Utah News Clips

Posts for News Monitoring Tools

How many times have you heard the phrase, "They talk the talk, but can they walk the walk?" In the news monitoring industry we've seen many newcomers enter the space with a lot to say, and many sales people saying it. Usually, the pitch purports to do something at a lower cost, allowing you to do it yourself, or providing some automated function designed to make the job of the public relations professional easier.

All three of these service differentiators are great prospects to a news monitoring or media analysis client. In the end, users must ask themselves if they truly feel the new vendor can deliver what they promise...can they "walk the walk"?

At Total News Tracking we counsel clients with honest and direct solutions, regardless of which vendor they choose. Call this part of our "Good Karma" marketing. This post provides three easy steps to help news monitoring and media analysis users separate the talkers from the walkers.

1. Don't let the price of one component of your news monitoring needs distract you from the total cost. Just like cable companies, wireless providers, and telecom services have learned, bundled media monitoring services can hide your true costs. Look at YOUR user patterns, then decide which vendor has the best overall service for you. You can save on tracking, only to get slammed with the cost of clips.
2. Serving yourself can seem like a real treat, but...! If you're like most PR professionals and corporate communicators, you haven't found a hidden cache of extra hours in your day. This is a brutal reality. Do you really have the time to filter your results, preview broadcast clips, and create the tightly edited clips you need? What about creating filtered reports and measurement reports for your team? Make sure your vendor can do these things for you if needed.
3. Be sure "automatic" is helpful to you, and not more harmful. With most news monitors now having computer assisted monitoring and similar portals, be aware of the vendor promise that automates tasks that only trained people can do well. For example, if you need real media measurement and metrics, don't let automated metrics thrown in at no cost drive your decision. Human analysts can analyze media to a 93% accuracy rate, automated analysis averages only a 55% accuracy rate.

Before signing on the line with any vendor, check their references and have them provide a complete proof of service. If they can only show you "some" of what they'll ultimately deliver to you, ask them why. No user, in any industry, should be afraid to make their vendors walk the walk before buying their talk.

Leave your comment with any other tips you have for checking the "walk" against the "talk". Thanks!

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The art of saying, "Thank you". Yes, that is the tip. At the end of each year the public relations and advertising industry explodes with predictions for the coming year. Many of these top X lists speak to utilizing the latest tools for social media, or embracing internal content to drive your communication efforts. These ideas are all good ideas as content is truly king, and the social media tools are great for amplifying your messages. For a nice example of top 2012 lists, check out this post from PRSAY (PRSA). In the end, this short post focuses on the #1 thing you can do to enhance your public relations and media relations.

This is a fundamental observation from #TheNewsTracks, it is the art of the "Thank You". Yes, providing a real "thank you" is just good business. Whether serving clients, or working with the media across any channel, showing your appreciation reinforces a relationship and helps ensure that relationship can grow.

At Utah News Clips we provided a bit of a tongue-in-cheek play on saying thank you. The real focus of this year should be on those you appreciate, so we tried to capture that in our email campaign to clients. Offering to buy our clients and friends a cup of cocoa or coffee seemed like a friendly way to say thank you.

Our news monitoring and media analysis clients are attracted to Utah News Clips because of our culture, the fact we enjoy what we do, but most of all, because we appreciate working for them. Oddly enough, the aforementioned qualities are the most often heard reasons our new clients cite for leaving their prior vendors. So if you're going to do one thing in 2012, or even here at the end of 2011, tell those you appreciate, "Thank you".  Seriously, I thank you for reading my posts this year and truly look forward to helping you and your clients in 2012. Cheers!

Any public relations planning for 2012 should center around goals and objectives. With goals and objectives in place, the tools by which you gauge your success or failure can be more important than some might think. Fundamentally, if you're not comprehensively evaluating your media exposure, or shall we say not seeing what all is out there, you can get a very skewed view of your efforts.

