Media monitoring is the process of reading, watching or listening to the editorial content of media sources on a continuing basis, and then, identifying, saving and analyzing content that contains specific keywords or topics.
A media monitoring service, a press clipping service or a clipping service as known in earlier times, provides clients with copies of media content, which is of specific interest to them and subject to changing demand; what they provide may include documentation, content, analysis, or editorial opinion, specifically or widely. These services tend to specialize their coverage by keyword, industry, size, region/geography, publication, language, etc.
This activity is done on two fronts, either internal or externally. Internal monitoring is limited to specifics and mainly to certain geography. External or specialized media monitoring agencies have the capacity to capture the content on wide geographies, various languages, and at a fraction of the cost.
Media Monitoring is the key to Public Relations, Corporate Communications, and Marketing Strategies. Most organizations, government agencies, not-for-profit organizations, brands, celebrities and individuals such as authors, sportspersons, glamour world personalities, etc. utilize media monitoring as a tool to track mentions of their organization, its brands, its executives and celebrity presence in news media.
Some of them also deploy media intelligence tools to track the success of their press releases, to analyze competitor strategies, to benchmark performance against competitors, to control corporate or brand reputation, to gather market intelligence, to keep an eye on every move of its competitors, understand the business environment, to keep tab on new and innovative ideas, technologies, etc.
Monitoring editorial content of news sources including newspapers, magazines, trade journals, TV, radio stations and the Internet is by far the most common type of media monitoring. This form of media monitoring is called “news monitoring”. In addition to monitoring news, many organizations now also monitor social media on the Internet, tracking word of mouth mentions about their organization in social media such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, message boards and forums. This is commonly known as social media monitoring, word-of-mouth monitoring, or buzz monitoring.
Some organizations have their own capacities to track and monitor news content on their own. But most of the organizations, PR houses, Market Research Agencies, Media Intelligence firms take the help of full equipped specialized Media Monitoring Companies like Indian Press Clearing.
The in-house team can track or monitor news coverage from very limited avenues of news medium, like newspapers from specific area or region, limited no. of editions and journals, online search engines, etc. This can hamper the analysis of the overall impact of the media release throughout the country and internationally.
Hence most of the organizations prefer to have specialized media tracking agencies that have the infrastructure, skilled human resource and expertise to scan through innumerable news mediums, print, online, TV channels and radio, etc. to get the relevant and required news/information at earliest. These agencies can provide a very comprehensive news reports, from varied geographies and can save precious human hours and efforts of the in-house team using free-online search options. Their efforts can be used in more productive activity for the organization than this tedious job of searching news clips.
In addition, Specialized News Monitoring agencies are more efficient, accurate, time- saving and economical than the in-house staff. News monitoring is the requisite for most organizations. Today, news in traditional media (newspapers, consumer magazines, trade journals, news syndication services) is best monitored on the Internet. But still, few publications are still not ready to update their content online, especially the regional ones. This is where the Specialized News Monitoring agencies can prove a vital source of information. So, Specialized News Monitoring needs to gain more stronghold in the business of Media and Media Intelligence.