Media Monitoring Checklist

Contents
Contents 2

Introduction 3

Set Up Your Account 3

R Take advantage of your provider’s help & customer support 3

R Set up your search criteria 4

R Create essential reports & charts 5

R Schedule email alerts 9

Use Your Reports 9

R Consume email reports 9

R Review clips in an online dashboard 10

Leverage Your Content 11

R Use workflow tools to organize yourself and your team 11

R Distribute news to key audiences 11

R Add stories to your intranet or external web site 11

R Analyze news data through rating and other metrics 12

R Save reports to your online dashboard 13

R Export your data 13

About the Author 14

About CustomScoop 14


© 2011 CustomScoop. All rights reserved. Page 2

Introduction
Tracking important stories in traditional and social media provides powerful benefits to organizations of all types and sizes. With the
proliferation of media outlets and content, it becomes ever more difficult to do this monitoring effectively.

Whether you’re using a free consumer service like Google Alerts or a professional solution like CustomScoop, there are ways to make
sure you’re getting the most from your effort.

Ultimately, you want to make sure that you expend as little time and money as necessary to get the results you need without
unnecessary hassle.

This e-book will show you how to maximize your media monitoring benefits with a step-by-step guide to setting up your account, using
your reports, and leveraging your results.

Set Up Your Account
When you decide which media monitoring provider to use, it’s time to start setting up your account to position yourself for success. By
investing some time up front, you will save yourself time and make yourself more effective as you use your solution on a daily basis.

R Take advantage of your provider’s help & customer support
Most free search providers offer some degree of online help that tries to guide you through the way to use the monitoring service.
By understanding the nuances of the available search syntax, you can do a better job of tailoring your search results to meet your
individual needs.

Customer service exists to serve you
Of course, if you’re paying for your monitoring service, you should have access to a much richer customer service experience. Don’t
be bashful: your account manager and other support staff exist to serve your needs. Tell them what you want and let them help you
accomplish those goals.

Let the pros customize your account
Good providers will work with you to fully customize your monitoring account. In fact, this is one of the key things that separate free
services from professional solutions. If you use something like Google Alerts, you have to rely on public help files. With professional
services, you can describe what you want to track and the customer service representatives should help set up the criteria and reports
you need to be effective.

Training helps get the most out of your investment
Don’t overlook training. You and your team want to make sure that you get the most out of what your media monitoring investment, so
be sure to understand the full suite of features and tools available to you. Training may include basics like online tutorials or videos.
In some cases, your provider may also provide web-based training through group webinars or individual tutorials. And if you can
take advantage of on-site training opportunities, be sure to find time for those because they can provide you the greatest return on
investment by engaging in a meaningful, in-person dialogue about your needs and how to meet them.



R Set up your search criteria
At the heart of any online media monitoring program lies search terms. At its most basic level, that may mean typing a keyword or
phrase into a search engine like Google or Bing. But true media monitoring providers offer a much richer set of tools to help zero in on
the stories, blog posts, and other content you need to see.

Start with your own organization & leaders
It is often best to think of monitoring search terms as concentric circles. In the middle, you have stories that mention your organization
and key leadership. So be sure to include all relevant terms (including notable variations, even common misspellings) in your search
criteria. Add in your CEO/President or other important executives and spokespeople.

Add in what your organization does
Related to direct mentions of your organization would be coverage of your products, campaigns or other ventures. You probably want to
see just about all of that coverage, so add those in to your provider’s tool to stay on top of that content.

Track your competitors and critics
Of course, knowing what the media and public say about
you and your organization is important, but it doesn’t
occur in a vacuum. So be certain to add in names of key
competitors or critics so that you can understand your
own coverage in the context of what else is being said
that impacts your marketplace or issues.

Stay on top of industry topics
The other key driver of the success of your own
communications programs is what else is going on in
your industry. Some of that comes from your competitive
tracking, but it is also worthwhile to add in search terms
related to major industry topics that impact the success
of your own organization.

