Media-Monitoring Software

I am looking for an interview on using media monitoring/social listening/PR analytics for benchmarking and competitive intel. I’m looking for comments on tactics and strategies, not the specifics of tools.

1. Pay to Play (in a Good Way)

If you’re a serious PR pro, then you need media-monitoring software. Google Alerts won’t cut it. Professionals use tools they pay for; this way, they have access to a dedicated support team and patronize something they depend on.

2. Cast a Wide Net

The more info you have, the better. Algorithms can gather info, but it takes a real live person — ideally, a trained professional — to comb through the results and separate the signals from the noise. This is a case where less is less and more is more. I’d rather get duplicative results than risk missing something.

3. Conquer the Search Commands

If you want to get the most out of the software, you need to master the science of search queries and all the special commands and advanced operators. For example, don’t just search for “Walmart”; learn how to exclude certain articles, to rank articles by prominence, to analyze them by sentiment, and so on. The smartest media monitors memorize these keyword combinations the way most of us memorize Ctrl + Alt + Delete: We use them so much that they’re embedded in our muscle memory.