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How to Improve Your Media Monitoring Management

Media monitoring is the key to seeing the clearest picture of how your company is functioning. Yet, it can feel like a monumental task to manage all the available information, while also making sure your data is current, comprehensive, and correct. The more you can discover about which data is most integral for your company to thrive, the more you can refine your needs, filter out unimportant data, and create a long-term, sustainable, and successful media management strategy for your company.

In this article, we will discuss how to improve your media monitoring management by using innovative and effective technology that, in its simplest and most basic form, makes the process more straightforward and, ultimately, easier.

Why do you need to manage your media monitoring?

Today’s media landscape includes an almost limitless stream of news articles and social media posts happening every second of every day, all of which can give you insight into how your brand is performing.

To keep up with the increasing bulk of information—and pare it down to the metrics that really matter—it’s necessary to have media monitoring management that can focus in on the unique needs of your current and future business. Every brand is different, and these metrics and organization strategies can differ depending on the size, industry, and type of organization. Regardless of your industry, media monitoring can help you recognize, communicate, and utilize key insights about brand health, competitive trends, and emerging opportunities to inform business decisions.

That’s where media monitoring technology comes in. Using a tool like Nexis NewsdeskTm, it becomes easy to paint a picture of how your organization is being viewed externally by marrying context with qualitative data to give you insight you need to shape future campaigns.

MORE: Analyze market, media, and trends data for better business intelligence

Basic media management expectations 

At bare minimum, your media monitoring and management tools should be:  

  • Searchable: A search function should allow you to do volume-based searches based on your personally identified keywords and phrases without the need for you to conduct individual open web searches.
  • Filterable: Filter for current, properly sourced, and pertinent, allowing you to easily eliminate the noise by returning only what's most relevant to you.
  • Monitored: Monitor for your key words pushing out media updates for your organization, about your industry, or about your competitors.
  • Visualized: Produce some level of automated visual results (simple charts) that are easily analyzed and made use of by any member of your team.

Next level media monitoring platform management

Next level media monitoring platform management is about managing the system for long-term effectiveness. It allows for at-a-glance analysis and real-time results that help you replicate searches and reporting functions very quickly and very easily, as well as identify opportunities for deeper engagement and campaign refinement.

It’s important to optimize the use of your platform and dashboards for maximum efficiency. Using a shared platform, your team can rapidly understand, interpret, and integrate the same media data. This makes it easier to manage, create, and share dashboards, allowing for better collaboration with all the members of your team.

MORE: Harnessing the power of media intelligence

Deliver better ROIs with better media monitoring management

By using an organized media monitoring management system, you can go beyond traditional media monitoring to expand your search while streamlining the information you take in, allowing you to respond quickly to any pertinent developments.

Beyond the traditional metrics and brand mentions, consider a platform that allows you to track influencers, identify trends, and follow news stories in real-time.

Influencer tracking   

Influencer tracking can help you identify your brand ambassadors, advocates, and detractors, as well as identifying your competitors and their brand ambassadors, advocates, and detractors. You can also track topics and talking points of interest by setting up dashboards that help you analyze your key influencers.

Let’s say there is an influencer out there that tracks top executives at your competitor organization. By partnering with them, they can help you better track what your competitors are doing, which will support and inform your future planning efforts.

On the flip side, when you start to track what people are saying about your brand, you can use the information to update your key messages. Tactical application of this information will enhance future campaigns and illuminate best practices for their implementation.

Trend identification

In the same way that influencer tracking helps you understand what advocates, detractors, and possible partners are saying about your brand, identifying trends can impact what and how you're communicating by future-casting and threat-casting—that is, making predictions about your brand by analyzing current trends.

With future-casting and threat-casting you can identify potential reputational risk before an issue arises. Think of it as anomaly tracking before there's anomaly. If your dashboards are set up properly, you can quickly create these searches to identify new opportunities stemming from news stories, story topics, media outlets, or influencers.

You can also identify voids in your media coverage or find prospective experts who can help you fill those voids with key messages or topics for future PR campaigns.

Real-time reporting

Real-time reporting allows you to rapidly respond to breaking news with thought-leadership or to allow you to break into the news cycle. If you have live charts and graphs that are embedded on your internal web page, you can instantaneously share some of your insights with key stakeholders.

There are a few ways that you can use real time alerts to your brand's benefit:

  • Quickly to an emerging reputational risk and/or track the effectiveness of your crisis response on media coverage.
  • Identify reporters and media outlets that are currently covering your brand or your area of expertise.
  • Capture and report coverage as it airs, rather than waiting for the story to publish online.

Taken together, an organized platform that goes beyond traditional media monitoring will give you the most complete picture of your brand’s media performance and how to shape your communications and business strategies.

MORE: Five steps to can’t-miss ESG monitoring

Manage your media monitoring in one place

Managing your media monitoring can take time and energy if you’re not using the right tool. To get the most out of your efforts, you need a platform with access to the most data, including licensed, behind-the-paywall articles, and the ability to analyze the data so you can quickly glean the insights you need.

That’s where Nexis Newsdesk comes in. With Newsdesk, you can powerfully leverage media monitoring and meta data across a single, global collection of print, broadcast, and digital media, then quickly uncover critical insights about your brand, competitors, and the market. It easily takes you beyond basic coverage reports, analyzing everything from coverage sentiment to trending topics to help you understand how your messages are working in the real world.

Newsdesk then automatically identifies the most relevant data from every search to be easily exported and shared to relevant stakeholders, allowing you more time to focus on strategy and build your brand.