MEDIA MONITORING GUIDE PROVIDES A FRAMEWORK TO ELEVATE COMMS STRATEGY
CARMA, the global media intelligence provider has shared a comprehensive guide for businesses to kick start its media monitoring program. Gareth Owens, consultant at CARMA, looks at the tips to follow and errors to avoid when building a successful media monitoring framework.
Media monitoring enables PR and comms professionals to identify emerging trends before they saturate the mainstream market. As the first thing the C-suite will receive each morning, media monitoring is also a valuable tool for organisations to streamline its internal comms.
It can be difficult for businesses to know where to begin collating this data, so Gareth Owens and the team at CARMA have put together a comprehensive guide to begin media monitoring in just 15 minutes per day.
Start the week by creating a basic framework that is tailored to your organisation. Identify which elements of the brief are most valuable for the team, from company centric media to that of competitors or a specific industry topic. While the organisation name will likely identify a large proportion of media coverage, it is worth considering other ways the brand may be mentioned, including CEO or spokesperson names.
If working with a monitoring partner, it is important to communicate your established brief with them. The process then falls to an initial trial run to see what results the framework delivers. If too little coverage appears, then it may be a case of expanding the search criteria or reducing restrictions put in place by the supplier. If there is a problem with too much coverage, then reassess the tools in place to filter, categorise and sort through the content.
When using a DIY tool or briefing agency partner, the initial search will likely have a large impact, but a couple of changes may remove up to 80% of the noise, says Owens. While at the set-up phase, it is a good idea to keep the results within a small team that understands the trial-and-error process, before bombarding the wider team with testing alerts and unorganised content.
Owens highlights the importance of identifying quality content over quantity. Some of the best ways to generate high-quality content are to use a media list, specify headline mentions and specify that an article has leverage mentions of the key terms. Keep in mind that language changes over time and keeping up to date with current industry terminology is key to driving useful results.
Most importantly, make sure to prep communications for the stakeholder audience and ensure the media monitoring is aligned with what the organisation wants to achieve.
Read the full weekly guide to start media monitoring in just 15 minutes per day, from Gareth Owens at CARMA here.
