Am I Monitoring the Media? Or is the Media Monitoring Me?
Posted by Joscelyn on April 11th, 2007
First of all, if you’re reading this, my thanks. It has been an exceptionally busy winter and spring for the Girlz, still is actually, and we just haven’t had the time to keep up with the blog.
Now, onto the good stuff.
Everyday I do media monitoring for my clients. Most of you do, particularly at a junior level. If you’re in PR, you’re probably monitoring regularly, as well you should be! Now I don’t know how this was done 10 or even 5 years ago. Quite frankly, I’m not sure I want to know! When I started in this business almost 2 years ago, media monitoring in Canada meant setting up profiles in Infomart, maybe getting Bowdens (sorry, Cision) involved to send you broadcast clips and the odd hard copy of newspaper clippings. If you were properly set up and had all your keywords sorted out, this took 15-25 minutes per day, per client, on average. Let’s call it an hour of your morning.
Soon after I started, blogs started becoming a big deal, especially here at TFC. So I set up my Bloglines account and found many interesting and many useless, blogs on a variety of topics, including those that related to my clients. I started flagging the blogs I thought were particularly helpful and checked them regularly for anything my clients would need/want to see. So tack another 25-30 minutes onto your monitoring time for this. More if you’re commenting regularly.
Let’s toss Google Alert’s into the mix, just for fun. They pop up throughout the day; I try to clear them out 2 or three times a day, flagging the ones I think are worthy. I do a more thorough read-through when I’m doing my daily monitoring. So let’s call it another hour a day.
Now, I’m told that social news is the way to go. Citizen journalists, average joes like you and me are now writing articles all over the world about every issue and imaginable topic. And I’m supposed to keep up with them too? Who are these people? Why do I care what they have to say? If they say something negative about my client, is that as powerful as a negative piece in the Globe or on CTV? Does it merit us PR folk launching into crisis mode to diffuse the situation? I’m going with no. Is a negative piece on one of those sites going to have legs? Not very long ones. Yes, lots of people are reading those sites, but it’s the same people. Outside of this office, I don’t know one person who frequents these sites, who even knows what they are or who cares about them. A lot of people still haven’t caught onto blogs. The HORROR!!!
Media monitoring is one of the most recognized things we do in this business. It’s certainly important and I would argue that the one doing the monitoring knows more about the client’s business than the ones reading what is clipped. Valuable? Absolutely. But it’s not everything; it’s a sliver of what we do. I could blow a monthly retainer doing media monitoring, media scoring, media analysis, but is that value? So where do we draw the line?
At what point do we say enough is enough and concentrate on the more valuable media for our clients? I think an hour a day, per client, is more than enough monitoring. In that time, you should have found the relevant articles, anything that affects their business or their competitors, and learned something about their world. More than an hour and that’s a lot of time drifting from one site to the next, grasping at straws, looking for something, anything, that will make that hour valuable and worth your hourly rate to your client.
Oh, and don’t forget about measurement. It’s how we justify our budgets and clients need to see those reports. How do you measure those sites? Is it comparable to other forms of media? Who decides and what are the guidelines?
If you ask me, that’s a lot of unanswered questions related to social news and social media. Have the answers? Great! Love to hear em.
Posted to Agency Life, Media, Social Media
April 11th, 2007 » 5:15 pm
Good post, Jos
The volume of content is overwhelming.
BTW, what’s the deal with the Bowdens rebrand, anyway?
April 12th, 2007 » 8:23 am
Joscelyn, I was in the media monitoring business way back when, actually I started in the business way/way back …yikkkks! Chiseling those clippings out of all those stone tablets was an extremely labour intensive job, not to mention finding a hardy stock of pigeons to fly them out throughout the Empire required constant maintenance and care.
It was sure nice to retreat to the Bath House after a long day! The hours were long and the work was drudgery; however the rewards of a few coins in my skin pouch made it all worthwhile!
