Introduction:
In an era where a single tweet can have an impact on your business, media monitoring has evolved from a “nice-to-have” PR task into a high-stakes survival tool. But as the tech gets smarter, the jargon gets denser.
Whether you’re setting up your first monitoring account or you’re a seasoned pro who wants to brush up on terms related to your monitoring service. Here is your definitive guide to the terms that actually matter in the media monitoring industry today.
Basic Media Monitoring Terms
- Keyword(s): Words or terms that are important to your organization. Your media monitoring service will use your list of keywords to look for mentions across various media platforms. Keywords are often your organizations name, brands, key members, partnerships, competitors, or any other topics that could impact your organizations brand image or shape your future directives.
- Boolean Search: A type of search that uses operators like AND, OR, and NOT to limit or broaden your results by clarifying your keywords. Example: Apple NOT fruit.
- Mention(s): Any time one of your keywords are found in a news article, social media post, blog, or a TV segment.
- Earned Media: Are mentions by a third party (Traditional newspapers, social media, broadcast TV & Radio, Online news and blogs) without payment. This is often seen as the most “credible” channel because it implies an external endorsement.
- Clipping: Historically, this is when an news article is physically cutout of a newspaper; this now can also refer to a digital article/mention/social post of a media mention.
- Dashboard: A centralized place (typically a webpage) that aggregates mentions or data from various media channels—such as news sites, social media, broadcast, and blogs—into a single display. Rather than forcing you to sift through individual articles, a dashboard uses charts, graphs, to provide a high-level overview of your brand’s health and media presence.
- Crawling: The process where monitoring bots scan/search internet content or social media platforms to find your specified keywords.
- Alerts (Real Time Alerts): Real-time notifications (often via email or app) sent whenever a specific keyword or high-priority mention is detected.
- Reach: A calculation of how many people could have seen your content. It’s usually an estimation based on a publication’s circulation or a website’s visitors.
- Sentiment Analysis: Using AI to determine the “mood” of a mention. Is it Positive, Negative, or Neutral.
- Ad Value Equivalency (AVE): A metric used in the public relations to calculate the economic value of earned media coverage (articles, mentions, or interviews) by comparing it to the cost of a paid advertisement of the same size or duration.
- Engagement/Interactions: A number representation of how many people interacted with a post (likes, comments, shares).
- Omits: When users identify what types of results they want to exclude from their monitoring results.
- Paper List: In newspaper (print) monitoring, users can focus their monitoring to a specific list of papers, know as a paper list.
Advanced Media Monitoring Terms:
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Share of Voice (SoV): A percentage that shows how much of the “conversation” you own compared to your competitors.
- SoV=(your mentions/total industry mentions) X 100
- Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Specific, measurable goals used to evaluate the success of a media monitoring or PR campaign.
- RSS Feed: A web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to their monitoring results and data in a standardized, computer-readable format.
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See Your Mentions Today
Curious how your current Share of Voice stacks up? Contact Newz Group today for a complimentary media mention review.
Don’t let complex data slow you down. Let Newz Group handle the Boolean strings and sentiment analysis for you.
Want to learn more about what makes Newz Group different, see our blog post on local and rural monitoring: https://blog.newzgroup.com/archives/14358
