I frequently get asked questions from clients about best practices for tracking press coverage.  Clients frequently get slick presentations from media monitoring vendors showing lots of pretty charts and graphs. Unfortunately, the  the underlying media monitoring for tech publications and blogs still is not as accurate as it needs to be, so the pictures turn out to be more eye candy than analysis. 

Recently, I received the following e-mail from a media monitoring company that we had previously terminated because it was missing too many press clips from clients’ main trade publications:

“We have doubled the amount of news sources we monitor since we worked with you last year.”

The proliferation of blogs and publications means that media monitoring companies need to be constantly adding publications to the list that they track and report on.  However, the number of publications has not come close to doubling in the last year. So this means that the media monitoring service was not finding a huge amount of publications. Unfortunately, this was an expensive lesson that we already had learned.

So how do media monitoring companies go about adding news sources? A large proportion of these missing publications are brought to their attention by their paying customers who follow the trade publications in their verticals, and notice that their clips are missing from their monitoring reports. Customers receive no compensation for fixing mistakes. Actually, they are paying for the privilege.

The market leading monitoring service is Google Alerts, a free service which has very basic functionality. Of course, in cyberspace, it is good to be Google. The same Google spiders that are used in the search side of the business also contribute to Google Alert results. This also means that Google is not charging customers to build out its service. 

Written by Rob Adler

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Tags: Google Alert, media monitoring, press clips

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 17th, 2008 at 9:15 am and is filed under Vantage Communications, We talk to vendors so you don't have to. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.