Know what key Individuals are saying
It’s also important to know what key individuals are
saying that may impact your business. By adding in
the names of selected journalists, commentators, and
analysts, you can help develop strategies for targeting
media outreach or for identifying topics that you need to
inoculate against.

Use your media monitoring as a business
intelligence tool
Your media monitoring platform can also prove to be
a valuable tool for keeping key executives apprised of
activities related to critical government leaders, business
partners, board members, investors, major customers,
donors, vendors, and more. By adding search criteria to



track media mentions of these individuals and entities, you can help provide timely intelligence to others in your organization who will be
appreciative of the heads-up.

You can even use media monitoring as a lead generation tool by identifying individuals, especially through social media, who may express
an interest in topics related to what your organization does.

Take advantage of advanced search tools
With the wide range of topics that you will get value from tracking, it is important to restrict the results to just the most important
stories. If you’re a Fortune 100 company with lots of media coverage, you probably can’t even read every story that mentions your own
organization, let alone all of the other searches suggested here.

That’s where professional solutions really shine. Many offer the ability to restrict search criteria to certain groups of publications – or
even to require a search term to appear more than once in a story to cause it to create a match. The more robust your search options,
the better your odds are of creating a manageable workload.

R Create essential reports & charts
Visualizing or segmenting your media results can lead to important insights more quickly than reading through every story that your
monitoring tools uncover in chronological order. Even many free services provide basic charting capability that helps show volume for
individual search terms over time, while professional solutions often give you a robust set of options to create customizable reports and
charts and graphs that meet your specific needs.

Use volume charts to spot trends
Looking at the simple number of results matching certain search criteria can prove to be a valuable tool to identify important trends.
Understanding spikes and valleys in coverage – and what caused them – will inform future activities.



In the chart here by Nielsen’s BlogPulse service, one can easily causing that uptick. Think of it as an early warning tool for
see a short-lived spike in the social media coverage of Steve understanding things that are driving coverage.
Jobs. There are a number of pieces of information that can be
By looking at longer timeframes, however, it is also possible to
gleaned from this six month view.
understand replicable events that drive coverage. Some may
First, a clear baseline of coverage is seen on either side of the be obvious, like quarterly earnings reports for a company, but
spike, thus providing useful information for Apple executives as one may discern other patterns that prove useful for planning
well as competitors. If one were to look at the chart in real- purposes. Maybe a spike is noticed every time an interest group
time some morning and see movement above that baseline has events or when a competitor releases new products. The
– as would have been the case if looking at this report in early possibilities are endless, but the tools to zero in on these trends
May 2011 – it would alert the need to examine what event was are readily available even in free services.

View results broken out by keyword or source type to find news drivers
With the proliferation of media sources, it is valuable to understand where coverage of a particular topic is coming from.
Are results being driven by traditional or social media? Is it an industry trade press story or one that is garnering mainstream
print or even broadcast attention?



Knowing how your organization and issues (and your competitors) are being covered – and where – will help improve your own
targeting and messaging activities.

In this chart from CustomScoop, one can easily see that the coverage of this particular topic is focused largely in online and social
media sites, along with a significant component of trade press. But clearly it is not one that is breaking through to the mainstream,
with very little newspaper, magazine or TV/radio coverage.

If the pie chart shown here were “normal” for your organization, it would allow you to glance at it each day and know quickly if
something is out of the ordinary. Perhaps a competitor has a crisis that took it from being a social media/trade press story to one
that broke through to receive attention from a broader media segment.

Compare yourself to competition/opposition using charts
We all need benchmarks and our bosses often want to know how we’re doing in “us vs. them” comparisons. Knowing how we
stack up helps drive strategy and tactics and may even inform compensation discussions.

The most common way to compare results for related topics is through combined line charts like the one shown here from Google
Trends. As the name implies, that free service provides the ability to understand topic trends over time by comparing with related
benchmarks. For instance, this example shows George Bush vs. Barack Obama, with obvious spikes around the 2004 and 2008
elections.



