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The 2024 State of the Media Report

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How to Do Media Monitoring: Essential Tips and Best Practices

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What Is Media Monitoring and Why Does It Matter?

Learning how to do media monitoring effectively is one of the best things you can do to protect and grow your brand reputation.

Media monitoring tracks what people say about your brand across multiple platforms. This includes traditional media like TV, radio, and newspapers, and digital sources like news sites, social media, and podcasts.

It's important to get a clear picture of what people think of your brand and how they share those sentiments with others. Media monitoring lets you do this and create a platform from which to develop a better brand strategy.

This guide aims to show you how to do media monitoring effectively, whether it's for your own brand or a client's.

Media Monitoring Defined

We will look at the entire media monitoring landscape later in this guide, but to start, it's important to define what we're talking about. Media monitoring is the process of tracking mentions and references of your brand, products, identity, or industry across various channels.

A global corporation may monitor the media as part of its reputation management strategy, just as much as an Instagram influencer may use it to track their online mentions.

Specialized tools can be used to scan global media sources for keywords related to a business, sentiment toward an industry, or even the reputation of a celebrity client. Therefore, choosing the best media monitoring tools is essential for PR professionals and brands to effectively track and analyze media coverage.

The goal is to capture relevant conversations and content in real time. This allows you to stay on top of the good (and not so good) things people are saying about you online and in traditional media.

The Importance of Media Monitoring for Your Brand

Media monitoring helps business owners, influencers, and communications professionals understand public perception of their brand. It's possible to spot trends, identify potential issues, and gauge sentiment by crunching all the data obtained via a media monitoring tool.

This knowledge is crucial for shaping communication strategies, particularly for brands who are still learning how the public perceives them.

By monitoring media, you can:

  • Respond quickly to customer concerns

  • Spot emerging crises before they escalate

  • Identify influential voices in your industry

  • Track the success of your PR campaigns

Regular monitoring keeps you informed and ready to act. It's like having a finger on the pulse of public opinion about your brand.

Benefits of Effective Media Monitoring

Monitoring media isn't just about recording when a newspaper writes about your product, or a thousand X users like a post. It's about having a 360-degree view of your brand's place in the market, who likes it and who doesn't, and what its impact is within your industry and wider society.

A good media monitoring tool is what's needed to oversee all your activity. It helps you make smarter decisions based on real data and provides the following benefits:

  1. Improved customer service: You can address issues faster when you know about them right away.

  2. Better crisis management: Catch potential problems early and plan your response.

  3. Competitive insight: Learn what works (and doesn’t) for your rivals.

  4. Content inspiration: Find trending topics to fuel your marketing efforts.

  5. ROI measurement: Track the impact of your PR and marketing campaigns.

Media monitoring also helps you find new opportunities. You might discover potential partners or untapped markets, perhaps in different languages or on the other side of the world.

In This Guide:

  • Key Components of a Successful Media Monitoring Strategy

  • Tips for Setting up a Media Monitoring Process

  • Best Practices for Improving Your Media Monitoring Results

  • Avoiding Common Media Monitoring Mistakes

  • How to Adapt Your Media Monitoring Strategy for Evolving Trends

Use this guide to learn the basics of the monitoring process, discover the common mistakes that brands make, and see how you can realign your strategies based on your media monitoring work.

Key Components of a Successful Media Monitoring Strategy

Before you start monitoring, it's worth understanding the basics.

A strong media monitoring strategy helps you stay on top of your brand mentions, the sentiment towards your brand, and wider industry trends. It lets you track what people are saying and respond quickly to opportunities or issues.

The three areas your media monitoring strategy needs to address here are:

  1. Outlining your monitoring goals

  2. Finding the best media monitoring tools to help you

  3. Pinpointing the platforms you need to monitor

Combine these three areas into a strategy and you'll be ready to start your media monitoring. Let's dive into each one in a little more detail.

1. Defining Your Monitoring Goals

It's important to set goals for your monitoring activity, so you know what you're aiming for.

Make sure they're specific and measurable. For example, aim to respond to all customer complaints within an hour, or track the sentiment of brand mentions over one month. You can then generate a media monitoring report that tracks the data points relevant to your goals.

Don’t forget to link your monitoring goals to broader business objectives. This might include improving customer service, finding new leads, or managing brand reputation.

If you work for a large corporation, then you'll need to work with other departments to ensure these goals adhere to the wider business strategy. For small teams and individual marketers, be sure to keep in mind all the variables that come with a business's reputation before setting these goals.

