Coverage in the press only matters if you know about it.
There are thousands of publications, from the most obscure trade journal to international news organisations like The New York Times and CNN. And it’s vital that companies know when they appear in the pages of these journals and in what context.
I’m familiar with how difficult this can be. I remember during my first internship ten years ago, I would spend hours refreshing searches, walking down to the newsstand and preparing endless slides with clippings.
Public relations have long struggled to accurately report the value of their efforts. An incomplete view of what’s been achieved only complicated the situation.
PR tech and the data it provides are critical in reputation management for both promoting a brand and safeguarding against reputational risks. Crisis monitoring is an important aspect of public relations and involves tracking all media channels for potential issues.
This is widely understood. Last year, according to the Prowly’s 2024 trends report1, 38.9 percent of professionals prioritised tracking and evaluating their PR efforts, a significant increase from 23.3 percent in 2022.
OK, media monitoring matters. But Google Alerts exist. Why bother hiring an outside service to handle your media monitoring?
Here I’ll explain why it’s a bit more complicated than that.
Three reasons to leave it to the professionals
1. Manually tracking mentions
Manually tracking mentions can be time-consuming and distracting. Some teams still perform media monitoring manually but more often it’s either outsourced to agencies or automated with tools. Media monitoring services can be subscription based and provided by agencies, making them a feasible option for many small companies without the budget for expensive software licences or the headcount for repetitive admin tasks. An agency can frequently provide a better price because of economies of scale.
2. Information availability
Another obstacle for manual searches is publications behind paywalls, making it difficult to monitor them using free sources and search engines. An average financial services client might appear in 20 different publications in the course of the year, each with a subscription cost of thousands of dollars. Media monitoring services can register paywalled websites using APIs and web scraping techniques. While this isn’t a one size fits all solution (it depends on the specific vendor and publisher) tools that have agreements with paywalled publishers can be invaluable for PR professionals both in-house and on the agency side. Services don’t grant unlimited licenses but allow the limited viewing of a headline and selected excerpts.
3. Analytics
Media monitoring platforms retrieve data from multiple sources, including news websites and social media channels. The customised reports and dashboards can make it easier to digest large amounts of generated data and extract insights. This is especially true for public or consumer facing companies that have high volumes of mentions.
Custom dashboards give clients the ability to highlight what for them are the most critical metrics. They can include such values as the number of total mentions, estimated reach, sentiment analysis and share-of-voice. The trick is to be able to find a good combination of quantity and quality metrics – 20 syndicated articles isn’t the same as one interview published in Financial Times (insert your dream title here).
The ROI of monitoring
As a PR professional, it is crucial to understand how to retrieve insights from data and adjust strategies based on interim results. Media monitoring services can help businesses avoid costly oversights, allowing them to quickly address sensitive topics. While media monitoring tools are not new, the rise of AI has given them new capabilities and more flexibility.
At Cognito, we use a combination of proprietary technology we’ve developed ourselves, combined with human analysis and the best of third-party services. This allows clients of all sizes to monitor coverage, spotting negative sentiment, staying up to date with industry trends and news, identifying potential crises before they escalate, and visualising insights in seconds. Get in touch to see what we can do for you
Dina Akhmetova is a senior account manager in Amsterdam
