Posts Tagged ‘iMonitor’


Are You Asking the Right Questions?

Friday, September 18th, 2009
http://www.flickr.com/photos/oberazzi/318947873/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/oberazzi

Valerie Simon

 “You know, it’s amazing what you can learn when you listen” my mom said. I put down my Blackberry and looked up. “You just need to ask the right questions.”

“For example, the other day I was at the hairdresser. I asked the owner how the recession was impacting his business. I ask that question a lot. He told me that although yes, some clients were scheduling less frequent appointments, his business was actually growing. The reason? Many of the women who used to get their hair done in New York City, are now coming to his (New Providence, New Jersey) salon, since he is a lot more affordable than those places in New York. And they are good…”

My mom continued to tell me about her fantastic hairdresser, but I had stopped listening (and, yes, I see the irony). But I was stuck on that first line…”It’s amazing what you can learn when you listen… You just need to ask the right questions.”

BurrellesLuce clients understand the value of listening. They recognize the importance of understanding what is being said about them in the media. But with an ever expanding media landscape, it can be a challenge to get your arms around all the chatter and identify what coverage is important to you. As my mom said, in order to hear what’s important, you need to know the questions to ask. In the news monitoring business, we call it “setting up a profile” or “crafting the right search terms.”

 We invest time, effort, and expertise, working with clients to make sure that they are able to “hear” all of the news coverage that’s meaningful to them. It’s a challenge: if your question is too broad, you’ll waste time and possibly even miss what’s really important. Of course, if you neglect to ask the right questions, you’ll miss important information as well. Asking the right questions that will generate meaningful responses is an art.

Have you thought lately about what news you are monitoring? Are you “asking the right questions” about your brand, your competitors, and the industry? What are your biggest challenges in learning about the media that matters? 

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Posted in Media Monitoring, Public Relations | 3 Comments »

Connecting with Clients through Social Media

Friday, April 24th, 2009

Connect with clients through social mediaby Cathy Del Colle*
After reading the title of the blog post from Graham Charlton, “The Power of Social Media for Customer Service,” I couldn’t agree more.  At BurrellesLuce, we’ve found that it’s essential to be active where our customers are active. And social media is booming right now.

When you log on to Twitter, their home page states “What is Twitter? Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”  This is terrific!

When potential customers have posted a comment about which media monitoring company people are using, we read it and respond. When a current client has a question or concern, we make sure that the client is contacted by the account manager that currently handles their account. As Graham Charlton stated in his blog “Responding in public to such customer complaints requires some tact and good judgment, but when done well like this it can be a big win for a company in terms of positive PR. It also emphasizes the value of monitoring what is being said about your brand online so you can respond when necessary.”

It doesn’t matter what social media source you choose to monitor, it’s important to just get started. I can say from experience that the benefits will come shortly after your first post!

*Bio: During my 22 years with BurrellesLuce I’ve heard and seen a lot in the way of media monitoring and measurement. I originally started as a sales associate specializing in fashion and higher education. Now, I am the SVP of client services. Over the years I’ve developed a close relationship with many PR and marketing professionals. When I worked in the nation’s capital, I sat on the board of Washington Women in Public Relations, where I also served as membership coordinator and, in 1995, as president. Today, I remain an honorary member of that organization. I continue to enjoy meeting with clients and assisting them in any way. LinkedIn: cdelcolle; Twitter: @BurrellesLuce; Facebook: BurrellesLuce

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Posted in Client Services, Public Relations, Social Media | No Comments »

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

Steve Shannon
The Empire Strikes BackMark it down in your calendars, PR pros: Monday April 6th is when news media publishers said “enough is enough” with the turmoil shaking their industry and begun to strike back. The pronouncement came at the annual meeting of the Associated Press, a consortium owned by newspapers and other publishers. The course of action?  “… an aggressive effort to track down copyright violators.”

If you’ve read my previous posts, here, here and here, you knew this day was coming. What does it mean for PR professionals? Simply, be careful how you use copyrighted material. A handy primer is the BurrellesLuce white paper, Copyright Compliance: What Every Media Relations Professional Needs to Know, that covers the subject. 

Expect to see the AP pick on some small fry first such as a blogger or two. But beware, a “poster child” big fish may be in the offing as well, to set an example, and get everyone in the land paying attention to copyright and news material, much as the recording and movie industries have done in the past. Don’t forget that the SIIA, another organization where news publishers are heavily involved, brought Knowledge Networks to a $300,000 settlement for violating copyright on both printed and digital news content. That was a fraction of what they could have won in court as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act calls for penalties as high as $50,000 per occurrence.  Remember that cutting and pasting ten entire articles into a clip report is ten occurrences and a potential $500,000 fine.