April 12th, 2007 » 10:46 am
How can you be Public Relations “professionals” when you can’t even spell GIRLS. Butchering the English language is not professional. There is a little feature on your computer called spell check. Try it sometime. Words like banks being changed to banx or girls being misspelled as gurlz just because some dippy teenager with an IQ less than their shoe size spells that way does not mean that this should be accepted in the business world. Perhaps you should look for something different in the career direction. Practice this “Do ya want fries with dat?”
April 12th, 2007 » 3:56 pm
Paul R- My take is that when you ARE a girl, you can spell it how you like. You can spell boy or man how you like, since you are one (presumably), but I can think of WAY better nouns for you to spell if you’re interested… But I’m too much of a lady to say them.
April 14th, 2007 » 7:34 pm
Joscelyn: Sorry about my comments, I thought you were an adult. Just a little something to keep in mind for when you grow up. Good luck when you graduate from high school.
April 16th, 2007 » 4:20 am
Absolutely agree that media monitoring is a tedious task, but unless you are monitoring and measuring, how do you know what the best use of your time is? All that monitoring and subsequent measuring provides the data so you know where and how to allocate the rest of the day. if you don’t know what’s working and not working, how do you know what you should be spending your time on?
April 16th, 2007 » 11:00 am
Paul R: Apology accepted! With any luck, I’ll one day be as wise and mature as you. Now, shall we move on?
Katie: All good questions! I completely agree- careful media monitoring is essential. If not done properly, you could easily miss an issue that requires immediate attention. I just wonder where the most influential and important media are that provide you with the most accurate information from which to form these decisions- mainstream or social news? Only time will tell…
April 20th, 2007 » 3:36 pm
Thank goodness for RSS feeds and smart feed readers. I wouldn’t be able to keep up without them. I am doing new PR for Attensa, who has a free feed reader that will automatically put feeds into Outlook for you. And it’ll automatically set up folders for each feed so you’re not drowning in information.
Tracking social news as well as blogs and traditional media will soon become mainstream - but only when tools like Attensa are widely adopted by PR pros.
April 30th, 2007 » 11:16 am
I on Katie’s team on this one.
You can’t manage it if you don’t measure it. Monitoring is one among several means to that end and measuring media coverage (traditional or CGM) is only one among several things that can and should be measured. Sponsorships, reputation, relationships, trust, brand, employee communications, spokesperson/exec speaker effectiveness etc. etc etc.
So, while not each of these are necessary for every organization (depends on who they are, what they do, who they communicate with, why, how and in what environment) there is life beyond measuring media.
October 2nd, 2007 » 2:05 pm
Hey there Joscelyn - great post. Many of the agencies we’ve been talking to have been struggling with the same problems - more and more social media properties to find, monitor, analyze, trend, share with clients etc… and still too little time to do it.
I’ve seen PR pros go in two directions: 1) pick away at it whenever they can knowing that they really should be doing it more often but who has the time
2) assign a small army of staff to tackle it and try to manually piece it all together for the client - hoping you still don’t miss anything and that conversations don’t cross over too many different social mediums because then the tracking gets even more tricky
We’ve been working with a number of early adopter firms in North America over the past year on trying to solve this pain. Here’s what we’ve heard:
- find an easy way to track more than just blogs (ie, the YouTubes, flickrs, twitters, opinion sites, forums, mainstream media online) and filter out the junk that can get mixed up with the valid conversations;
- find easy ways to get the “forest for the trees” views of conversations;
- offer easy ways to sort and jump to the stuff creating the most discussion;
- have an easy way to share the data once you’ve found it and analyzed it so you can easily incorporate it into the expert advice we provide to clients.
This feedback has certainly been amazing for us as it has helped us fine tune the solution to specifically get at what the PR or ad professional really needs. Because, as you said in your post, the ultimate goal for each agency is to: “make that hour valuable and worth your hourly rate to your client.” Couldn’t agree more.
Cheers.
David
http://www.radian6.com
“Be the social media expert”