With 2012 only a month away, we're hearing from many clients, and prospective clients, about their needs for this coming year. Yes, Utah News Clips has all the same online news monitoring tools for releasing, tracking, and analyzing your exposure as our competitors, but we're one of only a couple of companies that still dedicate account managers to help you in times of need (or even with simple questions).

Yes, it has been a year with many changes in the news monitoring industry. The primary takeaway for the clients we've been talking to is that the most vocal competitors are not living up to their promises when it comes to depth of coverage and quality of results. For this reason we wanted to get a short "planning" post out to help organizations plan for 2012. Our two step process greatly simplifies the decisions that will go into your PR efforts, and reveals the two primary questions you should ask yourself when preparing for the coming year.

1. Do you need to justify your PR efforts to your organization or client?
2. Are you spending your own time trying to piece together tracking results from free and paid sources?

If you answered yes to the first question, then monitoring the news and media is imperative. It's not a question of if you will do it, but what vendor will give you the best service to gauge the success of your efforts.

If you answered yes to the second question, then a quick cost analysis can help reveal to you how your time could be spent more cost effectively...attending to mission critical activities. Most of our clients were not hired to manage, filter, and copy/paste stories from google news, twitter, and other disparate tools. If you were hired to do this work, congratulations on landing a sweet job to surf the web. If not, you need our help.

As we re-brand our company to better reflect our national reach, it's important for any company to ensure that the client's needs are being met. Our mission isn't to simply meet your expectations, we work hard to surpass your expectations. In short, what we give our clients is far greater depth of news and media coverage, more exacting media placement results, a much higher quality of audio and video, and a true customer service experience. 24/7, nights and weekends, our team is available to help our clients. If you're not seeing this level of service from your current vendor, let's talk before 2012. If you feel you want more from your news monitoring service, whether it is Utah News Clips or another company, let's talk. We're always listening, so please leave your comments.

Interestingly, this blog post started out as an experiment to find out how engaging location-based mobile platforms truly are. Many people won't deny that they've either not heard of Foursquare, or have heard of it and asked, "But why?" Like all #newtools in the social media world, or any new tool for that matter, adoption only occurs if the question of "Why?" can be answered. Why participate in Foursquare? Why would I want to take the time, effort, or bother checking in as I travel about my day?

I've tested/played/worked Foursquare for about six months now, and my basic summation is that Foursquare does not suck. I know I've only scratched the surface of what circumstances and environments are right for location based social tools like this, but here's what I can share.

First, Foursquare seems to work best when your community, or your friends, operate on a level playing field. If for example you spend most of your days at a desk in an office, but the rest of your friends or family are mobile and moving throughout the greater environment, you will never score well. You may become Mayor of your office, or even your cubicle, but you'll never have the points you get from checking in and a variety of places. Besides, there's just not enough engagement in this scenario to make it worthwhile if you don't go anywhere.

Second, Foursquare is awesome for close groups of friends or families. When you mix the game theory with the ability to comment and post pictures, your result is a somewhat competitive platform that engages the group. I enlisted my family (2 kids, a wife, plus me). We now scramble to check-in from our smartphones, or iPOD Touch in the case of my daughter, to see who can maximize their points. You soon learn the strategy to maybe be the second person to check in and garner those additional points because your "BFF" is there. I know, kind of corny, but so is Karaoke and that's hugely popular.

Finally, Foursquare is great for business to consumer location based check-in and event check-in. Restaurants, soccer fields, movie theaters, grocery stores, office buildings, concerts are all among places you can check in. If you don't see it, add it based on the GPS location of the space you want to add. There are obvious marketing benefits to what you add and how you name it, not to mention the tips you might post...or hopefully your visitors post. Offering discounts and consumer generated recommendations are very good reasons to try Foursquare, but probably not compelling enough to be the only reason to try it.

Where I think Foursquare fails, simply because of the model and not their platform, is that it offers very little in the way of business to business engagement. I have a hard time applying the location-based game platform to a B2B model, but maybe someone can suggest ideas and leave them in the comments below. Still, at a simple level, it has provided an engaging platform that my whole family can participate in no matter where we are. I even enabled my Android phone as a 3G mobile hot spot with Verizon so my 10 year old daughter can play when there's not wi-fi in the wild for her.

