Six Essentials for Media Monitoring Success

There are many ways you could choose to monitor the media. Thank you for choosing BurrellesLuce. Here’s a quick read on how you can make the most of our services and take advantage of the distinguishing characteristics that set us apart from the competition.

• A Comprehensive Source List
Ideally, you want a media monitoring service to have a vast source list that includes every reputable form of media
available. That is what we work from – the daily and non-daily papers across the country, magazines and trade journals, newsletters, radio and television broadcasts, electronic publications, Internet forums and 24 million blogs! That’s no typo. BurrellesLuce now reads 24 million blogs. Other media monitoring services limit their coverage to “business oriented” or “significant” blogs, but we know that there is no need to limit our source list when we can rely on our customized reading instructions to retrieve targeted news.

• Inclusion of Premium Content
Premium content on the Web is defined as any portion of a site or publication that requires a paid subscription before it can be viewed. Many media monitoring alternatives do not include premium sources. A significant percentage of our source list is available only through paid subscriptions. We pay for these subscriptions so that you can receive news from these sources as well as all of the free content sources on the Web.

• Search Terms that Set Parameters
There are all sorts of ways to limit a media monitoring account so that you won’t be inundated with irrelevant or redundant coverage….that is one of the beauties of having a media monitoring service do your looking for you. At BurrellesLuce, you can limit your reading instructions based upon circulation figures, geographic location, by syndication parameters or exclusions of your choice. And, you have an account manager assigned to you who can help you create a reading profile that will accommodate your monitoring needs.

• Dynamic Keywords
Search terms are an essential component of successful media monitoring. They need to include not only keywords that are properly spelled, but also the common misspelling of those same words and any abbreviations that are used in place of those words. What’s more, independent keywords are often not enough. Many times it is important to specify key term parameters or “in connection with(s)” so that irrelevant articles are not mistakenly retrieved. The success of our business depends on the accurate reflection of each client’s information needs as expressed through their key terms. That is why we take the time to discuss the set-up of keywords and why we encourage you to revise them whenever your information needs change.

• Flexible Delivery Methods
The delivery of press clippings was a non-issue in the past, but today clients have the freedom to choose how they want to receive their news coverage. If it is essential to your business that you receive your coverage on the day that it is printed or broadcast, you need our Express service. Even if you don’t need your news that quickly, you are now able to choose between electronic delivery and postal delivery. Many of our clients have converted to electronic delivery because this affords them a flexibility that other methods do not. Clips still look the same as always, complete with photos and graphics, but electronic delivery enables clients to easily sort and save their news in a very dynamic way giving them the freedom to organize their news coverage according to their changing information needs. What clients seem to like best of all is the ability to make clip books in minutes. It gives them the freedom to electronically store their clips and distribute coverage to colleagues with ease.

• Human Intelligence
This is another key component to successful media monitoring that is often overlooked. Many companies, in an effort to save money, have eliminated the editing process and so clients receive whatever is retrieved in an initial search. BurrellesLuce has carefully evaluated the importance of editing clips before sending them on to you. We have found that 80% of the clips that were initially retrieved through optical scanning, were eventually eliminated by our editors because the news did not match the intent of the search criteria. Discarding this kind of news before it is ever sent out is a huge timesaver for our clients and something we consider to be essential to quality media monitoring.

Every one of our clients has an account manager assigned to assist with all of the details that go into comprehensive and reliable media monitoring. If you would like to discuss ways to optimize your media monitoring service, please e-mail us at optimize@BurrellesLuce.com and ask to speak with your account manager.