2. Choosing The Right Media Monitoring Tools

Once you have your goals in place, you can look for the right media monitoring software that matches your needs and budget. Look for features like real-time alerts, sentiment analysis, and easy reporting. CisionOne's Media Monitoring is a great place to start.

Your tool needs to track all the channels you care about, from broadcast monitoring to review sites. You'll need to be able to gauge your online reputation as much as your place in print media, so a strong tool here is really important.

Learn more about real time media monitoring here!

3. Identifying the Right Social Media Platforms and Media Channels

Now that you have your goals and your media monitoring tool, it's time to assess the channels you plan to track.

Many organizations choose to assess the entire media landscape. That means looking at whether their target audience interacts on social media, reads local newspapers, listens to national radio stations, or only watches subscription TV networks like Netflix.

A media monitoring service will help you understand where your audience is. You might find that your customer base loves a particular social media platform, while another segment is faithful to watching primetime TV.

Try to cover all the places people might be talking about your brand or industry. From there, you can decide which areas to focus on, and bring all the data back into your media monitoring tool.

Tips for Setting up a Media Monitoring Process

Having aligned goals and the right monitoring tools is one thing – but implementing any monitoring strategy requires a process. This goes for whether you're tracking the entire media landscape or just plan to focus on one channel like social media.

Setting up an effective media monitoring process requires careful planning and execution. By following these tips, you can create a system that delivers valuable insights for your brand.

Assigning Tasks to the Team

You might be tasked with monitoring social media or the wider media sphere on your own, or you might be part of a team that does it for one or multiple brands. Either way, it's important to assign roles so everyone knows the process.

Media monitoring tracks data points like mentions and interactions with your brand, certain keywords, and the wider industry. You need to know who is going to follow what data, when they'll do it, and how it's collected and reported back to stakeholders.

This might mean creating a daily or weekly schedule to stay on top of the data, so you don't end up scrambling around for answers on short notice. Once you have this plan in place, you can do more of the below processes.

Setting up Real-Time Alerts for Key Topics

Real-time alerts keep you informed about important mentions as they happen.

Start by identifying your most crucial topics, like your brand name, products, or industry keywords, and then use a media monitoring tool to set up alerts for these topics. Most media monitoring tools offer features like real-time notifications and the ability to monitor specific keywords, helping you navigate vast amounts of information while focusing on what truly matters.

Configure your alerts to notify you immediately for high-priority items. You can then set up a process for escalation, should you get an alert. For example, if you're alerted to hundreds of negative social media posts then you, or a team member, can instigate a crisis management process.

For less urgent topics, consider something like daily or weekly digest emails that spread around your team.

This approach helps you stay on top of breaking news without getting overwhelmed.

Using Keywords and Boolean Search for Precise Results

Effective keyword selection is key to getting useful monitoring results. You might assign someone the job of doing this for multiple brands within an agency. Or, if you're working on your own, this could become the most important part of your day-to-day role.

Start with your brand name, product names, and industry terms. Think about common misspellings or abbreviations people might use. Cast a wide net and see what you catch.

A media monitoring solution like CisionOne can also help track offline mentions in print media, alleviating the challenge of manually collecting clippings.

Boolean search operators can help you narrow down results:

  • Use AND to combine terms (ex. Apple AND iPhone)

  • Use OR for alternatives (ex. sports car OR fast car)

  • Use NOT to exclude irrelevant results (ex. Apple NOT fruit)

Create separate searches for different topics to make it easier to analyze the data later. Then, test your searches and adjust as needed to ensure you’re capturing all relevant mentions while minimizing noise.

Analyzing Data for Actionable Insights

The next stage of your media monitoring process is to make sense of the data. Many media monitoring tools now make it easy for anyone to crunch the numbers.

Look for trends in sentiment, volume, and topics over time, and pay attention to which sources generate the most engagement for your brand.

Create a system to categorize mentions by topic, sentiment, or importance. This helps you quickly identify issues that need immediate attention, such as a flurry of negative feedback on a specific Facebook group.

Track metrics that align with your goals and generate regular reports to assess your progress. This can then feed into future strategies.

Best Practices for Improving Your Media Monitoring Results

Media monitoring tools provide you with a lot of data that can be used to shape your brand, your products, and your services. But this data can be difficult to decipher. Yes, your tool can crunch the numbers, but you'll still need to know what to prioritize.

