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. 

This is a first in a semi-regular series called “We talk to vendors so you don’t have to.”* Often our clients ask us to vet PR related products and services such as media monitoring, metrics packages, and media research. This usually inlcudes listening to sales pitches or trying the services. So we thought it would be enlightening to bring readers reports from the front lines of PR and technology.

Recently, I was listening to a sales presentation from a media monitoring service. In the middle of presentation, the sales person mentions that the press clippings are hosted on servers of the monitoring service. This led to the following exchange:

Me: Can the client’s press clips be downloaded?
SalesGuy: No
Me: What happens to the press clips if the client terminates the service?
SG: Well, they will be very happy with our service. So I don’t think it will be an issue.
Me: That did not answer my question. Is there a way for the client to get its own clips?
SG: Well they can e-mail a copy of link of an individual clip.
Me: In other words, no.

This is a big downside of SaaS (software as a service). It is really important to make sure that any media monitoring service provides you with the ability to get hard copies. For example, some services do allow a download – typically to an Excel spread sheet. After all, it is your coverage and someone providing you a service should not be in a position to hold your coverage hostage.

* Yes, this is an adaptation of the name of the popular Valleywag “Twitter” tag.