What a News Clipping Service provides?
Quick explanation:
A news clipping service tracks and compiles mentions of specific keywords or topics that a business or organization is interested in across various media platforms.
News Clipping Service Set-up Steps
Define your media monitoring goals.
Here’s why this is crucial:
- Identify the Purpose:
- Without clear goals, media monitoring becomes a vague and inefficient exercise.
- Defining goals provides a roadmap, ensuring that the monitoring efforts are focused and relevant.
- Targeted Monitoring:
- Goals determine what keywords, topics, and media sources to track.
- For example, what are you monitoring for:
- Brand reputation management?
- Competitive analysis?
- Crisis management?
- Campaign effectiveness?
- Each goal requires a different approach.
- Measurable Results:
- Clearly defined goals allow for the measurement of the monitoring’s success.
- This enables clients to assess the return on investment and make necessary adjustments.
Before diving into the technical aspects of setting up keywords, a client must first understand why they are monitoring the media. This foundational step will guide all subsequent actions.
Identifying and defining relevant keywords and search queries.
Here’s a breakdown of why and how this is done:
- Translating Goals into Search Terms:
- The goals established in the first step now need to be translated into specific words and phrases that will trigger the monitoring system.
- This involves brainstorming and creating a comprehensive list of:
- Company names (including variations and misspellings)
- Brand names and product names
- Key personnel names
- Competitor names
- Industry-specific jargon
- Relevant hashtags (for social media monitoring)
- Common misspellings of all of the above.
- Refining Search Queries:
- Simply using single keywords can lead to a flood of irrelevant data.
- Therefore, it’s essential to refine search queries using:
- Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) to combine or exclude keywords.
- Phrase matching (using quotation marks) to search for specific phrases.
- Capture variations of words.
- For example, instead of just “company name,” a better search query might be “company name” AND (“product launch” OR “new service”).
- Building a Keyword Library:
- This is not a one-and-done process. The keyword library should be treated as a living document and be updated as needed. New products, new competitors, and changes in industry terms all necessitate updates to the keyword library.
By meticulously defining keywords and crafting effective search queries, clients can ensure that their media monitoring efforts capture the most relevant and valuable information.
Establishing distribution and access protocols.
This involves determining who needs to receive the monitored information and how they will access it. Here’s a detailed explanation:
- Identifying Account holders:
- Determine who within the organization needs to be informed about media mentions. This might include:
- Public relations/communications teams
- Marketing teams
- Executives and senior management
- Customer service teams
- Legal teams
- Sales teams
- Determine who within the organization needs to be informed about media mentions. This might include:
- Defining Access Levels:
- Not everyone needs access to every mention or all the coverage data.
- Establish who needs access to what information.
- Identify the primary account holders who will need full access to the monitoring platform, to disseminate information to other teams.
- Identify the individuals or teams that will receive alerts for specific topics or keywords.
- Setting Up Media Delivery and Alerts:
- Determine who will receive daily email results.
- Ensure that alert notifications are delivered promptly to the appropriate personnel.
- Training and Onboarding:
- Provide training to primary account users.
- Ensure that they understand how to use the platform and make edits to their account.
- Establishing a Response Protocol:
- It is very important to have a plan in place for how to respond to various types of media mentions.
- What are the steps your organization will take to respond to your media coverage?
- Who is responsible for responding to coverage?
- Where will you post your responses or marketing campaigns to with the information gathered from your monitoring efforts?
- Having a plan in place will allow for a quick and effective response.
By carefully planning distribution and access, organizations can ensure that the valuable insights gained from media monitoring are delivered to the right people at the right time, enabling them to make informed decisions.
