After Google Alerts: Shall we go for a Professional or Free Monitoring Tool?

April 10, 2013 by Leave a comment

google-alerts

After the announcement of the closing of Google Reader, some online rumors show Google Alerts as the next project to be closed by the Search Engine Company.

In the Communication environment, Google Alerts is widely used so, what would we do if this tool disappears? We will have a bunch of options, that’s sure, but before we take a decision about a new tool, in this uncertain scenario we can take the time to wonder which are the real needs we have regarding monitoring. Do we need just a free monitoring service or we must go for a professional monitoring tool?

Don’t get us wrong, we do not want to talk badly about the free monitoring tools, which fulfils the news of a large number of users (for example, Kim Kardashian is happy with this type of service :) ) . The aim is to help you identify the real needs in terms of your brand and market monitoring.

What subjects do we want to monitor?

For example, if we want to follow our brand mentions, and it does not use day-to-day words (Example of brands which have day-to-day words: Orange, Sky, New Look, etc) and we are not facing a large amount of mentions, a free monitoring service can be enough and very useful. However, if you want to keep track of your competition, or the main topics of your sector, you might find yourself with a big amount of information which is not easy to digest. In this case, a Professional Monitoring Solution is the best choice: we can follow-up exact-matching expressions (sensitive to capital letters, for example), test with similar words, exclude certain expressions, and also filter by geographic, topic, media type,… Thus, these different filters allow you define a very precise monitoring systems that match exactly your requirements and reduce the “noise” in your results.

Which channels do you want to monitor your keywords in?

Most free tools are specialists on a particular media type (Example: Google Alerts on Google News and Blogs, Hootsuite on Twitter,…). If you want to monitor the same keywords on different channels at once (media, blogs, social networks), the best way to do it is by using several tools to obtain relevant results in each channel. That also means diverse sources of information which result on a high risk of fragmented information and duplicated publications in all the sources. That makes the consolidation of your monitoring a complex task.

How deep is the analysis you want to make?

Analysis is the goal of a monitoring process. When following several expressions, it’s handy to have a dashboard that summarizes the results of your monitoring which gives you a quick and easy view of your activity (the beginning of a news viralization, etc…). In goal-oriented companies where the data is a basic source for taking decisions, it’s smart to have a quick generation of different types or reports (your own reputation, competitors, ROI of your communication efforts, etc)

How do you want to share your results?

When having a small number of your monitoring results, it’s easy to share the publications and articles about your brand to your stakeholders. On the other hand, if your monitoring results are composed of a large number of items, compiling them and manually send them to your clients, colleagues or investors become a tedious job. Professional monitoring solutions offer numerous possibilities regarding this matter: You can easily program automatic newsletters the days and hours it’s more interesting for you. There are also different formats of newsletters, online magazines which can be dynamically shared.

What is the level of quality of service you need?

The rumor about the closing of Google Alerts should make us reflect: free monitoring services may dramatically change their features or simply stop providing their services at any time. If monitoring is a strategic action in your business, you should switch to a professional solution that offers a customer service and constant monitoring. Moreover, professional monitoring solutions evolve according to customer needs.

Free and professional monitoring solutions have their advantages and disadvantages and respond to different needs. That is why you should clearly define our goals and needs of your monitoring strategy before taking the decision.

So, If Google Alerts disappears tomorrow, what would you do?

Question

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New journalistic practises : a high-tech job ?

December 13, 2012 by Leave a comment

On Dec 10th, and as every year since its creation, SciencesPo’s School of Journalism organised a conference on the new journalistic practises (#npdj12).

Sciences Po's Conference on the new practises of Journalism in 2012

The viability of media companies was central to many of the presentations and it doesn’t take much magic to guess that the Internet is the main catalyst for it. However, some of the suggest development avenues were probably a surprise for many and very intellectually stimulating. I will try to summarise 3 broad areas :

  • Tech: If there’s one point all speakers agree on, it’s the evolution of journalism towards more diverse and advanced technologies. Whether you look at the Huffington Post and its multilingual, multi-country CMS or at Buzzfeed, its 5 full-time developers (for a total staff of 75) and its highly elaborate and internally developed Web Analytics tools, new media are all resorting to elaborate technology in order to optimise their content production.

    Mark Hansen, presented a striking example of visualisation of the propagation of New York Times articles through various social media in order to understand factors of virality. According to Hansen, journalists, better trained into data capture technologies could bring a lot to the interpretation and analysis of Big Data. The use of publicly accessible data is also at the heart of The Texas Tribune‘s brand and 60% of the site’s articles provide viewers with dynamic, customisable graphs as well as the raw data used to calculated them.

