As the saying goes, “Knowledge is power.” Knowledge gained from monitoring what’s being said about a company, its brands, and competitors helps you develop effective strategies for PR or marketing success. But with so many media outlets and media angles to consider, how can you elevate your media monitoring beyond basic without over-extending your resources? Our on-demand webinar, “From Basic to Boss: How to Take Your Media Monitoring to the Next Level," offers tips for extracting and reporting insights culled from the media—regardless of what tools you're using. What does next level media monitoring entail? In simple terms, it’s about ensuring a strategic alignment between the data being captured, insights that inform campaigns, metrics that your C suite cares about the most and, of course, proving ROI to showcase the value of PR and marketing. Read on for a sneak peek.

Creating value from media insights

Chastity Johnson, Director of Product Management at LexisNexis®, serves as your guide during the webinar. As a product leader, Chastity is constantly looking at customer needs and how artificial intelligence and emerging technologies can enhance business-critical information discovery and analysis.  She notes, “When you're monitoring and measuring and reporting on the right things, media monitoring can really help you identify and predict ways to make your PR strategy and campaigns much more effective and efficient.” During the webinar, Chastity explores three areas that are difference makers:

1. Metrics and Measurements
2. Metadata
3. Management

Within each area, Chastity offers ways to evaluate PR and marketing program effectiveness and turn those measurements into actionable insights.

Let’s take a closer look at the first area—metrics and measurements. Gone are the days of measuring column inches to assess the effectiveness of PR or marketing campaigns. Basic metrics remain part of PR and marketing pros measurement arsenal:

• Media Type—Trade, print, digital, or blog
• Placement—Global, national, regional, or local
• Value—Media value, impressions

However, these metrics offer limited insight. Take impressions, a stalwart in the media measurement arsenal. SmartInsights notes, “The PR industry has been around for more than a century. Over those many years, the prevailing belief has been that the more people you hit with a message, the better.” But awareness alone won’t boost your brand or fill your sales pipeline.

During the webinar, Chastity identifies features that move metrics from basic to boss—with a corresponding lift in actionable insights. The best metrics should:

• Offer context to your media coverage over time
• Measure results tied to specific business objectives
• Focus on outcomes that demonstrate a change in behavior, opinion, or action
• Deliver actionable insights rather than observations

Take the metric coverage over time. By analyzing coverage over time, you can see how your story, brand or campaigns perform over time. You can also compare media coverage across platforms over time, allowing you to evaluate the effectiveness of your website, social channels, etc., and allocate budget appropriately based on engagement. And, coverage over time is also useful for spotting anomalies to better understand how events correspond with performance. For example, a non-profit might look for spikes in media coverage to better understand what precipitates a jump in donations or higher program participation.

Sentiment tracking is another boss-level metric. Sentiment tracking allows you to identify what’s being covered as well as how your company or brand is being perceived. Chasity delves into the pros and cons of automated versus human sentiment analysis and says it’s not an either-or choice. Boss-level sentiment tracking recognizes the limitations of automated sentiment tracking (accuracy challenges when it’s a complex or nuanced message) and human sentiment tracking (time-consuming, human resource intensive work). By combining the two approaches, you get the best of both worlds. You can start with automated sentiment analysis to get a big picture, then pull a sample of the coverage for human analysis. By narrowing the scope of the human analysis, you can accelerate the time to insight.

Want more tips for moving from basic to boss with your media monitoring? Check out the full webinar, at your convenience, for more must-have metrics, plus best practices when it comes to metadata and management.