These comparison charts need not always be just against competitors. Perhaps you want to explore how your company’s coverage
trends against important economic, governmental, or even sporting events. There are almost endless permutations but the
bottom line is that they can all provide useful insight to help in your decision-making and analysis.

Segment results by geography or other important delineators
For many larger organizations, it may be valuable to break out clips by geography or other factors that are used for dividing
workload or enhancing analysis.

This sort of segmentation can take two different forms. It may be visual, as is the case with the coverage map shown here from
CustomScoop that allows at-a-glance assessment of which states have the highest concentration of relevant coverage for any
given time period.

While a map chart can be useful in getting an overview of coverage, many organizations will want to have specialized reports that
group results by region, topic, source type, or other factors that are used to determine who will manage responses. These may be
media relations managers with specific responsibility (like broadcast vs. social media), but it may also be used by organizations
that feed media results to non-PR departments, like regional sales representatives or grassroots government relations managers.

Develop reports to highlight the most important results
In addition to the charts and reports previously described that focus on uncovering trends or balancing workloads, you can also
use customizable report criteria to quickly review results that are more likely to be important.

For example, you might create a specialized report that flags stories that mention your CEO. Or perhaps you have a small,
targeted list of publications that are of particular interest. Some professional solutions will enable you to zero in on those sources
to help save you time. Other options to consider would be organizing results by the number of keyword mentions or other
indicators of relevance like circulation.



R Schedule email alerts
In the “old days” of media monitoring, you would receive an envelope in the mail with a stack of paper-based news clips every few
weeks. That’s not exactly timely.

Today, with the powerful electronic media monitoring tools at your disposal, it is now possible to be almost instantly notified of
important news stories or blog posts by email. Not only is it faster, but it’s available to you whether you’re in your office or relaxing
on a beach somewhere.

Free services like Google Alerts provide some basic email delivery tools to take advantage of, while professional solutions typically
give you greater flexibility to manage your email consumption of new results.

Ideally, you want to set up different reports on different schedules. Here are some examples to consider:

• Critical items (like CEO mentions) should come hourly

• Overviews and early warning reports should come daily

• Intraday reports can be useful when dealing with coverage in multiple time zones or to catch breaking news

• Weekly emails can be set up to help with internal reporting requirements

Your own needs will likely vary from these examples, but hopefully they give you some ideas. The bottom line is that email alerts
are incredibly valuable to help you get your job done efficiently – especially if you want to make sure you’re on top of the most
important results before you get a call from the c-suite asking about something you haven’t seen yet.

Use Your Reports
Now that you have your account configured just the way you want it, it’s time to consider how you will use it on a daily basis. Both
free services and professional solutions typically offer tools to consume your results via email or on a web site.

R Consume email reports
Think of email reports as your first line of defense – or offense, if you prefer. It’s a more passive way for you to consume the reports
and charts you set up in the first part of this checklist.

When you’re on the go or if you’re busy on another task when an email alert comes in, you can rely on headlines, abstracts and
other summary information to let you know if it must be dealt with immediately or can wait.

Email reports can be easily forwarded as-is to colleagues to keep them in the loop or to ask them to take certain action. If you
find yourself consistently forwarding emails to the same person, you may want to consider adding them to your provider’s email
distribution system.

For longer daily or weekly email reports that you receive, you may view them more as helpful reminders to log in to your online
dashboard to explore the results with a larger suite of tools at your disposal.

If you have set up charts and graphs to come via email, you may want to time them around your own internal reporting
requirements so you can simply copy and paste the charts into your weekly or monthly report to your bosses or clients.



R Review clips in an online dashboard
Your online dashboard may be as simple as a Google search box and results page, or it could be a more robust one with a
professional solution like the example shown here from CustomScoop.

In either case, your online dashboard provides you with the ability to slice and dice your results in a variety of ways and then
manipulate those results to take action.

You will likely start out by filtering and sorting your results to enable you to zero in on your most important coverage first. Filtering
for key search terms and then sorting by relevance can help make you more efficient.

If you are part of a larger team, you can often share responsibilities with colleagues by reviewing different sets of clips. With
professional solutions, you will likely have the option to use saved reports to streamline this process, but even with free services
you can come up with business rules to manage this process at least somewhat effectively.