    And the one tech evolution to take notice of is mobile publishing. Contrarily to TV and other traditional channels, for which the percentage of media spend closely follows the percentage of time spent by the public, traditional newspapers and mobile media sites stand at opposite ends of the time/investment spectrum. In spite of its well documented decline, newspaper advertising still outweighs the share of attention these media receive today. Whereas ad sped on mobile is still far below what it could be in the light of the time mobile users spend consuming information on Smartphones and tablets. The inevitable game of communicating vessels budgets therefore encourages the media to publish their articles on mobile platforms a.s.a.p., notably through the use of responsive design, a web technology allowing the display of information on a page to automatically adapt to the size of the navigator / screen on which it is being viewed. At the Washington Post, two full-time jobs are dedicated to mobile publishing and that department will likely grow in the future.

  • Going visual: As noted by Michael Downing, the Web, since its origins, has been built around printed media paradigms (text pages, banner ads …) whereas the public at large is more interested in brief and interactive experiences (particularly on mobile, I would add). This probably explains why the monetization opportunities of a 5-10 paragraph article are limited (by ad rates of a few dollars/CPM) which makes the economic model of online news companies extremely fragile. In contrast, monetization of short videos is 6 to 10 times superior!

    Big Data lends itself remarkably well to the most audacious and attractive graphical representations. The rise of infographics is one illustration, but it is necessary to see beyond these to stand out.

    A man flying on a fire extinguisher in the tube

    Buzzfeed, a fast-growing pure-player online information company is championing a form of visual storytelling particularly suited to media: animated GIFs. This 25 year-old graphic format received a boost in 1995 the Netscape navigator added automatic looping to its rendering of these animated pictures. And 2012 was definitely the year of the animated GIF which, for the first time made the homepage of prestigious publications such as The Guardian and The New York Times. The media’s recent interest for the format derives from its ability to present in brief sequences the essence of an action or an event. The ever repeating images tell much more of a story than a still while at the same time presenting the facts in a much more focused and condensed manner than a whole video. Scott Lamb strongly encourages journalists to learn to create and use these files in their work.

  • The role of social media in information propagation: According to Joshua Benton, on 48% of traffic to New York Times articles originates on the site’s homepage. This proportion falls to 12% for The Atlantic and to 6% for Benton’s Nieman Lab. An increasingly large portion of the public is discovering news and other forms of content via social media. Google still reigns king of traffic providers in many cases but media organisations that are prospering online focus more on the sharing of their content online than on any other visibility factor. Page views isn’t even a metric on Buzzfeed’s analytics dashboard! Virality takes precedence over all other goals. All the more so because the site’s business model relies on this sharing not only of published articles but also of advertisements (mainly stories sponsored by large brands)!

     

    Analysing social sharing in various social media

    The most ‘liked’ content (which can range from a lolcat picture page to the analysis of a political discourse) is dissected, as are the social accounts at the origin of viral trend and all other factors playing a role in enhanced sharing. On the Huffington Post, social sharing modules occupy the right margin, using-up almost as much space as content itself.

These broad tendencies are just 3 among many others (live video, the will of large media to globalize their audience, adaptive content taking into account the visitor’s navigation history …) Lessons for the media and budding journalists are plenty, but one in particular really drives the point home for me: Stéphane Distinguin urges journalists to become decathletes rather than sprinters, by which he means to broaden the range of their abilities (photography, video shooting and editing, programming, data analysis …), and to scan the environment in search of untapped niches such as hyper-local information.

So, where does this leave PR pros? What should they take home from this day? Evidently, providing rich content (pictures, videos, slide shows …) has become essential to be notices. But I also think that they should follow closely the propagation, on social media, of their own releases and of the articles written about them, a practise that seems very seldom a priority in the industry. Obviously, this can be a chore but media monitoring is there to help.

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7 indispensable features of a PR monitoring platform

July 16, 2012 by 1 Comment

With the rising importance for corporations of understanding Internet conversations, monitoring platforms seem to be sprouting from nowhere every week-end. And with prices ranging from nil to 6 figures and feature sets tailored for many different use cases, it has become almost impossible to compare offerings directly.

Here are 7 essential features you’ll want to look for if your monitoring is PR and reputation management oriented.

Defining clean reading-lists

When watching out for crisis-alerts, it is a good idea to include as many significant sources as possible in your data: picking up a criticism from a small blog before a larger one amplifies it will prove invaluable to crisis management.

But if you’re monitoring competition or launching a niche product, more sources will simply mean more noise and less ability to analyze your coverage in meaningful ways (share of discussion, sentiment analysis by humans …)

Clean reading-lists are essential to media monitoring

Depending on your usage scenario, you need to be able to tailor your reading lists very accurately.

Staying flexible

  • One product today, three tomorrow.
  • Four competitors today, six tomorrow.
  • New technology, new regulations, new blogs, new buzzwords.

How easy is it for you to adapt to these changes? A monitoring plan optimized for January may look pretty outdated in July. Can you easily add or remove sources and keyphrases to your monitoring?

