or phrases that should appear in an article, such as the name of an organization or its subsidiaries or brands. An article containing a keyword is commonly referred to as “clipping” or “cutting,” “news clipping, or newspaper clipping.” Clips are delivered physically by mail or as a digital file, usually by email.
While some organizations use internal staff to monitor news and social media, most companies and PR agencies pass this feature on to commercial departments. Commercial departments can generally provide more complete media coverage than internal staff, using online news monitoring tools such as Google News. Commercial media monitoring services often perform better at lower costs than the actual cost of paying employees who monitor internal information.
Media surveillance history
Media monitoring began as a newspaper clipping service in the 19th century. Newspaper clipping services (in Europe called “news clippings”) used people readers to scan articles in print news outlets on the keywords of several clients. Readers tagged keywords in articles, then used razor blades to cut out highlighted articles, put cut-out articles in customer files, and deliver clips to the customer by courier. Most newspaper clippings covered a limited geographic region – for example, a country – and checked publications in the same language. According to surveys conducted by GE, Kodak and other organizations in the 1970s, human readers typically skipped 30-40% of articles containing customer keywords, mainly because readers were quickly looking for articles on the most valuable products. The key words of several customers and not quite on the article read. verbatim articles.
Broadcast monitoring services
In the 1950s, specialized broadcast monitoring companies began tracking television news broadcasts on the key words of the client company. Initially, broadcast monitoring companies used people to view programs, write content resumes, and compile a list of customer keywords.
Monitoring online media
The growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the 1990s spawned online media monitoring services with automated processes for tracking online news. Online services use specialized software called robots, bots or spiders that run on powerful computer servers to quickly analyze new editorial content from online news and social media sources and index all words in news content and social media posts. Once the software compiles the content, it identifies all articles that contain each customer’s search queries (keywords or phrases), and then automatically cuts and delivers those articles or social media messages to the customer. Unlike regular readers in old-school newspaper clippings, the program rarely misses relevant articles because it reads the entire article verbatim.
The benefits of online news monitoring
Business monitoring services have many advantages over outdated print media services or internal monitoring of media by staff.
Today, with few exceptions, each print edition publishes its editorial materials on the publication’s website. By monitoring world Wide Web publications, online media monitoring services can track news sources in any country in almost any language. Online news monitoring services currently track between 20,000 and 50,000 online news sources in several languages. Many online monitoring services use built-in translation software to instantly translate news videos into foreign languages.
While old-fashioned news clipping services took 2-3 weeks to deliver clips, online media monitoring services provide clips overnight as a standard service and usually offer timely delivery, almost real for an additional fee. Most clips are delivered via email in text or HTML format, but other delivery methods are available, including RSS, XML, and PDF via FTP.