Making The Most of Today’s Media Monitoring Tools

Companies and communications firms have long used tracking services to ferret out media mentions of their organizations and clients, including news about products, services and personnel.  These services were particularly valuable for determining print and broadcast coverage.  And when trying to control fallout from a company issue or crisis, you needed to know what the media was reporting.  So such tracking was useful.

Along comes the Internet and “useful” became “invaluable.”  Because now, not only the media can comment on a company, but every customer, critic and competitor has an electronic megaphone to compliment, complain or condemn – whether or not their judgment is true or accurate.

In addition, customers’ thoughts and ideas about products, services, or activities can help organizations modify their marketing strategies or tactics – even their product design.  Dell, the computer company, when following customers’ Twitter feeds, noticed complaints about some keys on its laptop being too close together.  Dell fixed the problem on its next generation laptop.  So, monitoring the Internet – as well as traditional media – can have broader impact on a company’s operations.

There are monitoring services available that will scan the searchable Internet as well as traditional media.  What can be monitored is limitless – organizations, brands, products, competitors, potential employees, etc.  Of course, there can be hefty fees attached, and for some large companies, it’s worth it.

The good news is there are excellent, free monitoring services.  You can find ten of them explained at http://www.ragan.com/main/articles/10freesocialmediasitesyoushouldt42771.aspx.  The ones most used by the Crosby team are “Addictomatic,” “Social Mention,” and “Google Alerts.”

Google Alerts is the one site that everyone should use.  Google Alerts are emails sent to you when Google finds new results – such as web pages, newspaper articles, blogs, or other user-generated content – that include your search term(s).  You can use Google Alerts to monitor anything on the web.

 It’s easy to use:

1.  You enter a query that you’re interested in.

2.  Google Alerts checks regularly to see if there are new results for your query.

3.  If there are new results, Google Alerts sends them to you in an email.

So, if you want to know what’s being said about your organization, learn what your competitors are up to or keep up-to-date on your industry, these are great tools to monitor the media.

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