Of course, BurrellesLuce clients can sleep easy through this latest development.  They know that our small copyright compliance royalty covers them for the internal use of our digitized print clips (under agreement with the AP and thousands of publishers), and that the links and best passages supplied in our BurrellesLuce iMonitor service are copyright compliant (and have no royalty charge either).

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Posted in Copyright, Industry Events, Media Industry, Public Relations, Technology | No Comments »

Social Media Marketing

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

Valerie Simon

I recently read a blog post about the cost of social media marketing, “Please stop saying social media marketing is free.” The post points out that while blogging, Twitter, Facebook, viral movies and webinars are often perceived as free or extremely cheap methods of marketing, the time spent on effective social media marketing can turn it into your largest marketing expense.

With leaner staffs, smaller budgets, and greater expectations from the C-suite, public relations professionals are under increasing pressure to do more with less. Trying to determine where to cut corners is never easy; sometimes the “free” solution can be the most costly.

That’s true when it comes to monitoring and measuring your media relations results, too. With an ever-expanding media universe, understanding and managing your coverage can be an incredibly challenging and time-consuming process. We recently launched BurrellesLuce iMonitor, a self-search option designed to provide PR practitioners an affordable means of monitoring their media coverage. There are no per clip charges and the solution is copyright compliant. 

iMonitor is getting rave reviews (Check out this one from SEO ShootOut) probably because BurrellesLuce captures more free and subscription news websites than anyone (including blogs, social media, and global sources), and the BurrellesLuce 2.0 portal was developed to help public relations specialists quickly and easily manage media coverage. There’s more in this white paper.

It has been fun showing clients the iMonitor difference and exciting to offer a real solution that can help them to do their job more efficiently and effectively, without breaking the budget!

What are you doing to manage smartly in this down economy?

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Posted in Advertising/Marketing, Media Outreach, Media Relations, News Coverage, Public Relations, Social Media | No Comments »

Making the Most of Boolean

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

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Valerie Simon

As media continues to expand, identifying the particular coverage that is relevant to your needs becomes increasingly complex. While our clients always emphasize the importance of comprehensiveness, they don’t have time to waste reviewing undesirable clips. In fact, many clients select BurrellesLuce pre-edited searches (completed by human editors) because of what we don’t send.

BurrellesLuce iMonitor, our new Internet self search, is our first unedited monitoring tool.  It is fast, flexible and comprehensive – just type in a few keywords and voila! – in just moments the results appear. It’s no wonder iMonitor has been so well received by our clients! Since it is an unedited service, however, it is critical that users take a moment to become educated on how to create searches.

iMonitor offers three different methods for searching media: a simple search; an advanced search; or a Boolean search. I rarely use the simple search, but if you are searching for a very unique name, a simple search can be a quick and effective way to capture your results.

The advanced search allows you to be a bit more specific, guiding you to craft your profile using fields such as “all of these words,” “any of these words,” “exclude these words,” and more. The advanced search also allows you to limit your search to specific time periods.

For the most precise and flexible searching, I encourage you to use Boolean logic. There are four main Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT and NEAR) to connect your keywords, as well as punctuation marks that will allow you to build extremely specific, structured and organized searches. A few tips creating Boolean searches:

  • An asterisk*  is a great time saver; by adding an asterisk after the stem of the word, you won’t have to spend time creating long OR statements and having to think of every way a word could be expressed.
  • Using quotation marks will assure that you only receive the exact phrase within the quotes. Unlike the “exact phrase” field in the advanced search box, using the Boolean search feature, you could include multiple exact phrases. This can be extremely helpful narrowing down your search.
  • Using parentheses will allow you to group words and operators in the search string. This is especially useful if you have several operators, or a particularly lengthy search. Just as in a mathematical equation, parentheses will define the order in which instructions are applied.

So before setting up a search, spend some time considering your goals. Get as specific as possible. After you have run your search, scrutinize the results and hone your search. A new guide to help you create more effective searches, including some Boolean techniques and some of the most helpful Boolean Search Operators, will be available on BurrellesLuce.com shortly, so check back soon!

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Posted in Media Monitoring, News Coverage, Public Relations, Technology | No Comments »

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