Many dashboards also give you the opportunity to search news in real-time – including on topics that you may not have previously
configured for monitoring. This can be particularly helpful when an important story breaks that you had not anticipated and you
want to gather coverage on that topic.

Professional solutions will typically provide a range of tools to organize and annotate your results, and we’ll explore the value of
those in more detail in the next section.



Leverage Your Content
So you’ve set up your account and started to review your results. Now what? To get the most out of your investment of time and
resources, you will want to determine how best to leverage the raw results to get more insight and value out of them.

R Use workflow tools to organize yourself and your team
Modern media monitoring solutions are about more than simply giving you a pile of clips to review. Increasingly, they are adding
functionality to permit project management, workflow, or even customer relationship management.

Often with professional solutions you can flag clips for follow-up activity by yourself or other members of your team. You might
append a note explaining what needs to be done or what messaging might be appropriate.

You also may have the opportunity to organize your results by tagging them or assigning them to folders. This can help make you
and your team members more efficient by being able to review hand-selected results.

R Distribute news to key audiences
Traditionally, public relations professionals have distributed daily “clip sheets” or monthly “clip books” to key leadership team
members. Today, that delivery takes place electronically and may be delivered by email or other online tools.

Most media monitoring services will enable you to email individual results to others to draw attention to specific pieces of content.
This could be passing along a bit of competitive intelligence to a sales team member or providing a clip quoting an executive to
that individual.

For team engagement or for reaching out to important external constituencies, some professional monitoring solutions provide
the ability to develop customized newsletters. These might be delivered daily or weekly to share the organization’s own media
coverage, competitive intelligence, or important industry or issue news.

R Add stories to your intranet or external web site
Emailing results in a newsletter format is a great option if you know in advance the email addresses of the people you would like to
share content with. However, often you may want to include news coverage on your internal or external web sites.

There are three ways to accomplish this. The first is a manual method where you find important stories through your monitoring
provider and then type in the headlines and links into your organization’s web site content management system.

Professional monitoring solution providers may provide you with more powerful tools to accomplish the same goal with less effort.

Widgets
For example, some providers will give you a widget that you can easily integrate into
your web site. All you have to do is define which results you would like to appear in that
box on your site. In some cases, the results might automatically show up if they match
certain criteria, like keywords or publication names. Often you will want to review the
results before they show up (to avoid circumstances where a negative story slips through
accidentally). In those cases, a provider that enables you to mark specific results to
appear in the widget would be a good choice.



RSS and XML Feeds
For more technically sophisticated organizations, it may also be possible to extract data from your media monitoring account
as RSS or XML feeds. Put simply, these are ways for computers to talk to each other so that any data that is in your monitoring
account can be integrated with your organization’s web site or even other database programs. Although it requires engaging
support from your IT department, it gives you maximum flexibility for handling your media results.

R Analyze news data through rating and other metrics
It is often valuable to go beyond merely seeing and reporting on what media coverage may exist for a particular organization,
person or topic. Applying various forms of analysis to your results will enhance your understanding for and appreciation of the
work that goes into steering coverage.

Rating results based on sentiment
The first thing that comes to mind for most public relations professionals is rating clips. Often this is done on a positive-negative-
neutral rating system, but there are countless permutations that others have developed over the years. The approach you select
should be simple enough to easily implement but robust enough to meet your organization’s unique needs. Some professional
solution providers give you the ability to select or create your own rating system, while others keep you in the more traditional
positive-negative-neutral paradigm.

Historically, rating of media results has been done manually. Originally, it would have been readers reviewing paper clips and
assigning results by hand or in a spreadsheet. Today, it is done in the context of an online dashboard in most cases.

In recent years, an alternative to the manual rating approach has been developed. Often referred to as “automated sentiment
analysis” it’s really just a fancy way of saying that a computer tries to use “artificial intelligence” or “linguistic analysis” to
determine whether a story is positive or negative.



