Media Monitoring: Automated and Manual Solutions Explained

The expansion of the Internet in the past decades and the increasing flow of information that is thus available has sparked a debate about automatization in the PR and marketing industry. Media monitoring, as a central task for professionals in these sectors, is not left out of the discussion.

Surprisingly, there are still some misconceptions about the differences between manual and automated media monitoring that can drive professionals to opt for the wrong option according to their business needs.

Manual vs. Automated Media Monitoring

On the one hand, manual media monitoring consists of the investigation of the different information sources accessible to manually find and collect any disseminated information about the topics of interest – such as editorial or advertising content about your own company or brand.

On the other hand, automated media monitoring relies on technologies such as text analysis, Natural Language Processing (NLP) or Optical Character Recognition (ORC) to process large databases of publicly available media content and detect any mentions about a specific topic.

While the practice of manual media monitoring was widely used among communication offices and press cabinets of any international or local company between the late 19th and the 20th century, this radically changed in the 90’s due to the spread of digital technologies that allowed a massive amount of information to be disseminated. Thus, automated media monitoring tools were developed as a response to the effects of the digital transformation bringing countless advantages to the PR and marketing industries.

Advantages of Automated Media Monitoring

Among the many advantages that automated media monitoring offers, it enables the analysis of larger amounts of information. For example, while a human could only review tens of articles per day, automated solutions could monitor hundreds of them plus other written content from news websites and blogs.

Studies have shown that automated media monitoring solutions are more effective in terms of information collection when compared to humans. The use of technology significantly increases the amount of relevant data found about a topic.

Unlike humans, automated solutions can continuously process information and constantly send notifications about detections, 24/7. This is a very important factor in a globalized market where every minute there is information being disseminated in some part of the world that might affect international companies.

Through the automatization of content search and collection, companies can focus the resources of their employees on other tasks requiring more human involvement, especially those adding value to the business such as critical analyses of the media monitoring results and making informed decision that support their strategies.

Economical Automated Media Monitoring Solutions

Some companies are still not aware of these benefits and therefore stick with manual media monitoring which bears the risk of losing a great competitive advantage.

Companies that are unsure if automated solutions are for them fear high cost or a new tool to be difficult to use – which is not the case.

Quite the contrary: among the benefits, eMM users highlight that the platform is easy to use and offers them additional features that improve their workflow. For example, the duplicate detection feature saves them time and effort when analyzing the same content that was repeated several times in the same or different channels.

When it comes to cost-effective solutions, eMM users benefit from competitive prices and tailor-made media monitoring subscriptions. If you would like to know how automated media monitoring can suit your business needs, get in touch with us. We are confident to find the right solution for you!