For example, a marketing executive at a sneaker brand knows her product is popular on Instagram. Yet she doesn't know who is actually buying her shoes, and where the hype is coming from.

Effective media monitoring can help her track the origins of her brand's reputation, compare it to her competitors, and gain valuable insights for her sales funnel.

Below are three key strategies brands can use to enhance their monitoring efforts and maximize their impact from PR and marketing campaigns.

1. Prioritizing Brand Mentions Based on Sentiment and Influence

It's great when your brand gets mentioned in the media – but volume doesn't equal quality.

It's important to use social listening tools and other media analysis software to gauge sentiment and categorize mentions as positive, negative, or neutral.

If you're getting a lot of negative mentions, then you need to take action.

Equally, pay special attention to who posts about you. If they have a big influence over your target audience – for example, you're a fashion label and a pop star posts something positive about you – then these accounts can sway how your brand is perceived.

Create alerts for sudden changes in sentiment to quickly address potential issues.

2. Monitoring Competitors to Stay Ahead

All brands keep a close eye on their competitors, and doing so via media monitoring platforms is no different.

Track media coverage, social media activity, and their share of voice to gauge relative market position.

Set up alerts for your competitors' new product launches, campaigns, and company news.

This helps you stay informed about industry trends and potential threats to your market share.

Learn from their successes and mistakes to improve your own customer service approach, and use these insights to refine your marketing efforts and differentiate your brand.

3. Reporting and Sharing Insights With Stakeholders

Monitoring social media channels, newspapers, TV, etc. is only worthwhile if you act upon the results you find. One big tip here is to accurately report and share your findings, so it's not just you who understand your brand's presence.

Reports need to feature data and insights that are relevant to your campaign and business goals.

You need to gather valuable insights and relay it in a concise, clear style. Remember, you might be sharing a report with someone who only wants to know the headlines, not the fine detail.

Top online reputation monitoring tools will help you develop the right reports and share them with the correct people.

Just be sure you're sharing worthwhile insights that loop back to those business goals.

Avoiding Common Media Monitoring Mistakes

Monitoring the media can be tricky. Whether it's assessing a brand's online presence, dealing with bad customer feedback, or wading through sentiment analysis data, a lot of hard work and diligence is needed to do it right.

It's understandable that teams and individuals get things wrong. Even the top media monitoring experts make mistakes, especially when it comes to dealing with data.

Watch out for these common pitfalls to get the most value from your efforts.

Ignoring Negative Sentiment or Crisis Signals

The point of media monitoring is to move away from reactive decisions and be proactive in the execution of your strategy. This is particularly important when it comes to dealing with crises.

Never turn a blind eye to bad news. Instead, pay attention to negative comments and feedback about your brand, whether it's from customers, influencers, or various media channels like newspapers.

These early warning signs can help you proactively catch and deal with potential issues before they escalate.

It's therefore important to establish a crisis communication plan, so you know what to do when issues arise.

Relying Solely on One Media Type

Brands fail if they put all their eggs in one basket. For example, running a successful TV commercial is great, but if you don't also utilize social media then your marketing campaign is missing out on a huge section of your audience.

This goes for monitoring too. Watching only social media or just press releases won't give you the full picture. It's important to cast a wide net, especially when you begin monitoring the media, so you know where your audience is.

Overlooking Long-Term Trends

Marketers who use media monitoring have to balance short-term progress with long-term ambitions. It's important to do the day-to-day tasks and keep your brand reputation healthy.

However, it's just as crucial to look ahead at how your brand, your industry, and the media landscape might develop.

Look for patterns in topics that come up about your brand and industry when using media monitoring tools. Are there recurring issues you need to address? Look at social media platforms, traditional news sources, and everything in between to determine how this landscape will change in the future.

Is everyone shifting to digital media, or is there still value in traditional media platforms like radio and TV?

Use this info to shape your short- and long-term strategies.

How to Adapt Your Media Monitoring Strategy for Evolving Trends

Speaking of trends, the media is always evolving as new technology comes along to make it quicker and easier for people to communicate with each other, and consume news and entertainment. Brands need to be flexible and keep up with evolving trends. A brand that went big on Vine may have failed to spot the impending closure of the social media platform.

Here are three trends to consider when monitoring the media in the future.

1. Keeping up With Changes in Media Consumption

People use media in new ways all the time. There's always a fresh generation entering into the social media sphere, while older generations shift their preferences as they retire.

