By Danny Sullivan
Media monitoring is a function of every PR firm, but how comprehensive a service are you getting? There are a hundred and one services and solutions out there, but each comes at a cost and, for the average PR firm, there isn’t an unlimited budget for such things.
We use a few tools that, when combined, provide a fairly comprehensive report on clients’ coverage. However, there are still some pieces of coverage that aren’t always picked up on, typically in niche publications without much web content.
The best form of media monitoring is knowing where your coverage is likely to appear and keeping an eye open for it – although this is admittedly less practical for coverage of news announcements, where monitoring tools really come into their own.
Ensuring you are subscribed to the more niche publications on your target list should cover the possibility that your tools and services miss something. Of course, this becomes less practical if you are monitoring coverage that is occurring all across the globe.
Ultimately, you have to achieve a level of media monitoring accuracy that is acceptable to you and your clients, at a reasonable budget, while understanding that there may be some pieces that will slip through untracked.
If anyone has any particular tools and services or combinations that they have found to work particularly well in terms of effective monitoring, I’d be interested to hear from you.
