Common Problems Faced During Your Media Monitoring Process
And few simple solutions to tackle them!
Daily news digests and monthly analysis reports have become a must-needed media monitoring products for PR and communications professionals. However, monitoring the entire media in search of your brand and keyword mentions is not going to be an easy task. Not only have the news sources where your mentions appear increased a hundred-fold, but the need for an external media monitoring firm to plan, monitor, interpret, and report the media information has also climbed up without any doubt.
That’s why we bring you here the most common drawbacks when PR professionals perform do-it-yourself searches or use self-serve media monitoring tools, and most importantly, how you can tackle them. While there are many questions to ask and answer, we will run through the top 4 problems faced by most of the PR executives in media monitoring and how you can solve them.
Problem 1: Hours Spent
Based on the rough estimate done by our current PR customers, nearly 70% of junior-level employees’ work time is spent only on news monitoring and tracking mentions. It’s no wonder that surfing thousands of online news sources and searching for relevant mentions are where most of a PR professional’s time will be spent on. Now, consider yourself a company, hiring an employee to cover your news monitoring process and you will be most likely to pay more than $80K per year as salary. Though, the expenditure falls on the expensive side, the output results aren’t even comparable to what a well-trained media monitoring expert could do.
How you can solve it:
With the help of expert analysts from a media monitoring firm, the incompetent time wasted by your employee on media monitoring tasks will be cut-off as the analyst will be doing all the heavy lifting instead of your employee. Media monitoring analysts will monitor your mentions throughout the day and send you morning, mid-day, and EOD digests as per your preference. They will also alert you whenever there is a significant spike in your media mentions, allowing you to quickly act and report to your top executives, if needed, respond back to media immediately.
Do you like to know what your competitors doing? Analysts from media monitoring firms will also include competitor media activities as well as your Industry’s top happenings in their news digests.
Problem 2: Missing Mentions
One of the biggest issues faced by PR professionals with their do-it-yourself searches or self-serve media monitoring tools are frequent missing of important brand mentions. Nothing is more frustrating than when crucial media mentions are not captured in your results. It’s fair to say that the amount of money invested on the monitoring and tracking tools could be worth it if the end results are thorough and accurate. However, many PR professionals are getting continuously annoyed with the current automated monitoring tools which inevitably miss crucial media appearances. PR executives are then forced to investigate Google like search engines and other social channels to double or triple check to confirm nothing is missed before reporting to their top tier officials.
How you can solve it:
Thanks to the latest crawling technologies combined with the human powered comprehensive search tactics, PR executives have access to most of the online sources cracking the paywall sites. The analysts also double check the search logics and adjust the filters to make sure all the essential mentions come through. Thus, media monitoring firms uses human experts to shine the flashlight into the dark corners of the entire media room including online, print, broadcast, and social media, thus allowing PR executives to confidently report their C-suites with all prominent news titles where your pitch landed.
Problem 3: Unwanted Noise
Two common issues in media monitoring tools reported by PR professionals are the amount of noise and the number of duplicate mentions. PR teams are tired of getting rid of these unwanted noise and irrelevant stuffs ended up in their search results. If you’re consistently getting noisy media monitoring results that leave you scratching—or shaking—your head, then it’s time for you to act immediately. But the challenge includes a need for a staff, well-trained in media monitoring and a stronger way to clean the output results.
How you can solve it:
In the human powered media monitoring firms, monitoring services are handled by expert research analysts. So, PR teams can completely rely on the results pulled by them. PR teams can even see the quality uplift of human touch in sentiment analysis and the assessment of key message penetration. Behind every result, there is an experienced person who not only scans the result for relevancy but also analyses the context of the conversations happening in the media news stream.
Problem 4: Tight Budget
Depending on goals and available budget, PR professionals rely on free tools and a total do-it-yourself approach, while others invest heavily in full-service media monitoring tools. And then there are the many PR agencies and in-house PR teams who subscribe to a media monitoring tool that allows them to perform their own coverage tracking and reporting.
While a self-serve monitoring tool isn’t as costly as a full-service option, it is still a significant financial investment for many organizations, and one that users will want to make sure they maximize the value of. However, according to an executive-level PR professional from a reputed company, “Human media monitoring is undeniably the best option to go for, but still the fixed PR budget is the one main constraint to opt for it.”
How you can solve it:
Though monitoring and analyzing media news coverage became a priority for every PR and communications team, stretching their defined budgets is also difficult for many organizations. So, to overwhelm this issue, many human-curated media monitoring firms operates on a customized pricing model which allows you to pick and choose which metrics are essential to you, effectively tailoring your final media monitoring package within your budget.
Also, with business operations in both US and India, media monitoring firms like DigiMent Research could possibly be the best and most-affordable human media monitoring and PR measurement firm in the current industry. Also, statistics say DigiMent Research analysts can save their customers a minimum of 60% a year on cost and an average of 2 hours a day on building and distributing PR reports, when compared to traditional media monitoring services and do-it-yourself tools.
Want to try human-curated media monitoring service? Contact us for a free trial today!