Look at which social platforms are growing, and how TV networks and radio stations stay relevant. Use your media monitoring tool to track the wider use of digital and traditional mediums, which will help you know where to focus your monitoring efforts. Don't forget about niche platforms that might matter to your brand, such as local newspapers.

Remember, not everyone is on TikTok and not everyone uses Facebook. Use your tool to discover where your brand should focus its energies now and in the future.

Integrating AI and Automation Into Your Process

Any marketing strategy that incorporates media monitoring should also lean on AI for help. AI is now built into most top tools, making it much easier to sift through data. AI spots things humans often miss. Your monitoring reports and marketing strategies are all the better for it.

AI is already integrated into your monitoring process if you use a tool like CisionOne. In the future, it's likely that AI will do even more of the data work, allowing users to spend their time on strategy.

Personalizing Your Media Monitoring for Niche Markets

The worldwide media landscape is becoming more digitized, and with that comes even more data that marketers can use to find unique and specialized demographics.

It's how newsletter companies like Mailchimp are able to easily split mailing lists into categories of like-minded audiences.

This means brands will be able to tailor their messaging to certain sub-sections of their audience whenever they choose. Many brands already do this. For example, you can specify when advertising on Facebook exactly the type of user you want to target.

Likewise, brands are getting better at monitoring these audience sub-sections and understanding their views.

From running sentiment analysis on online conversations to outlining regional differences amongst audiences, personalized media monitoring solutions are becoming easier to find.

Frequently Asked Questions

Media monitoring involves tracking mentions across various platforms. It's a fairly straightforward practice once you get accustomed to how the software works. However, not even the most experienced PR professionals can be expected to know everything about them straight away.

So, here are some key questions about online monitoring of the media that we're asked:

What Are the Essential Tools for Effective Media Monitoring?

You need a mix of tools to monitor media well. A good news media monitoring service needs to track online news, social media, and traditional outlets like TV and radio.

Google Alerts can help, but it’s nowhere near powerful enough. Instead, a monitoring tool with social listening capability – such as CisionOne – is the best option.

Can You Give Some Top-Notch Examples of Media Monitoring Reports?

A great media monitoring report will explain your brand position across traditional and digital media platforms. It will highlight where your growth is, the positive and negative sentiment associated with your brand, and who your target audience is.

The good report will also show how your audience interacts with your brands, point to the best ROI for marketing projects across various media sources, and flag any potential crises on the horizon.

Monitoring the media helps brands stay ahead of the game and strategize with more confidence.

It's these reports generated from monitoring tools that form the bedrock of future strategies.

In What Ways Can Media Monitoring Propel Brand Loyalty Forward?

Media monitoring helps you understand your customers better because you can see what they're saying about your brand and your industry.

This lets you respond to their needs quickly. You can change your products, launch a different type of marketing campaign, or even target a whole new demographic.

You can also spot potential issues before they become big problems.

By addressing concerns fast, you build trust. Happy customers are loyal customers.

How Can a Company Set up an In-house Media Monitoring Operation, and What Skills Are Required?

Setting up in-house monitoring takes time but is made a lot easier when using a media monitoring tool.

While the tool can help you assess the media landscape, it's also important to employ people who understand your industry and your audience. They'll be good at spotting trends and analyzing data.

Beyond this, good writing skills are important for creating media reports that can be shared with other stakeholders.

Technical skills also help when using monitoring tools, although a platform like CisionOne can help train workers up from scratch.

Remember, the media never sleeps, so your team needs to be on top of things and time management is crucial.

When Assessing Different Media Monitoring Services, What Criteria Should Be Considered to Ensure They Meet a Brand's Needs?

Look at coverage first. Does the service track all the media types you need? Think beyond social media and consider traditional forms like TV, radio, magazines, and newspapers.

Then, check their data sources. Are they reliable? A tool like CisionOne has more than 100 million data sources from over 190 countries.

Next, look at the reporting features. Can you get the insights you need and share them with others in your company?

Ease of use matters, too. Your team should be able to use any tool without problems, and be offered training to get up to speed.

Price, of course, is important, but value matters more. The cheapest option isn't always the best, and marketers tend to benefit with better results from increased investment in monitoring solutions.

Author Bio
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Joe Short
Journalist and SEO expert


Joe is a journalist and writer specialising in sports, politics, and technology. Joe has more than a decade of experience in SEO-focused online publishing and began working for Cision in 2024. Based in Sussex, he has interviewed everyone from elite-level sports stars to the latest tech innovators.