Utah News Clips

Posts tagged with: news monitoring

(I'm so pleased to bring our readers this post by our Production Manager, Dave Kenison. Dave works with all our clients to ensure they get what they need, when they need it. You may reach Dave directly at dkenison@totalnewstracking.com)

 

Information is everywhere. Emails, texts, tweets, status updates, news alerts –and the list could go on. Never before have we been so connected and never before have we had such a wealth of information at our fingertips. Thanks to advances in news monitoring technology, companies can know who said what about them on any blog and any tweet—sometimes within minutes. This is great, right? Maybe.

If you are a senior-level decision maker at a large organization all of this information can add up to a lot of useless noise. Good information is what drives good decisions, but how do we cut through all that noise and get just the good information? Total News Tracking’s Executive Reports solve that problem. These reports deliver hand-selected, subject-specific news--providing context for important strategic decisions. Executive Reports help any organization remain agile in the ever-changing marketplace.

At this point in our information society, we're moving past just being able to access as much information as we want. The winners in competitive markets are now looking at only the information they need.

Ask yourself this:

1. What breaking news is mission critical to your organization?
2. What could you be doing to move your company forward if you didn't have to start each day cutting through all the information noise?
3. Is your competitor using our professional news editors to start their day before you?

Whether you are cutting through the information noise yourself, or outsourcing it to professional editors like ours, the problem of information overload is here. How deafening is the noise for you? If you need help answering these questions, or you know the answers and now need our help, let us know.  Your news is our business.

Editor's Note
[We often share kind words from our clients as testimonials on our website. However, as a highly respected PR professional, and user of Total News Tracking, Karen Boe shares specific solutions in the post below. We determined that "engagement" is truly about sharing solutions, rather than promotion, so we share Karen's application of our services with you. If you find a news monitoring or media analysis service you need, in Karen's words below, leave us a comment or give us a call. We always love talking shop. Karen is the President of Boe Marketing in Salt Lake City, Utah.]

Total News Tracking (formerly Utah News Clips) is a lifesaver for me in my public relations business. The service is professional, responsive and timely for all my immediate needs. Their new name so much better reflects the wide range of news and conversation tracking locally and nationally.

I traditionally just used them for my television and radio broadcast tracking and analysis, but have begun using the new Internet/Online/Social Media Monitoring tool, which helps me to better monitor the conversations for my clients. In addition, they now offer national press clipping services which can replace my Vocus service and their Media Analysis and Metrics modules help me to make sense of the value for each client. It's one my key client deliverables and Total News Tracking helps me to streamline and simplify the process.

As a user, I would recommend Total News Tracking to anyone needing to know what's being said about their company, where the stories are landing, and for solid reputation management.

Thanks, Karen! We've received a lot of compliments on the name change. More importantly, we're pleased to bring expanded services to our many clients

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!

Comments (2)

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.

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.

By now most have heard the biggest broadcast monitoring news in the last 35 years. The father of TV news monitoring, Video Monitoring Services, has file Chapter 7 bankruptcy. As they move to liquidate the assets of this once great company, all VMS clients are scrambling to find a service offering a similar balance of real-time reports, access to broadcast news segments, and true customer support.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, VMS did not close because of their service. Some competitors, obviously looking to grab clients by stepping on the grave of VMS, have eluded to a notion that VMS was out of touch. Just because they started the broadcast monitoring industry doesn't mean they fell behind in terms of tools, innovation, and attention to customer service. As of noon on 8/26/11, the time VMS closed forever, VMS had as powerful a set of client tools and remained focus on fulfilling every need of their clients. In fact, I stand by the notion that VMS was the company that every other broadcast monitor bench-marked themselves.

Yes, Utah News Clips has updated all their services over the past two years to compete with any national service available in the news monitoring space. Yes, Utah News Clips has been helping former VMS clients get on-board quickly so they have their news monitoring reports today. And yes, Utah News Clips sees innovation as the key to success. But as we look back on what happened to VMS I think it is important to see all that they did right. If it were not for the attention VMS gave to development, fulfillment, and customer service, they would not have been the "company to beat". In the end, it appears that a shift in management may have contributed to a loss of direction for VMS. Management structure is where we differ.

I own Utah News Clips. I am also an owner in Universal Information Services, a family business. Together these companies have lead our industry for over 20 years as innovators of news monitoring and analysis services. Our approach is very simple, we have built all the services our clients need, and the tools our competitors offer, but we also provide true customer service. True customer service is something you can't find in those who offer only an online platform for monitoring your news. Absent in the SaaS (software-as-a-service) companies is your immediate ability to reach a live person who knows your account, get on the spot training when you need it, and the ability to have someone to "just make it happen" if you're in a crisis management situation.

Today we will be working diligently to help those clients who no longer can use VMS. Our service team will continue to provide any callers with immediate attention and have their news flowing within 24 hours. We can do this because we know there are only two things that matter: Your ability to get the news you need and access to a vendor who can help you anytime you need it. Please call us if you need a company that works very much the way VMS did...and you need help now. (801) 463-0101

Utah News Clips is here to help with all your nationwide news monitoring and broadcast clip needs. We are here to help.

Comments (2)

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).

Comments (2)

To balance my prior posting (Top 3 Reasons To Attend Conferences #NewTools), and an important point on its own, I believe one should not make a career of attending conferences. Over the last three years we have observed the emergence of those who are on a quest to be the most well educated person working in the new media/social media space. This effort is great when balanced with effort and output. But, when one simply makes a career out of attending meetings and conferences without pausing to create and further the initiatives of their company or client, it is largely wasted time and money. Agency and corporate communications personnel are equally susceptible to this problem.

We’ll call these offenders “perpetual attendees”. You’ve seen them. They have been to all the hot meetings, have collected the free swag on their desks, and are able to rattle off names like Shankman, Scoble, Vaynerchuk, and Evan Williams like they are close friends.

The aforementioned guys are very likeable, knowledgeable, and have brought much to our evolving media landscape. But the relationships most have with them are no different than my friendship with Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway…The Oracle of Omaha. I’ve seen him several times, been at arms length to Mr. Buffett, but we don’t “know” each other. Am I better for seeing and hearing him talk on finance and investing, for sure. But I don’t see him speak every time he’s available. I gather nuggets of wisdom from Mr. Buffett, and then apply them to my business and personal efforts. Similarly, industry conferences and learning opportunities work to impart nuggets of information I can apply to helping my clients or colleagues.

So, when deciding if I should attend a conference, for me it comes down to common sense (#SameRules). Will I learn something new or be inspired in a way that will benefit news monitoring and media analysis service, my clients, or my work/life balance? Can I improve our press clipping or web monitoring service? Am I free for the dates of the conference without any other true obligations? If the answer is “No” to either of these questions, then I will skip the conference and catch a different one. Basically, am I going to learn something new AND use what I learn? If not, skip it. That’s the good thing about conferences; there are so many opportunities if you just look. See the links on my prior post for some good sources of meetings.

Leave your comments about your number one reason for skipping a conference. All theory and no application does nothing for your company or clients. If you’re not adding value in your position, there’s somebody out there who will.

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