Mixing it up

Twitter delivers news (and rumours). Fast. Facebook provides recommendation. Good blogs are niche lighthouses. But don’t count traditional media out just yet.

While there is great value in social media monitoring, it cannot be your only source of information for PR and reputation management. According to Edelman’s 2012 Trust Barometer, traditional media are still, by a safe margin, the most influent source of information when it comes to trust.

Traditional media are still influent for reputation management

The ability to mix data from online and social monitoring and traditional offline clipping into a consistent feed is essential to analyse and understand along what paths news about your company circulate, which source is more influent and to be sure you are not missing out on anything important.

Blocking out the noise

What do SERPs look like for your company name, CEO, brand, products, competitors, technology (…)?

Hopefully, you own the first lines or pages of results, but beneath these are plenty of other pages unrelated to your brand and which are all likely to place news in your unfiltered monitoring feed.

For Augure, noise sources (from our point of view ;) ) are many : atmospheric metal music (yes, that exists), world of warcraft guilds, organist fan clubs, photography exhibitions, magic tricks … plus a constant slew of good and bad omens (Augure means omen, in French) in all types of activities, from business to arts. All of these use the term Augure so a simple keyword based monitoring feed would probably contain 80% of noise.

Noise hurts the efficiency of media monitoring

It’s important. Noise will lower your confidence in monitoring results and lower your focus. More importantly, it will make all analysis impossible and crisis detection very unreliable.

Your ability to add that double glazing to your monitoring windows, with far more than single word exclusions to deal with noise, is critical to the success of your monitoring goals.

Striving to qualify

What good is a list of clips and mentions to your management?

Qualified data makes efficient analysis and reporting possible. A monitoring platform that provides information such as author influence, theme, audience metrics, source type, (…) not only lets you refine your monitoring plan and reduce noise but also helps integration with your engagement platform and its reporting module.

Management usually prefer strategic insights and ROI evaluations to a bunch of URLs or paper clips. Do you qualify?

Finding your target

Most monitoring companies focus on specific areas of the world, which makes perfect sense (unfortunately, not all are perfectly clear about it).

Our focus is on France (6000 fully crawled sources), the UK and Southern Europe. Plus quite a few Spanish-speaking countries (our technology originated in Spain). Which doesn’t mean we don’t monitor the US or China, but our main focus what I just described.

Does your monitoring platform match your target ?

Whenever choosing a monitoring platform, be sure to check whether it covers your area extensively. Products from one continent may not be ideally suited for another.

Seeing beyond RSS

Most entry-level offerings – but also some more expensive and well-known platforms – rely exclusively on RSS feeds as their source of data. RSS feeds are a standardized output format from websites and blogs so tapping into them is extremely easy. In fact, you can build yourself a very similar monitoring rig using only a free RSS reader with search or filtering capabilities and cherry picking your sources.

But there are a number of problems with this approach.

First of all not all websites have RSS feeds. They’re a distinct minority but some of them are important and RSS-only will miss anything published by their website.

More often, a website will have separate sections and a specialized article might be published in a dedicated area with – or without – a dedicated RSS feed. Monitoring all the feeds from the website will result in duplicates if the article changes sections (e.g. a few hours on the homepage, then finances, then sports for an article on Football club debts).

Finally, many influent bloggers use their blogs as their sole website and make a solid proportion of their income from promoting their books, white papers, speaking bookings … in their sidebars. These prolific – and very important – authors deliberately place only a small portion, an appetizer, of their articles in their RSS feeds. If your company is mentioned in the body but not the header, RSS-only will miss the mention.

Clean crawling of websites, not using RSS, is a labour intensive job to perform and maintain. A large portion of the price difference between solutions can be attributed to this choice of sourcing technology. While free or entry-level software cannot be expected to go beyond RSS, any platform carrying a healthy monthly fee absolutely should.

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Rooting for collaborative media monitoring

March 28, 2012 by 4 Comments

If you’ve read my previous posts on media monitoring, you’ll know that I rank collaborative very high in the criteria for success for this activity as well as – more generally – for PR and Reputation Management.

When one team used to deal with gaining press coverage and another with getting products in front of the public, it didn’t matter quite so much but, today, it does. When PR teams are earning and measuring clicks and marketers need to incorporate corporate reputation management in their campaigns, the overlap is simply too important to overlook and the only way of working successfully is: together.

And nowhere is this taking-down of internal silos more important than monitoring. Whether sizing-up the playing field for a product launch, extinguishing the flames of a social crisis or monitoring the impact of a campaign on reputation, the need to share information throughout the organization without hinderance is essential.

Media monitoring feeds view on a smartphone and an iPad

Click to view a sample Webzine

With this in mind, we’re hopping-up-and-down pleased to introduce our social webzine module, that lets any one in your company view the results of your monitoring process. Think of it as a daily press review incorporating mentions from traditional, online and social media and readable like a magazine. A cross-channel Flipboard of sorts, for PR and marketing pros.

