The Complete Guide to Media Monitoring
Media monitoring is a fundamental tool in the arsenal of any organization or business, regardless of its aims or goals. While Communications teams are on the front lines of media monitoring, what is monitored and what’s done with the results affects the whole company.
When done well, media monitoring significantly contributes to achieving business goals by providing insights into competitors, industries, and the broader world, as well as an understanding of the effectiveness of communications campaigns.
Media analysis and intelligence is the next step beyond media monitoring, providing more thorough and useful insights.
The success of media monitoring hinges on understanding what needs to be monitored, as well as intuitive tools that provide actionable insights. It also means setting up the right processes to ensure better analysis of insights and taking action when needed.
This guide provides PR & Communications professionals with a fundamental and comprehensive understanding of media monitoring and how to achieve this successfully.
Explore this guide:
- What is media monitoring and analysis?
- How do I monitor media coverage?
- What is PR monitoring?
- What is broadcast monitoring?
- What is a media coverage report?
- Why is media analysis important?
- What are media monitoring tools?
- What features does a media monitoring tool need?
- What is the best free media monitoring tool?
How to make the most out of media monitoring
Signal AI users make the most out of media monitoring for the whole organization. Find out how to take media monitoring to the next level in our guide.
What is media monitoring & analysis?
Defining media monitoring & analysis
Media monitoring is the actual process of scouring the media for relevant coverage. In today’s world, that means scouring the fast-moving worlds of social media, the internet, as well as traditional media, including print, podcasts, and broadcast.
Media monitoring allows you to track topics relevant to your organization and industry across print, online, social, and broadcast media output. To ensure long-term success and become a household brand or big player in your industry, you need to keep track of what’s happening around you. To see a crisis emerging and protect your business from any impact on its reputation, you’ll need to monitor the media.
Media monitoring involves:
- Tracking: Listening across a broad range of media platforms (including social media)
- Analysis: Gauging the sentiment of the audience’s reaction to communications
- Action: Using the insight to shape and develop campaigns and responses aligned to business or organizational objectives.
Media analysis involves:
Analysis, on the other hand, is a two-pronged approach. It is both:
- Quick analysis: Acting upon opportunities or threats posed by articles or online chatter, in real-time and where and when appropriate.
- A slower, more measured analysis of the impact of PR: For meaningful insight, this goes beyond reach, page clicks, and the number of cuttings achieved, addressing what those things actually mean for your business and how they align with your organization’s objectives.
Media monitoring can be costly, time-consuming, and overwhelming without the right tools, as there is now an overwhelming amount of output to keep track of on a second-by-second basis. Appropriate media monitoring software is necessary and makes this task possible.
AI is revolutionizing media monitoring, offering a method to scan the endless stream of data from media and social media and highlight output that requires attention or that presents an opportunity. It frees communications professionals to focus on the work that truly matters, including setting strategy, making informed decisions on how to deliver it, and shaping effective tactics for implementation.
How AI is revolutionizing PR for better media monitoring
Media monitoring should be quick, easy and insightful but traditional methods can often be the opposite. Thanks to revolutionary AI technology, both of these things are possible.
Tracking & monitoring brand mentions
Why is it important to track my brand mentions through traditional and social media monitoring?
In today’s fast-paced business environment, monitoring both traditional and social media is crucial for protecting and enhancing your brand’s reputation. Here’s why:
- Crisis Prevention and Management: Detect potential issues early through real-time alerts triggered by unusual spikes in volume or negative sentiment. This early warning system helps you respond quickly to emerging crises before they escalate.
- Strategic Decision Making: Track key metrics, such as sentiment, coverage, reach, engagement, and share of voice, to understand how your brand resonates with audiences. By analyzing these patterns, you can make data-driven decisions about your communications strategy.
- Competitive Intelligence: Monitor and benchmark your position against competitors and track industry trends to stay ahead and find whitespace opportunities.
- Audience Understanding: How are your brand messages received across different markets and platforms? This helps you refine your communication strategy and ensure your content resonates with target audiences.
- Reputation Management Strategy & Performance Reporting: Transform the overwhelming volume of social media data into actionable intelligence. By monitoring sentiment shifts and tracking against reputation pillars, you can protect and enhance your brand’s market value.
How do I monitor media coverage?
The ‘how’ of media monitoring involves finding the right tools to provide the breadth of monitoring required and reporting in a way that is both accessible and actionable.
You need to be aware of media that mentions your search terms, be able to quickly assess their importance, and determine whether they require action or create an opportunity.
Monitoring media coverage begins with the question “What should I monitor?” To find that answer, it’s best to collaborate with your C-suite and the wider business to maximize the value of media monitoring for your organization.
Comms teams should go beyond just monitoring for their own brand name and mentions of senior leadership and key spokespeople. Media monitoring is about more than just focusing on efforts to assess brand reputation, while that still has an important place.