Ultimately, many find a "who cares" factor kicks in after using Foursquare. Of those informally polled, about 50% said they were no longer checking in. I also believe that the over saturation of "daily deals" makes the deals provided by Foursquare less compelling. For me, I enjoy it. When visiting a new city it is nice to push for a all time high score as you visit new points.

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With Groupon and LivingSocial the behemoths in the geospecific advertising world, and more niche deal sources coming on line every day, are we getting too much of a good thing? Utah News Clips helps track and analyze advertizing and news. The question of ROI, especially in the social media realm, is always foremost on the minds of our subscribers.

As a guest blogger for The Daily Cowbell I explored the problem of daily deal overload. My opinion on the matter likens the situation to that of news saturation. To much information makes it difficult for the consumer to to discern between the options, and therefore they tune out. News or discounts, over-amplification of "the message" creates noise...much like when you turn your sound system up to 11.

Visit the Daily Cowbell and tell me what you think. Too many deals, not enough, or just right?

Next topic: Foursquare for the Family-increasing utilization by involving the whole gang.

Welcome to our first ravings related to news, information consumption, social media, tools of dissemination, and how all this is impacted by Human Nature. Universal Information Services has created this blog to illuminate ideas related to the intersection of communication fundamentals and new channels of information distribution. Basically, our media analysis and position as a news monitoring service has led us to the conclusion that the fundamental rules of public relations communications has not changed, only the tools we have at our disposal are new (#SameRules #NewTools).

We’ve even chosen to hash tag these two phrases to underscore the importance that social media has on media engagement, media placement, and public perception. It is true, social media has greatly enhanced our methods of communication. But be careful, professional communication by any mode has not fundamentally changed. Therefore our blog will feature postings related to two areas of public relations and communications. We'll also focus on issues related to news monitoring, media analysis, social network influence. From press clipping to TV news clips to web monitoring, our broad spectrum of news monitoring and media analysis experience opens a wide door for discussion.

First, the fundamentals of writing style and the need for compelling content are not new. If you can’t write, spell, structure a sentence, or convey compelling ideas, it does not matter what channel you use to communicate, your audience will remain small and ephemeral. The same basic rules of communication survive today and are only slightly modified to match each medium (print, broadcast, web, social).

Second, how you harness the enormous power of the new tools like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Foursquare is a testament to your ability to apply your skills across the #NewTools. You should be thinking “in addition to” rather than “instead of”. Human nature, as well as common sense, dictates that one should meet their target audience through whatever communication tool they prefer. For this reason all of us need to stop referring to social media as something outside of mainstream media. Never has a new medium supplanted an older medium. Newspapers did not kill discussion, radio did not kill newspapers, television did not kill radio, the Web did not kill television, and social media will not kill any of the aforementioned mediums. The communication pie only expands while dividing into smaller pieces for each medium…growth instead of replacement.

I’m sure some will hold on to the false notion that there has been a complete shift in the communication paradigm. I hope to receive comments that the world has changed as we know it and we will forever be changed. These comments will help prove that no matter what our technical mode of discourse may be, human nature controls how we communicate…and that is fundamentally unchanged.

I am not a writer. You will see an overabundance of commas in my postings and I may not always structure my sentences correctly. Yes, you may correct me if you want, but in the end it is the ideas I’m hoping to spark interest with, not my writing prowess.

#SameRules #NewTools represents an extension of the media research we do here at Universal. This blog is for the “engaged community”. This does not mean only those who are social media savvy, but anyone who understands that humans create content and humans consume information. Those who fail to consider human nature when creating tools are doomed to repeat history by creating solutions that are DOA. There will be little acceptance of their #NewTool because they have chosen to ignore the importance of the #SameRules.

Future topics include: Niche content and The Long Tail, The Importance of Compelling Content, and an answer to the “Who Cares” question (ROI).

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