Media Monitoring for the Public Sector

Media monitoring is a task integrated into communication departments worldwide. Still, it is a subject that is not getting as much attention as it deserves. Globally, companies of all sizes count on solutions to keep an eye on both their own as well as their competition’s media presence. They all benefit greatly from monitoring the media, especially when choosing automated solutions.

As in many other industries, media monitoring is also widespread in the large and diverse network of public institutions worldwide. We looked at the specifics and requirements:

Tracking Topics and Uncovering New Issues

Public institutions are involved in political, economic or legal affairs as well as in educational, cultural or scientific matters. The list is long and yet public institutions always need to be able to track their topics across the media landscape. Additionally, discovering new trends and being on top of the news helps keeping up with developments.

The Office of the President, the different ministries or the political parties, for example. For them, monitoring the media is a way to understand the public interest as well as the most demanding issues at the societal level.

Public institutions promoting culture and science like the national museums, public foundations or research centers highly profit from learning about topics relevant to the population. With this knowledge, the content can be adapted and improved, leading to a more target-group oriented communication. Conversely, the media are also more likely to take up the content if it is of high relevance.

Similarly, public education providers like public universities or schools striving to become a leading institution in the sector benefit from observing their mentions as well as those from other education providers. Knowing what others are doing certainly helps in terms of strategy planning.

As a last example, public healthcare institutions (such as public hospitals) can identify issues that pose a risk to public health in the media coverage. This might for example be due to negative perception of a specific treatment or misinformation. Additionally, for healthcare institutions media monitoring can act as an early warning system in case of disasters. Thus, hospitals or other health facilities benefit by being able to reschedule their resources accordingly. The ability to identify incidents early and react on time is undoubtedly an advantage for all.

Monitoring your Interests and Measuring your Impact

Television, radio and the online press are undoubtedly important agents that set the public agenda. Similarly, institutions on the public sector have a major impact at all economic, political and social levels. Therefore, monitoring the coverage of the traditional media – which help to shape the public opinion– is an excellent way to be aware of any relevant topics and measure the impact on society.

Advanced media monitoring tools serve not only to measure the number of mentions in the media but also to track the sentiment attached to them, which provides even more meaningful data for an institution.

Together with the sentiment analysis, real-time alerts are of great help for public institutions managing the image of a public figure, which can be affected by negative headlines at any time.

Additionally, public institutions like the foreign affairs office, whose scope goes beyond its own country, also trust in media monitoring solutions to keep track of coverage in different countries and languages.

As a leader in media monitoring worldwide, eMedia Monitor offers its clients automated TV, radio and web-TV monitoring of more than 3.400 channels in all continents and in more than 15 languages. If you would like to learn more about eMM’s Pegasus platform and how your institution can benefit from it, contact us and we will gladly schedule a free demo.

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