For example, media monitoring can highlight:
- A story in a mainstream newspaper couched in negative terms around your brand, which is likely to warrant immediate action and attention
- A journalist discussing a key industry issue, which stakeholders in your business or organization would benefit from being aware of, and comms teams may wish to distribute internally
- A positive story on the back of one of your PR campaigns that carries its key messages forward, which may just be something to note in preparation for reporting on and analyzing the success of the campaign.
What is PR monitoring?
PR monitoring is the act of tracking and recording mentions of your brand and key people or spokespersons within your organization.
It’s how comms teams stay up-to-speed with how and where a brand is appearing and to begin the process of analyzing if the sentiment around it is positive and likely to contribute to organizational goals.
Key PR metrics form part of PR monitoring, but comms teams have an opportunity to add further value to their organization by seeing beyond those. Offering deeper insight into the actual impact for a business when its ‘Share of Voice’ is higher than that of its competitors, for example. That can mean liaising with colleagues and other departments who hold different data sets to demonstrate, perhaps, that sales peak when the share of voice is high.
Additionally, PR monitoring that stretches beyond the usual, albeit important, function of PR teams to look further into what is going on in the wider world, and the world of competition or emerging markets, will provide added value.
As Benjamin Thiele-Long, director of global communications agency Cognito, explained:
“Hits for the sake of it is never going to impress a board or a C-suite, but actually understanding the value of why a particular media program was useful, how it leads to sales generation, how it leads to awareness, how it leads to brand value, are all important,” he said.
PR monitoring and specifically reporting can sometimes overwhelm PR professionals, drastically reducing the amount of time available for them to be truly strategic and have a real impact. It’s vital to find a method that solves that problem.
Lauren Jane Heller, Director of Communications at venture capital firm Real Ventures, has described how using AI for monitoring was the answer for her. It allowed her to have confidence that nothing would be missed while also creating time for her to redirect her own efforts into more valuable tasks.
What is broadcast monitoring?
Broadcast monitoring is necessary to gain a comprehensive and well-rounded insight into all content relevant to your industry and brand, as it appears on TV and radio.
In the same way that social media monitoring is as vital as traditional media monitoring for communications teams, broadcast monitoring is equally crucial. Without it, you can never have a full picture of threats and opportunities, and PR campaign achievements will be missed.
Are you making the most of media monitoring?
We delve into how an AI-powered media monitoring tool can help elevate the work of PR from the tactical to the strategic in the four key areas of responsibility:
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Proactive reputation management
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Reactive reputation management
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Horizon scanning
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Performance measurement and stakeholder reporting
Media analysis & reporting
What is a media coverage report?
An effective media coverage report is about showing the outcome and impact of communications, rather than just a summary of mentions.
While benchmarking your media coverage is also likely to have some value, a report should demonstrate far more than just a list of vanity metrics such as coverage achieved, click rates, social media mentions, and reach of communications.
Then, it needs to go beyond that into sentiment analysis, both of the coverage in question and the resulting conversations. The next stage is to show what has actually been learned or gained as a result of media monitoring and communications functions. Did your recent campaign get coverage for the right reasons? Has an announcement about a new board member been met with positivity or negativity? How does that compare with your competitors and peers?
Beyond media coverage reporting, a media monitoring report that also provides alerts on the wider industry and related news will add more value to the organization as a whole, allowing communications teams to offer real strategic value.
Leading a World-Class PR Measurement Program at a Fortune 500 Company
This webinar, featuring Nicholle Manners, Vice President of Communications Intelligence at Prudential Financial, Stacy Ries, Vice President of Global Communications at SAP, and David Benigson, CEO at Signal AI, explores how to leverage PR measurement and analytics to drive impactful communications strategies that are indispensable to senior stakeholders.
Why is media analysis important?
For comms teams, analyzing media output is crucial to understanding the sentiment of conversations around your industry and brand, key topics of the moment, and the tone of discussions.
All of these things are vital not just for assessing your own communications activities, but also for planning future strategic campaigns, keeping the C-suite well-informed, and identifying opportunities and threats.
Media analysis begins with a robust media monitoring system to ensure you capture and remain alert to all that is being said. Media monitoring itself brings many benefits.
How do you analyze media?
A useful analysis of media to reflect how an organization is perceived requires a solid foundation in strategy. Goals should be set that are SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-limited). Without these goals, it’s hard to know what you’re analyzing the media for.
Defining a PR strategy aligned with company objectives will enable the most effective use of media monitoring, providing results that benefit other departments beyond just Communications. But first, you have to select the right metrics to analyze.
Some things to consider when seeking to achieve effective media analysis are:
- the Barcelona Principles – recognized guidelines for the measurement of PR campaigns
- The necessity to have the media monitoring tools to track social media as well as typical media streams
- How to use and present those insights and analyses.
It’s vital to have a process for quick analysis to allow immediate response and action where that’s necessary, as well as more long-term reporting to assess the benefits of PR activities and plan future campaigns.
