The odd underbelly of media monitoring
By Leo Valiquette
We have often talked about the merits, methods and tools for media monitoring on inmedialog, but it’s the amusing and bizarre aspects of the exercise that I want to illustrate today.
Media monitoring is, of course, the process of scanning media coverage for specific keywords and issues and presenting them to clients in the format that will best meet their needs. There are a number of free online tools and subscription-based services available for this. Some allow for extreme fine-tuning to narrow down search results with surgical precision. Others less so.
It’s the tools that fall into the latter category that often yield the most bizarre, and off base, search results. For one of our clients, upper limb prosthetics maker Touch Bionics, for example, I’ve learned far more than I wanted to about the new Bionic Commando video game, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and several other companies with bionic in their name that offer everything from energy drinks to home and office furnishings.
But it’s the news headlines picked up by search terms such as prosthetic, prostheses and amputee that are the most quirky, shocking or sad, as the case may be. The examples below all date from the past month or so and picked up a fair amount of press (I should know, I was deleting the hits from my inbox for days):
Skydiver’s prosthetic leg falls off – and then vanishes into thin air – during jump
Police hunting for man who carries weapons in fake leg. Wife ‘could be in very serious danger’
Neb. man sues prosecutor to get his leg back
James Franco isn’t all natural down there
