Media Monitoring and Analytics

What is media monitoring? 

Media monitoring is the practice of continually reading, watching, and listening to the editorial content of media sources, including print, online and broadcast media, to track the coverage of your organization, people, brand, or competitors. Through media monitoring, you can learn how the various media perceive and portray your organization (or other organizations) and gain a better understanding of how you’re performing in the market. 

Many organizations use media monitoring tools to help them gather this data, which can include such metrics as: 

• Brand mentions
• Impressions
• Sentiment
• Where your advertisements are appearing
• When your editorial content runs in print or online 

An essential component of your PR, marketing, and business intelligence toolkit, media monitoring helps you measure the success of press releases, identify topics or issues relevant to your organization, better understand your communications’ strengths and weaknesses, and pinpoint potential business opportunities. 

Base strategic decisions on media monitoring    

A well-structured media monitoring program is not just a stocktaking exercise. It performs continuous updates so that developments are tracked in real time. This means that corporate decisions are always based on the latest facts and figures. Ongoing monitoring of media coverage reports enables companies and organizations to act if comments are moving in the wrong direction. 

Sharing information from media monitoring and analytics within your organization enables you to take the right strategic decisions based on valid market data. A structured procedure delivers valuable market intelligence for several areas of activity including: 

• Monitoring the sentiment of your coverage
• Managing your brand’s reputation
• Uncovering valuable PR insights
• Gathering competitive intelligence 

Marketing management with media monitoring 

Media monitoring will quickly tell you whether your marketing campaigns are bearing fruit. For example, you can find out how your new advertising campaign resonates with the audience or how your new corporate design is being received. You can then act in real time if the required results are not being achieved or if a campaign is not developing as intended. If there is positive feedback, you can also pick up on this and use your response to amplify your message. 

When marketing teams come up with ideas for content marketing, topics that are not relevant to the target group must not be allowed to find their way into the editorial plan. Media monitoring delivers intelligence on what animates the target group and supplies inspiration and ideas for new marketing themes. 

Media monitoring thus both supports ongoing campaigns and provides inspiration for marketing.  

Brand management with media monitoring  

How is my brand positioned in the market? What is the brand’s image? How frequently does the brand feature in reports? Who reports on it? What is the tone like? 

These are all key questions in brand management and PR: they are crucial to the success and value of the brand. Strategic brand positioning and brand maintenance are important to sustain and enhance the brand’s value and public relations.  

Media monitoring in real time makes the success of the brand strategy and PR solutions visible and enables it to be analyzed. If you keep a constant eye on developments, you can immediately counteract negative trends and amplify positive voices. The results of media monitoring are also an important element in comprehensive market, consumer, and competition analytics.  

Reputation management with media monitoring 

If an organization or brand builds up a good reputation, it is well-equipped for times of crisis. It is also important to draw up a crisis strategy in advance, so that it can be deployed immediately in an emergency. 

To be able to respond promptly, for example if negative reports on your organization gain the upper hand, you must always keep an eye on the media landscape. For this you need a media monitoring tool that evaluates the tonality of the content: Are the reports, comments and discussion positive, neutral, or negative? Then you can immediately recognize when the trend is tipping towards the negative and take action – ideally by implementing the crisis strategy you have already prepared. 

Media analysis and data visualization 

Media analysis goes a step further than media monitoring. It involves analyzing the observed data and drawing up recommendations for action. Media analysis starts with definition of the objective that will serve as a basis for the measurement of success. Qualitative evaluation of media reports delivers important intelligence for organizations. 

The gathering of valid information is one of the benefits of successful media monitoring. Data visualization is also essential to process the data quickly or present it to relevant target groups in vivid form. Diagrams enable the frequently complex links to be taken in immediately. 

Reasons for media analysis 

With media analysis, you can quickly get an idea of how your brand exists in the broader landscape. This includes analyzing: 

• Performance: Identify strengths and weaknesses of PR and marketing
• Influencers: Identify influential authors or content creators in the industry
• Sources: Evaluate the most important sources and media
• Reputation management: Analysis of the organization’s image 

Based on tonality analyses, the own share of voice and many other key figures, strategic approaches can be derived from the media analysis. 

