Monitoring the internet

Media Monitoring is essential to PR and marketing. It gathers together the fruits of your marketing labours, and allows a marketer to watch what is being said about the brand and thus protect and develop it.

Media Monitoring of offline media is a well established and relatively straightforward task. The number of publications or media outlets is reasonably static and are comparatively well known and the companies that offer the service are very experienced. In addition, the publications themselves are used to supplying copies of features and articles. The same cannot be said of monitoring the online world. First of all the number of outlets or conversations going on is huge. Everyday new websites, forums and blogs appear, and new communities develop. All of a sudden it is as important to be monitoring the conversations happening on social networking sites as it is to monitor the features being written on news websites. Even the websites that seem to mirror offline media - such as news websites - have the added complication that they are updated several times a day and most have a "respond to this article" function.

What's the solution?

Currently there is some debate as to the best way to monitor the online world. There are those companies that advocate a technology-only solution. These use programs that first of all scour the web for any mentions of particular keywords and then use yet more technology to ensure that the particular mention is relevant. This is particularly hard if you have a brand such as Orange where the obvious keyword can be used in very obviously different circumstances. Those advocating the technology-only route also have faith that they can analyse any coverage discovered and flag whether it is 'positive' or 'negative' coverage.

A second school of thought opts for using a combination of technology with human interpretation. This generally uses technology to locate and recover all mentions of a particular keyword but then uses a non technological approach to sort the resulting coverage in terms of relevance, and positive or negative content. Some approaches will also use technology to discard keyword mentions that are obviously irrelevant. Which approach you use will depend on what you want to monitor, your resources and to some extent which methodology you personally buy into.

Where to look and why does it matter?

In the digital world people are talking about your brand. You will find the discussion going on in news sites, on people's blogs, in chat rooms, in Facebook groups. Images, videos, animations and audio. Your monitoring needs to be looking at all of these places.

Measuring PR and Marketing

If you are running an online PR or marketing campaign careful monitoring allows you to measure its successes and its failures and adjust your strategy to gain the best possible ROI. Simply put, media monitoring helps you to identify the influencers and the conversations relevant to your brand - the target audience. It also allows you to monitor the results of your marketing and PR - the news features, the blog entries, the forum conversations and tagged media. So if you ad into the equation your outputs in terms of press releases, joined conversations, blogger relations alongside traffic being driven to your website you should be able to develop a complex and accurate analysis of a campaign. It will also allow you to see the effect of any adjustment in strategy.
Research - Activity - Coverage - Website traffic.

Developing a social media strategy

If you are considering engaging with social media, you want to make sure that you know your community. A simple search on Facebook for wine groups or automotive groups will return literally hundreds of groups, some of them serious, some not. Some of them are positive, some are merely poisonous bile, some are big and some small.

The simple fact is that if you are going to decide which ones if any to engage with, which ones to monitor and which ones to ignore, you need to know about their existence and know what kind of group they are - this will be essential to any social media strategy.

Crisis PR

A stitch in time saves nine. Wise words. One of the characteristics of social media is the idea of community, with people with similar views and ideas talking to each other. This is great, unless it turns against you or your brand. Take for example the surf company who had an upset customer who went on to start a blog and website dedicated to airing his personal grievances with the company. The blog developed a life of its own with random people getting involved and adding their opinions. It meant that when people were researching their surf holiday they came across this site and its negative messaging. Bookings fell, but it was only when a potential customer actually rang them to ask about the accusations made on the blog and website that the company became aware of the storm that had been brewing. It took this company a further 2 seasons of dwindling numbers to manage this PR disaster. Had they been aware of what was going on, they could have taken steps to address the negative conversations that were flourishing on the internet.

Monitor the conversations about your brand and act before things get out of hand.

The ISM approach

ISM has developed it's own human and technology monitoring solution which can be hosted to provide instant access, or, can be summarised and sent direct to your inbox.

Our team of analysts and PR professionals further assist our clients to ensure they make timely and informed communications decisions.