The webzine is loaded with user-friendly features (the articles behind the links in tweets are displayed along with the tweets, for instance, and prominent stories are given greater screen real-estate) and designed to be as easy and pleasant to use as possible.

Coupled with our recently acquired cross-channel monitoring abilities, this lets you easily :

  • Define the keywords that matter to your business : brands, products, executives, competitors, industry topics …
  • Use your entire monitoring results or cherry pick the most relevant for a specific situation
  • View and share with any number of colleagues the results in a daily digest that will brighten up their computer screen at work, your tablet at home or your smartphone in the tube

We don’t often brag about our products on this blog but, seriously, we think this one’s a biggie :) So much so, in fact, that we’re handing out free trials to every one. So, if you’d like to be reading a cross-channel digest of your company’s coverage in your next train commute, just click below !

Request an Augure demo

Be seeing you!

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10 ways media monitoring will help your crisis management

March 22, 2012 by 2 Comments

It used to be that a corporate crisis was triggered only by major events involving top executives, global scandal or industrial accidents. The media would relay the news at best on a daily rhythm and giving company spokespersons as much coverage as the news itself. The public would get daily updates from a limited number of sources, most often TV, maybe the morning radio and a newspaper. Coverage would be very similar, providing incremental information in a linear fashion as time went by. Only the amount of coverage in a given publication or program would determine how much of the story people got to read or watch.

Contrast this now with a classic social media outbreak such as the Domino’s Pizza or United Airline broken guitar videos. Created by amateurs – employees for Domino’s Pizza and a disgruntled customer for United Airlines – these received millions of views on YouTube in only a few days, spread from friend to friend every minute and got relayed by mainstream media, sometimes without the respective companies having their say.

Both videos triggered response from the highest levels of management in spite of the original incident being fairly minor : yes, the Domino’s Pizza video was disgusting but the gravity of the facts pale in comparison to what would have been necessary to generate as much noise only 10 years ago. And the United Airlines example – and its almost 12 MILLION views – highlights the possibility for the dissatisfaction of a single customer to find a great echo with the other members of the public when the heat would previously have been kept private.

Given that the probability of positively resolving a crisis decreases in time, with simultaneously increased crisis management costs, this greater propagation speed not only means more frequent crises but also more complex and costly resolutions. An efficient monitoring process and well rehearsed response plans are the best safeguards against this phenomenon.

Here are 10 ways media monitoring will help you avoid the worst before, during and after the crunch :

  1. Knowing you natural channels. The most effective crisis management device, bar none, is a favourable terrain. Surveys show, year after year, that a company with a good reputation will be much less affected by bad news than another with a low trust capital. Pretty obvious but not always acted upon. Cross-channel media-monitoring will tell you exactly who is talking about you and where discussions are taking place. Also what media and what channels are covering you.
    2. Coverage of a crisis by media type

    Twitter rules this crisis

  2. Closing the gaps. Conversely, by monitoring your competition and industry topics, you will also find who isn’t talking about you, but should be. This lets you start conversations and begin building trust in other important corners of online and social media.
  3. Understanding propagation. If, through your monitoring, you’ve been paying attention to what the information propagation patterns are in your industry, you’ll have a pretty good idea of who starts rumours, rants and misinformed discussions. And of who amplifies news, who defends your positions or corrects errors. Not only should this provide you with plenty of ideas for engagement before a crisis, it will also help you react much more efficiently when red alert is sounding.
  4. Understanding pain points. You might be surprised with the topic that ignites a crisis. There probably was no way for Domino’s to anticipate the coup-d’éclat of their employees but, in most cases, it’s pretty easy to understand what the main pain points are for your customers (or partners, or employees …) and prepare for disaster in that direction.
  5. Detecting a problem early. If my lengthy intro tells you anything, it’s that speed is an essential ingredient for success. Frequent feed updates will give you an early start and the ability to at least establish an official presence in the discussions very early on to correct mistakes or, at worst, simply say “I don’t know, but we’re looking into it”. In the example below, catching the opportunity to speak out on the 25th is a lot better than a few days later. Real-time is better still.

