Short and Long Term Media Monitoring – A Solution Adapted to PR’s Needs

For those familiar with the marketing field, it is nothing new that PR staff managing a company’s communication strategy have a challenging profession. Their day-to-day tasks include multiple overlapping projects with various deadlines: from one-time events to year-round communication activities.

And they are expected to keep balance between all of them in a constant work flow. With so much going on, a little help - or a helpful tool - won’t hurt.

Fortunately, the market now offers a number of solutions to help manage PR activities such as media monitoring tools. These are among the most practical as well as popular PR software products since they facilitate tracking what is being reported in the news – even globally, depending on the provider. However, this definition oversimplifies what a good media monitoring service can really do in terms of short- and long-term tasks.

Media monitoring is just as versatile as PR and below we explain why:

Temporary vs. Permanent Projects

Sponsorship is a common practice among companies. The UEFA Euro 2021, for example, was able to win over brands like Heineken, Coca-Cola and TikTok as sponsors for the popular sports event. These big international companies provided financial support to the sports organization, and, in return, their brands got promoted in one of the most followed events worldwide.

This is clearly a beneficial practice for both parties, but certainly PR professionals of sponsoring companies need to measure the success of their actions: how many times was Coca-Cola mentioned during the games? What was TikTok’s share of voice compared to other brands? Has the presence also increased beyond the paid partnership?

Tracking the media during the four-weeks event reveals truly valuable information for the companies and helps them to understand whether their economic efforts have actually paid off.

On the other hand, a company’s name is not only mentioned in relation to a specific, planned event. Actually, there are hundreds of reasons why a company may suddenly end up in the news. At best, it is in relation to a positive situation, but the chances of negative incidents are just as high.

Whatever the case, a marketing team needs all the information connected to the company. A long-term media monitoring approach acts like an early warning system for such surprises and helps tackling critical situations timely to save the company’s reputation.

Basic and in-depth analysis are both part of PR tasks.

Basic vs. In-Depth Analysis

Nowadays, what most businesses care about is getting meaningful data. But what is meaningful for each company varies greatly.

Information updates on the number of mentions, the type and the name of the channels may be valuable for some. This is a simple task when using an automated media monitoring solution like eMM’s Pegasus platform providing real-time information.

However, it is not all about getting numbers of mentions. An important part of PR and marketing teams is working closely with other areas such as sales. All activities must be aligned to reach the overall business goals.

In-depth data enables comparisons, drawing conclusions, and, therefore, making better informed decisions at business level. Automated media monitoring actually extracts and processes a huge amount of data coming from TV/radio channels and other media sources worldwide, which - well-used - can boost a business.

This is exactly what the eMM Data Cubes for BI have been developed for. Benefitting from long-term media monitoring, users get valuable broadcast content data that can be combined with their internal business data in order to detect meaningful correlations.

For example, for an automobile company it may be interesting to discover if there is any connection between media coverage of climate change and electric car sales, while for another it could be valuable information finding out whether the company’s perception differs between public and private media channels.

Independently of short or long-term, the possibilities of using media monitoring in PR and marketing are tremendous. If you are interested in finding out how eMM can help your business out, leave us a message and we will schedule a free demo for you.

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