The automated approach allows high-volume processing with minimal investment of human resources. However, it sacrifices
accuracy. Most studies have shown that automated sentiment analysis is somewhere between 60 and 80 percent accurate. At the
low end of range, that’s only slightly better than tossing a coin.

Even when humans review and rate results, there can be disagreements. In fact, the vast majority of results end up being neutral.
So perhaps it is not surprising that computer results have errors, too. However, humans disagree based on facts, whereas
computers may simply get confused. For example, sarcasm often confuses computer analysis. In addition, the shorter, more
casual language popular in social media may be difficult for most automated sentiment analysis solutions to interpret.

Because of the volume and cost advantage of an automated approach, it is still worth considering as long as you understand and
accept the lack of true reliability.

Incorporate charts for understanding
Most individuals appreciate visual elements of reports. How often does your eye go to a bulleted list or a chart over a long
paragraph of text? Keep that in mind when you are producing your own reports based on your media results and be sure to
liberally incorporate charts and graphs to help illustrate your key points.

These charts can be particularly valuable when producing analysis since they can reveal important trends that may be easier to
see than explain. To borrow from Justice Potter Stewart, sometimes you can’t define something, but you know it when you see it.

Don’t jump directly to analysis
Good analysis requires real preparation. It can be very tempting with all of the tools available to you to just jump into the results
and start spewing out charts and graphs and calling it analysis.

But good media analysis requires careful planning and research in advance. You need to establish baselines and understand the
objectives of the program. You should define measures of success – both ones that can be measured by your media monitoring
program but also others that rely on actual business or other organizational outcomes.

Once you figure out what’s right for your own analysis program, you need to commit the resources needed to implement it
appropriately and consistently. Analysis that gets done only sporadically does not have as much value as reporting that occurs on a
set, regular schedule to help make important strategic and tactical adjustments in a timely fashion.

R Save reports to your online dashboard
As you create reports, charts, and analysis, it can be very valuable to keep that information stored in a central location. That may
be in the form of an intranet resource that you already have established for your team, but some professional monitoring solutions
provide you with the ability to save reports – and even external collateral and other documents – in your online dashboard.

By keeping the information in one common location, it makes it easier to go back and review previous information or share
important documents among an entire team. This leads to greater organization, more consistency, and improved effectiveness.

R Export your data
As more of us move to services that exist online instead of software that resides on our own computers, the control over our own
data becomes more of an issue. Most free monitoring services and even many professional solution providers don’t allow you to
extract your results easily.

Ultimately, your media results are something you should own. So if your provider permits it, take advantage of the ability to
download your information in spreadsheet, database, PDF, XML, or any other format provided. If you have the ability to control your
own data you have more flexibility in the type of analysis you can do, and it also gives you peace of mind that you will be able to
maintain historical media results data even if you – or a colleague – switches to a new provider sometime in the future.



Call for free consultation
1.603.410.5000
About the Author
Chip Griffin serves as CEO of CustomScoop, a media intelligence company he co-
founded in 2000. CustomScoop provides a cloud-based subscription service that
monitors, measures, and reports on traditional and social media coverage for Fortune
500 companies, non-profit organizations, public relations agencies, and small-to-
medium sized enterprises. For two decades, Chip has worked in the public affairs
arena, including service in public and private sector organizations. He has co-founded
more than half a dozen companies, and he writes and speaks frequently about the
intersection of technology, media, and communications. He is a graduate of American
University where he is Vice President of the Alumni Association and a member of the
School of Public Affairs Advisory Council. Chip lives in New Hampshire with his wife
and two sons.

About CustomScoop
CustomScoop offers traditional and social media monitoring, analysis, and
distribution solutions for public relations, marketing, and government relations
professionals. Each client has access to fast, accurate results with a customizable
dashboard, email alerts, newsletter creation tools.

Sign up for a free demo of CustomScoop by visiting www.customscoop.com

CustomScoop | 130 Pembroke Road | Suite 150 | Concord, 03301 | T: 603.410.5000 | F: 603.410.5050 | http://www.customscoop.com

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