    6. A sudden spike in media coverages can indicate a crisis

  6. Fostering engagement. In the first phases of a crisis, it is important to understand where the threat is strongest. The most angry and most influential relays need to be addressed very quickly. Even if you have very little to offer, identifying the greatest detractors and simply acknowledging you have heard their complaint and are doing everything to look into it, is a great help. This stops the flame wars and buys you (a little) time to prepare for the next step. Since you cannot respond to millions in a few hours, your monitoring must help you pinpoint the most important stakeholders to talk with.
  7. Planning a response. Your monitoring will then tell you what the exact complaint is and how it is being discussed in the media. What terms are being used? Who is being mentioned? What are the undesirable associations with your brand? … Share these insights quickly inside the company and prepare a response plan.
  8. Measuring progress. As you reply to angry comment and gradually feed in information, measure how the crisis topics you previously identified are rising or falling in ‘popularity’. Are opinion leaders picking up your information or are crisis related terms still gaining. Monitor constantly and adapt your strategy accordingly.
  9. Monitor side issues. If you’ve been listening carefully to your communities and to internal discussions, you’ll know what other pain-points are likely to be picked-up as extra fuel in the crisis. Are any of these flaring up ? Prepare responses for all of those that are related to the current hot-topic.
  10. Checking for secondary flares. I come from the South of France, where the summer time is a period of constant battle against forest fires. After a long day or week of extinguishing the main fire, an intense watch is set up at many peripheral point to be ready for spontaneous re-igniting. In a dried-out landscape, a single incandescent log forgotten under ashes is enough to start the fight all over again. Crisis management follows the same logic. And when the main combat phase seems over, you need to be particularly watchful for new spikes. So keep the monitoring very regular and use what you learned in the previous phases to monitor the terms most likely to mean trouble.
  11. Rebuilding trust. If all goes well, your side of the story should progressively get greater share of coverage. Measure how consistently you messages are relayed and how the tone relating to these gradually shifts to green.

Effective crisis management consists if many successive phases, including:

  • Comprehensive pre-crisis engagement to establish a favourable terrain
  • Immediate response, if only to establish a corporate presence, even if you don’t have the answers
  • Laying out of a plan and swift communications about it
  • Walking the early road to recovery by providing information on how the plan is unfolding
  • Re-building trust, which can take 4 years

In today’s instant-information and connected world, mapping cross-channel monitoring to each of these will go a long way towards dealing effectively with the worst the web can offer.

How is your company preparing for such crises ?

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12 important goals for a monitoring plan

January 27, 2012 by 1 Comment

While monitoring – particularly of the social subspecies – is on everyone’s lips today, it is often considered in only one of two contexts:

  • Customer feedback: by monitoring all customer expression channels (social media, phone, email …) and applying heavy technological machinery to face the daunting task of analysing the huge volumes implied, a summary of pain points can be extracted in order to alter the very structure of internal services and support
  • online PR measurement: since media production and consumption has shifted online in the past few years, paper clippings are no longer sufficient to evaluate the success of PR campaigns and online monitoring is used to complete the picture

While both are very valid uses, I’d like to point out a few more. Not because of a sudden crave for encyclopedic endeavours, however pleasant that may be, but because recent evolutions in the social and media landscape dictate profound changes in the way companies and organizations engage with their publics and monitoring is the single most important tool to navigate these often complex waters.

How the Web was won

This is a chart we use on our website to explain the four phases of engagement that must be considered in any communications campaign: Listen, Map, Engage, Measure …

Listen, Map, Engage, Measure. 4 steps in agile campaign management

4 phases of Engagement in a web 2.0 environment


… and back again.

That “back again” is the essential part! While in the past you could plan, execute and measure, the web 2.0 has changed all this and mobile is only making it more complex. The minute a message leaves your company (very often, way before that …) it is amplified, distorted and relayed at various speeds and frequencies depending on media, channels and communities. As previously mentioned on this blog, this new environment requires your PR and communications to learn from Agile and Extreme programming methodologies in order to adapt. Monitoring is essential to plan ahead and gain rapid feedback from all possible channels.

Who you engage, how, and what you measure to keep the boat pointing in the right direction are important aspects of your monitoring plan. The real takeaway is that monitoring is behind all four of these phases.

12 essential goals

OK, I lied. I don’t have 12. 12 sounded like a great number. Large enough to pull the crowds and not so large that I would scare anyone away. But the fact is that the number varies on your own campaign. What are you trying to achieve? Consider all the aspects of your campaign then choose the most relevant from the list below and add your own!!

So, here we go, in no particular order.

Preparing a product launch

Chances are your new product will appeal to many audiences: users who want to know when and how and how much; journalists, who want to know what to write, whether it’s worth their time (unless you’re Apple); bloggers, who want to be the first to spread the news and gain influence and credit (and traffic); resellers, who want to know whether you have addressed past product criticism, whether the rumors about a feature are true …

All of these audiences and expectations need to be identified and addressed for a successful launch. For a recent and compelling example, see how Nokia launched their Lumia 800 after years of struggling in the smartphone market.

Counting on my fingers, that’s at least 4, right there !

Preparing your entry on social media

With Facebook rocketing towards the billionth member mark, not a day goes by without 20 messages turning up in my mail box enticing me to join the party and triple my company’s revenue on social media. Yet the reality is more sobering, and for every success story, ten companies are realizing the emperor really is naked.

The withheld truth is that social media is not a one-size-fits-all marketing venue. Set foot on the wrong network with the wrong approach, and that free community will suddenly look very costly.

