What Are Others Saying About Your Brand?
There are a multitude of ways to measure your brand or organization’s reputation, and it’s imperative to do so. Maybe you want to know if your message is reaching your target audiences. Or, you might need to mitigate a crisis that broke out in your company. One of the most effective ways to do this is through media monitoring. As a tool, media monitoring is the process of reading, watching or listening to content from print, online, social media and broadcast channels that can help you identify and analyze keywords, sentiments or topics pertaining to your brand.
Public relations and the journalism industry have always maintained a symbiotic relationship. Media monitoring is a key tool for public relations and marketing professionals to gauge what is being said about their brand or organization — thereby determining the influence it carries.
Media monitoring is a crucial asset to efficiently measure the impact, success and shortcomings of your PR efforts. In a crisis, it should be one of the tactics put into place to put out the fires that may arise. Media monitoring informs your decisions on a consistent basis to help direct strategy and proactive messaging and planning.
And the best part? It doesn’t have to cost you an arm and a leg.
There is a myriad of paid subscription services available (think Cision, LexisNexis, Meltwater, Muck Rack, etc.) but you can still find success in monitoring in a cost-effective way. Here’s how:
- Email Alerts
Navigating the depths of the internet can seem daunting at times. To maintain a consistent and streamlined approach to your media monitoring efforts, consider setting up email alerts such as Google Alerts or Talkwalker for your organization. With Google Alerts, Google will send you emails when new results populate on the web that mentions your organization such as news articles or blogs. This can be done simply by going to google.com/alerts, entering a search term for the desired topic (you can be as specific or as general as you want) and narrowing the alert to a specific source, language or region. You can also specify how often, how many and how to receive the alerts.
- Google News
Often, broadcast news stories will subsequently be posted to the TV station’s website. If this is the case, it can be easy to look for the story online using a more targeted, customized search in Google News and pull the video clip from the online story. For radio, if you know in advance that your brand, client or organization will be appearing on a show you can proactively ask the station for the recording.
- Social Media
Every social media platform (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) has internal search functions you can use to simply type in your brand’s name, keyword or hashtag. If you manage your brand’s Facebook page, you can also customize your notifications to monitor page likes, mentions and comments. Facebook Analytics can be used at length to understand the data gathered for your brand as well. For more of a consistent tracking of mentions on Twitter, consider setting up a free account with TweetDeck, which allows you to set up an extremely customizable dashboard to manage your account, mentions, direct messages, lists and trends.
Today’s 24/7 news cycle and digital outlets make it more important than ever to monitor the mentions of your brand or organization on a regular basis. Once you set up a robust strategy for your media monitoring tactics, whether you choose the paid or free route, you will be able to help to assess the impact of your communications efforts, prevent or mediate a PR crisis and improve your messaging strategy.
Want more of The Fearey Group blog? Check out our last post 5 THINGS EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW ABOUT PR.