Media Monitoring: An Absolute Necessity

Today, news and pieces of information are circulated to a variety of audiences in a blink of an eye. What is the media saying about your brand? Does it have a positive or negative impact on your brand? What are your competitors doing? To have the answers to all these questions, you need to have a complete overview of the market as well as the media. This is where Media Monitoring comes to play. Media Monitoring keeps a track of what is going around in the media and helps you plan your next step accordingly.

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Media Monitoring: Your eyes and ears

In today’s time, there is a continuous buzz in the market regarding various brands. This buzz, in reality, is the people talking and gossiping about what you are and what you do. You may not see them, but they are out there, always watching you.

Back in 1800, press clipping services were used to scour the media mentions of the brands. They scanned the articles or news in printed publications looking for the keywords for multiple clients. The keywords were then cut out and sent to the clients. Fast forward to the present day, with the emergence of new technologies, monitoring services have evolved accordingly to the needs of the clients. Today, a full-scale monitoring service can track thousands of news sources in real-time. Various Monitoring tools allow companies to gather, organize and filter news and information across the media landscape with a definite set of keywords. It is like having your eyes and ears open to all kinds of conversations going around your brand and industry on all channels and at all volumes.

Why is Monitoring a powerful tool to have?

News monitoring is requisite for most organizations. With the emphasis on the return on investment, corporate brands always need to gather information from media into a cohesive whole. Today, news in traditional media, (Newspaper, magazines, journals) is best monitored on the internet. Broadly speaking, along with monitoring and clipping of the print publications in various languages, monitoring services capture clips from innumerable online news sources.

These days, most of the brand campaigns and initiatives are done through online media. Monitoring experts have to use tools to track keywords on social media, blogs, portals, etc. This means having immediate alerts of trolls and other negative reviews or comments so that you can take immediate actions to save or clear your brand reputation.

Social media monitoring is used in finding and identifying influencers, analyzing your competitors, and various developments or changes taking place in the industry. It allows your brand to capture perfect press opportunities and help you gain public insights and needs. Relevant keywords can give way to influencers or bloggers who speak or talk about your brand or relevant topics surrounding your brand. They can help you find your competitors and their ongoing initiatives.

Managing monitoring alerts

Knowing what is going around is one thing and taking proper steps to maintain your brand’s reputation is another. Media monitoring automates the process of content tracking and collects the opinions surrounding a brand. Yet, a response is manual and should be given to positively shape the customer’s perception of your business. It should be forthcoming, timely, and measured regardless of whether the reviews or comments are positive or negative.

Understanding what is around you is fundamental to long-term success for businesses. You can use Media monitoring to measure and improve the effectiveness of your communications. It is a powerful tool to get business insights on a regular basis and alter your brand activities accordingly.