Here are a few things you can measure before pressing the GO button:

  • Find out where your prospects/customers are. There’s no point in painting your house blue for Facebook if you should be thinking of Linkedin instead
  • Find out what the hot discussion topics are. Listen before you talk. Identify areas where you can add value
  • Understand the internal gearing of the community. Who pioneers the news, who relays it, who is vocal but not listened to, who is really influential …
  • Understand critical engagement points. What are the positive topics? What are the negative? What ideas are associated to your brand or products? Are there any false rumors going round …

+4 !

Finding your reputation drivers

As they do every year, Edelman have just published the latest edition of their worldwide Trust Barometer, analysing reputation drivers throughout the world. While I used to be (and still am) a huge fan of that enormous survey, I do have to admit that the granularity somehow doesn’t cut it anymore.

Reputation drivers must be measured on the community level to be acted upon and will be different for every company. Measure what blogs are saying about you and compare that to online media and traditional media. While the main stories will be the same, the finer points of view won’t.

Now, let me count … that’s plenty more.

Optimizing your channels

You have successfully engaged with multiple social media communities, you have a regular newsletter shipping, strong relationships with journalists and bloggers …

You have a corporate message to get across.

Measuring the efficiency of media kits across channels

In which channel is it being best received (open-rates, click-through rates) and relayed (retweets, +1, LIKEs …)? Which format suits which channel best? Answers to these questions are key to optimizing your 1 to many engagement.

Media monitoring

Cheating again! I mentioned that in my introduction.

Yes, but, should you stop monitoring TV and newspapers just because of your online feed? Maybe, maybe not? Which are your strongest lead generators? Where are your opponents being most listened to? What is your competition doing? What is your share of voice on the various channels? All this must be plainly visible from a single vantage point. You can then eliminate what is not providing actionable information.

I’ve stopped counting, by now. I need my fingers to type this.

Public affairs, CSR and stakeholder engagement

Who are the best stakeholders to meet for a specific campaign? Influence is one thing to consider. The more influential the person, the greater the amplification of your message.

But that’s not all. Obviously, you’ll want to know what she’s been talking/writing/filming about recently. Anything about you, or your competition? Are there topics you’re not likely to agree about?

But that’s still not all. What been said/written/filmed about her? influential or not, the reactions she triggers might not be the ones you are looking for? What is her own image within your target audience? …

Bottom line, I promise

There are many more uses and goals, whether you’re a public sector corporation, an agency looking after you client’s visibility, a global company or a niche SMB.

But I hope by now my message is clear : monitoring is no longer (only) a question of plugging a clipping provider’s data stream into an application and counting mentions. As more and more departments and employees are becoming a part of your relations with the outside world, many more sources of information for planning and feedback should be integrated into and shared as a convenient and consistent whole to steer the whole organization towards its top line goal.

Sharing the results of monitoring

Sharing the results of monitoring

Offline media, online media, social media, one to one engagement, events, surveys … all are sources of precious information that need to be considered as monitoring and integrated into your daily tools and processes.

If you have any specific monitoring goals in mind I haven’t mentioned here, I’d love to hear about them. Please leave a comment.

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5 must-have steps in every monitoring plan

January 20, 2012 by 2 Comments

Media monitoring on a smartphone

Media monitoring on a smartphone

Monitoring is an essential part of any PR and reputation management campaign management, but is often considered from the sole point of view of extracting information from the Internet, whereas a successful plan involves and requires many other steps.

In my previous post, I described monitoring as trying to a listen to a conversation happening 20 feet away in a crowded bar. This is the information extraction part often referred to, but what good is it if the conversation stays in your head as a string a words, not communicated to anyone or analyzed or used to take action ?

Here are 5 steps that define a useful media monitoring plan from the definition phase to the decisional aspects.

 

Defining entities

Cutting through the billions of conversations going on each day implies restricting both the subjects you’re interested in as accurately as possible and limiting the sources to the most useful ones. defining entities is the first part.

Most competitive monitoring plans will focus on brand names, products or services and company executives. That in itself can be quite a hurdle. I monitor the news for Augure (which means “omen” in French) and you wouldn’t believe the stuff that comes in from World of Warcraft, ancient mysteries forums, church organ players and death metalheads if I’m not careful in my keyword selection. Oh my … ;)

WOW Augure !

Once you have defined your keywords and potential namesakes or other pitfalls, advanced monitoring platforms use semantic analysis to extract the correct information using context in the article. This filters out most if not all of the noise without missing important data.

Defining sources

Where does your audience hang out? Are your stakeholders most vocal on Facebook or in blogs? Is offline coverage important to your success?