In our webinar on building a global measurement programme, Chichi Osuagwu describes how media coverage reports and M&E frameworks were achieved in her role as Communications Officer at the World Bank Group.
Establishing a global PR measurement framework
Watch Chichi’s webinar on establishing a global PR measurement framework and learn how to achieve buy-in from multiple stakeholders.
Media monitoring tools
What are media monitoring tools?
Media monitoring tools are the apps, software, and methods used to scour traditional, broadcast, and social media for relevant news, stories, and discussion.
Where once Google alerts, Boolean strings, Twitter alerts, and cutting services were the only options. Now, AI has made things more sophisticated.
Often, PR & Comms teams focus media monitoring efforts on recording and staying abreast of owned brand mentions, spokesperson quotations, and coverage, as well as the overall reception of this messaging. That is important, but only part of the power of media monitoring.
Those who really harness the full potential of media monitoring understand the value to their organization of casting the net wider and keeping on top of their industry, competitors, and relevant global or regional news, too.
This insight can help organizations to:
- Shape their own messages
- Identify influencers and relevant journalists
- Join conversations to better connect with audiences
- Help steer those conversations
Joy Frascinella, Head of PR at Principles for Responsible Investment’s, says media monitoring “really gives you a voice.”
When discussing how to turn media monitoring into intelligence, Joy described the importance of real-time media monitoring and how it allowed her organization to:
- Act quickly to respond to inaccurate and potentially damaging stories
- Identify writers they needed to target with their messaging
- Crystalize its own messaging by assessing competitor output
- Ensure consistency of messaging from its spokespeople across the globe by sharing articles quickly that feature peers or convey the business message.
What features does a media monitoring tool need?
Essential enterprise media intelligence features include real-time alerting capabilities, customizable dashboards with visualized analytics, and AI-powered sentiment analysis.
Look for platforms that offer cross-company insights, portfolio monitoring capabilities, relationship mapping between entities, and executive-ready chart snapshots that can be shared with C-suite stakeholders for strategic decision-making.
When seeking a media monitoring tool, features to consider include:
- How many terms/keywords/entities it is possible to track?
- Does it offer insight into sentiment or just mentions?
- Is it possible to add and amend search terms quickly?
- Can you sift and sort results easily to allow focus on specific search terms?
- Can you convert your findings into meaningful stakeholder reports quickly?
- Does the tool offer real-time alerts to allow immediate action where required?
- Is there ongoing support with the functionality of the tool?
- Is it a comprehensive tool covering broadcast, social, and more web output?
What is the best free media monitoring tool?
The most notable free media monitoring tool is Google Alerts. Google Alerts will return results for simple terms via a regular email. It cannot distinguish between search terms such as ‘apple’, the fruit, and ‘Apple’, the brand, and can therefore return excessive irrelevant results.
Google Alerts isn’t a real-time tool either. Results are received at intervals and need to be processed to find relevancy. Then, they need to be manually reviewed for sentiment before action can be considered and taken, if necessary. Google Alerts will only report on web-based news, not broadcast coverage.
Free tools generally offer limited functionality. As these tools can be time-consuming, they often carry hidden costs in terms of inefficiency.
Inefficient media monitoring tools require more staff to keep up with search results and interpret their meaning. The overwhelming and time-consuming nature of reviewing what a media monitoring tool uncovers may lead to missed opportunities.
An effective tool needs functionality to identify and prioritize the things that require the most attention. Similarly, threats may not be responded to quickly enough with free, inefficient tools. The issue could escalate if the tools fail to help PR and communications teams identify high-priority results.
Signal AI’s platform helps PR & Comms professionals reduce the time it takes to perform time-consuming tasks, such as monitoring key publications or building coverage reports.
Other features include:
- Unlimited accurate searches
- Real-time alerts
- Instant language translation of content
- At-a-glance reporting and tracking
- Dedicated ongoing support
A number of paid tools offer limited free trials or entry-level packages. Not all cover broadcast, print, and web media coverage. There is often a limit on the number of terms that can be monitored within basic packages, and upgrading to include more can be costly.
Considering a media monitoring platform?
Signal AI is a comprehensive strategic PR and communications solution providing a real-time overview and insight into the world’s print, online, and broadcast media.
It’s a premium media monitoring tool that significantly streamlines the process of staying informed about relevant news. It provides valuable insight to support strategic communications, reputation management, media planning, crisis communications, market intelligence, and internal reporting.
AI takes all the hard work and slog out of media monitoring, allowing communications professionals to focus on the things that really matter, such as media relations, strategic planning, and tactical steps around reputation and crisis management.
In addition, unlimited search terms and at-a-glance reports, including sentiment insights, allow PR teams to increase their value to an organization by supplying up-to-the-minute industry insights and information to support regulatory compliance.
Check out our companion guides:
The Complete Guide to Reputation Management
The Complete Guide to Enterprise Risk Management