Competition monitoring 

One of the most important areas in which media monitoring is used is to monitor competitors The strategies of other market players are analyzed so that you can adapt your own strategy in response. 

Tonality analysis 

Knowing what proportion of reports about your organization, a campaign, or a competitor are positive, what proportion are negative, and which are couched in neutral terms enables you to set benchmarks and measure success. A detailed tonality analysis also identifies which individuals, companies or issues are being mentioned. From this you can tell what has led to the positive, negative, or neutral tone. 

The intelligence delivered by the tonality analysis can answer the following questions: 

• Is my marketing campaign getting positive resonance?
• Are my competitors getting more positive or more frequent reports than I am? If so, where and from whom?
• How satisfied are customers with my latest product? 

Media monitoring sources 

To ensure that you identify the media that are relevant to your market and your products and thus obtain comprehensive intelligence, thorough monitoring cover should all the various media types. This includes:  

• Social media: Channels with user-generated content such as blogs and mini-blogs
• Print publications: Newspapers, trade publications, and others
• Online sources: Industry related blogs and online news platforms
• Radio and TV: Transcripts of broadcasts
• Press releases and company websites 

The variety of sources highlights the complexity of thorough media monitoring. Much of the information from the mentioned media and publications can be found easily on the free Internet. The challenge with pure online media monitoring, however, is to distinguish validity of the source. In addition, more and more content is being kept behind paywalls, which can quickly become a costly ordeal for online media monitoring. 

With a professional media monitoring service, you can quickly search through a variety of source types via a platform. This not only saves time in research, but also the cost structure becomes more transparent as the fees for the licensed content are no longer assigned to many different information providers. 

The media monitoring of print and online sources also enables the identification of media that are relevant for corporate communication and PR solutions. Influencer blogs or certain journals can turn out to be specialized media for a particular audience that can be targeted for marketing or PR purposes. 

Sharing information 

One of the features of a media monitoring and analysis program that is properly embedded in an organization’s culture is that information is quickly shared internally with the right stakeholders. Analyses performed by one department may contain important insights for people working in other parts of the organizations, although not for all. 

It is therefore a great advantage if functions embedded in the media monitoring service facilitate targeted sharing of information and analysis while also taking account of copyright, since this enables quick decisions to be taken without loss of time and efforts. 

Focus on relevant regions  

What are the benefits of global media monitoring for a company that operates only in one region? Why should internationally active companies restrict themselves to media monitoring in Germany? Both scenarios are of limited usefulness.  

When choosing a media monitoring service, companies should therefore make sure that the results can be selected to focus on the regions and languages of interest to them. This minimizes “noise” and enables media monitors to concentrate on the content that is of importance. 

How LexisNexis supports influencer marketing 

Nexis Newsdesk^®, our flagship media intelligence solution, provides everything you need to robust media monitoring and analysis by providing you access to the information you need to find the right partners for your campaign. It enables you to: 

• Create personalized news searches around topics of interest 
• Analyze brand awareness and marketing campaign results
• Monitor what people are saying about your company, your brand, and your competitors in near-real time so you can quickly respond to developments
• Track multiple topics across nearly 4 million articles daily, spanning 75 languages and more than 100 countries, for a comprehensive view of the media landscape
• Stay abreast of 24/7 broadcast-news coverage with monitoring of more than 2,000 TV and radio stations around the world and access to full-length transcripts and related videos
• Keep track of the buzz across social media, including Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, as well as thought-leader blogs, podcasts, microblogs, video/photo sharing sites, industry forums and more
• Convert your research into easy-to-digest charts and graphs to share news and insights within your organization
• Stay up to date on the latest news thanks to customized alerts and newsletters
• Share copyright-compliant news and information with colleagues and clients using customizable distribution tools, including branded newsletters and RSS feeds 

Nexis Newsdesk’s features include: 

• A customizable dashboard
• Branded alerts and newsletters
• Embeddable interactive charts
• Advanced analysis and filtering capabilities
• Personalized searches and alerts
• An unparalleled array of content 

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