Listening to the social world

Listening to a social world

The natural temptation, in order not to miss anything important is to monitor the whole universe. And this leads to numbers games about the number of sources being monitored. But that’s meaningless and dangerous:

  • First because as soon as you have the technology to monitor a blogging platform such as wordpress, you can monitor over 50 million sources. Hook-on to Facebook and that’s 700 million, no 800, no 900 no … Numbers are meaningless. Far more important is to identify those that are influential in your industry, extract clean information from them (no adverts, no spam) and be able to add more as and when necessary.
  • Secondly because you will not be able to digest the result of too large a reading list. My photography-minded friend and Augure Product Manager Caroline set up one of our feeds to monitor the news about a new camera on social media. Like her, I doubt that you will enjoy seeing thousands of messages pile up every hour (unless what you want is a statistical dashboard), even on-topic ones ;) So be specific about what you need to include. By default, we suggest packs to our customers and it is always easy to build from that.

Homogeneizing

Forum messages and offline have very different structures. Mixing offline sources with online media requires some technical work in order to present readable and interpretable results. As a simple example: in your monitoring results, would you rather see tweets with shortened links or the article hiding behind the link ?

Analyzing

What is your goal with that monitoring? Are you interested in the share of blog coverage of a product you have just launched or is real-time sentiment analysis of a developing crisis more important to you?

Publication click-through statistics

Too often, analytics are an afterthought of monitoring plans. But defining the dashboard you need prior to anything else is important to determine what information your monitoring and/or qualification software/teams need to provide you with? Tone, volume, size, images, number of views, ranking, influence levels … ?

Sharing and collaborating

As social networks have changed public relations forever, companies have had to adapt by becoming more social themselves. Stakeholder engagement is no longer the exclusive responsibility of a few staff members in the PR team and more and more employees are becoming brand ambassadors after being trained and receiving proper engagement guidelines.

Media monitoring feeds view on a smartphone and an iPad

Media Monitoring On The Go

As will be discussed in the final installment of this series, monitoring is essential for successful engagement and its results should be share with anyone taking part in discussions on behalf of the organization.

Depending on the recipient, sharing may take the form of an analytic report, a webzine to read in the tube or a formal press review and reputation dashboard. Whatever the form taken, sharing is an essential and often overlooked part of success.

Now that you have the 5 steps in hand, how do you use your monitoring to enhance your social engagement ?

Filed under Industry debate Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Raising the bar for online monitoring

January 13, 2012 by 2 Comments

Picture yourself at the pub after work with that cool pint in one hand and your mates all around you discussing the day’s events: That incredible piece of fielding by Kiwi 12th man Bevan Small, the dreaded copying machine that’s down again, the new memo from IT and how idiotic it is to have made Greedo shoot first in the Blu-Ray edition in spite of fan protest.

Tables all around are the same and the whole room is alive with the hum of multiple conversations and points of view on various topics, everyone joining in regardless of background or expertise.

The hum of simultaneous conversations

But you’ve hooked onto a specific exchange going on a few meters away about a specific case you’re working on. After struggling several minutes to piece together the few words you have been able to isolate from the background drone, you realize your eavesdropping led you on to a different subject that you initially thought and you jump back in to your pal’s discussion with a hasty”… of course Han shot first! There’s no way Greedo could have missed at that range otherwise. Lucas is a self-righteous twerp!”.

From digital data to engagement information

Monitoring online and social media can be a very similar experience to this. The bar analogy isn’t just for fun, because social media engagement recommendations start exactly like this : “imagine yourself in a bar full of conversations. Listen to the conversations, add meaningful comments whenever possible. Provide information and entertainment and make a name for yourself in the community”.

Augure's anline and social monitoring dashboard

And, as I will describe in part 3 of this series, monitoring is not only for reporting, but a tremendous help to guide your engagement:

  • Who is discussing your brand and who is having the greatest influence in the conversation ?
  • How is your engagement campaign doing ? Which are the most responsive media and which terms are getting the most amplification ?
  • What is the global impact of engagement on the company’s top line and reputation ?

So, where do you start ?

The augure webzine displaying monitoring results for the iPhone 4s

Augure's webzine displaying monitoring results for "Apple"


Going from the millions of digital voices found in blogs, comments, Facebook, online media, Twitter and forums to a clean and useable output that resembles the picture above implies a series of challenges that are described in the next post:

  • Define who you want to listen to. In the bar, you cannot choose to eliminate a table or add others. In social monitoring project, you can.
  • Define what you want to listen for. Sir Isaac Newton’s view of an apple isn’t the same as Steve Jobs’ was. Trust me, we know. We have clients with fruit names and we are called Augure (which means omen, in French). So we know a lot about disambiguation.
  • Define what you want to measure. Are you launching a product and interested in share of discussion or is sentiment relative to a recent crisis more prominent in your mind ?

I will go deeper into these aspects in the next two posts. Stay tuned !

Filed under Augure News, Industry debate Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Listen there! Is your PR EXTREME enough?

November 25, 2011 by 3 Comments

A while ago, I introduced the notion of Agile communications on this blog. That post described how agile programming methodologies could be transposed to public relations in order to enable tracking rapid shifts in public perception while keeping the long-term communications plan in mind.

