Utah News Clips

Posts tagged with: media monitoring

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.

Looking back over the past week I see a couple lessons to be learned from the bankruptcy of VMS. Many things will be said by competitors, and some past employees, but here are my takeaways.

First, the Video Monitoring Services team, VMS employees caught in the bankruptcy, are great people. I'm glad to see quality services like cision hiring some of these employees. Soon we hope to also be working with former VMS staff. These people were clearly dedicated to their jobs and serving their clients.

Second, don't believe all that you read...especially in advertising. Whether a blog or an ad, some lofty claims are being made. Phrases like "biggest", "best", and "only" are hollow terms that don't tell you a thing about the level of service and support you can expect from a news monitoring service. I encourage you to speak with Amber Smith in our office, but also do your homework. What vendor is best situated to provide the service and support you need? Technology is a tool, the people serving you can make the difference.

Finally, if you are a former VMS client the best thing you can do is interview prospective monitors. If you are a local or regional organization, there is undoubtedly a monitoring service better located to serve your needs. Local and regional monitors know what news is important to you. They know your city, state, issues, problems, etc. Our news data service has 40 offices ready to customize and serve your needs.

Use the wonderful search of Google to locate news monitoring services that may be better positioned to provide what you need. Yes, I think Utah News Clips is one of the best news monitors in the world. I would not be able to fake passion for what I do if I did not truly believe in the team I work with and the client missions we serve. We make your news our business...period.

Please let me know your thoughts, or share your experiences. Communication is what we do.

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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The conference season has been in full swing over the past 30 days, as if it ever really slows down, and we have three great reasons you should make conference attendance a regular part of your business and new media education.

First, if you at all have a passion for your job or what you are pursuing, then continuing education must be a part of that path you follow to success. Nearly every industry, and variation within industries, has some form of a meeting where you can learn new tricks, rub elbows with peers, and hear from experts in your field. My news monitoring and media analysis industry has no less than five opportunities per year. I can attend PRSA, IABC, NDS, and even Rotary conferences...and many others. All of these opportunities allow you to further yourself in your position. Whether CEO or intern, gaining new perspectives is an essential part of fully realizing your potential. Here are a few resources I use to find helpful conferences in my areas of interest.

http://mashable.com/category/events/

http://www.prsa.org/Conferences/

http://www.bigomaha.com/ (don’t let the name fool you, this may be the most important conference you ever attend)

Second, if your success depends on your own creativity, then attending industry meetings and conferences allows you to get outside of your own head. At Universal Information Services my primary role is to envision, create, and deploy new services for our clients. I have implemented all of Universal’s TV and Radio monitoring, media analysis, and web monitoring services…but only through the insight I’ve gained from my pears throughout the industry. Developing services in a vacuum can be a dangerous path to believing all that you dream up is of great value to others. Interacting with competitive and cooperative peers exposes you to ideas that help keep your own mind in check and accelerates your own development.

Third, the ability to connect the dots may be the greatest benefit to attending conferences. I refer to connecting the dots as the ability to hear new ideas at meetings and conferences, but hearing them in a way that connects with a seemingly unrelated concept you may have rattling around in your head. This is critical to innovation. I use The Action Method, developed by Scott Belsky’s mind at Behance, to help me manage my ideas and visions This should be mandatory training for anyone with a creative thought.

Leave your comments on what conferences you have found the most beneficial. I’m always looking for better ways to get outside my head and connect the dots. Many of these fun ideas are found in our new site.

Next post: Number 1 Reason to Skip A Conference