Resident guru Jean-Charles recently pointed me to Extreme Programming, a popular agile process with similar goals and based on fundamental core values such as respect (for your team members, your client, your management), courage (to say NO! to a dangerous project or unreasonable roadmaps, or reporting delays …) or communication (constant sharing of knowledge to ensure every member of the team improves quickly).

Pair programming is a core practice of XP and should be used in public relations

Pair programming, an agile principle

Quoting from the book:

Extreme Programming is successful because it stresses customer satisfaction. Instead of delivering everything you could possibly want on some date far in the future this process delivers the software you need as you need it. Extreme Programming empowers your developers to confidently respond to changing customer requirements, even late in the life cycle.

Sounds familiar?

Becoming EXTREME with your PR

So why, exactly, am I inflicting this techy digression upon you?

Because the best ideas in one discipline often come from other disciplines and this one is really worth applying to PR and reputation management. You see, XP, as it is refered to by the cool people in the know, has the following goal:

Extreme Programming emphasizes teamwork [...] The team self-organizes around the problem to solve it as efficiently as possible [...] With this foundation Extreme Programmers are able to respond to changing requirements and technology

And I’d like to describe two of XP’s values that support this goal and should be in the minds of every PR pro: simplicity and, most of all, feedback.

KISS

Keep it simple. In this context, that means delivering the minimum work that will, with certainty, provide most value to the customer. It’s not about being lazy, it’s about being nimble. Delivering sure values in short spurts to follow trends more closely and not waste effort on long-term projects whose necessity might wane well before completion.

Take this blog, for instance. I have in mind what Augure wants to communicate about in the long-term, what image it wants to project and what expertise I want to share. I could write a 600 page book to describe all that but it would take a year to publish and many of today’s news and topics of interest would be long past their sell-by date. Besides who would read it when you can get info on a specific topic in just 500 words ? Blogging is more EXTREME than writing books ;)

Most of all, simplicity in PR is about reaching out to the outside world and listening carefully to what is being said NOW and deciding how to react quickly and efficiently, with the bigger plan in mind. Which brings me to feedback.

Positive feedback

If you’re a UltraFi nut like me, that title will send shivers down your spine. But for XP PR (!) it is all about touching ground after every short campaign. With your client or management, obviously, but also with the public. Constant monitoring is essential to maintain efficiency. Systematic monitoring after each micro campaign will inform you on the reaction of your public and will pinpoint your progress towards your long-term goal.

Imagine a navigator adjusting his sails on one side of an ocean and never altering them during the crossing in spite of wind changes. Monitoring will give you feedback on the wind to constantly keep on the closest possible track in spite of changing wind (perceptions and technologies). It will also save your life if the end goal changes during the crossing!

Shhh, it’s a secret !

Another reason for describing XP here is that, as I have mentioned in previous posts, we have big news coming that will help you get EXTREME very easily. But shhh, my lips are sealed. Stay tuned!

Filed under Augure News, Industry debate, Team Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Cross channel social engagement in Augure’s Autumn release

November 18, 2011 by 2 Comments

This isn’t the easiest period for running a company. Not only are twitchy financial markets making life harder for brand owners and their clients, but reputation drivers that are having a strong effect on businesses are changing very quickly and are being influenced by more and more by social channels that are notoriously difficult to harness effectively.

In CEOs Must Engage All Stakeholders (Harvard Business Review), Venkat Ramaswamy and Kerimcan Ozcan state: “Any attempt to reform capitalism must first take stock of the structural shifts in value creation that we are witnessing in society today. Because of the web, social media, and advances in mobile and interactive communications and information technologies, the experiences of human beings are now at the heart of value creation.”

Confirming this from the CEO’s perspective are the results of a recent Weber Shandwick survey: “Global brand executives attribute 52% of their brand’s reputation to how social it is today. They project it to be 65% in three years”.

Driving your social reputation consistently

What this means in practical terms is that the influence of social discussions on reputation in gaining and has as much impact as more traditional (and easy to engage) stakeholders. Perhaps even more importantly, it implies that messaging consistency (an essential factor of trust and reputation) has to be maintained through more channels than ever before.

Those were the main drivers behind the recent months of development that lead to two main features of Augure’s Autumn 2011 release:

  • The Online Presskit. While a previous version had enabled social publication of press releases and other documents, the online presskit embeds cross channel online publication into your campaign management and engagement projects. It lets you constitute a library of documents and messages, publish to social media, blogs, mail and other channels and measure the efficiency document by document and channel by channel. It tracks the success of your social campaign through time and provides actionable insight for building future campaigns.
    • Augure's online press kit

    The new Online Presskit

  • ComSuite mobile. Our previous mobile application, ComDecision mobile, enabled analysis of cross media coverage and reputation away from the office. ComSuite mobile complements it through engagement on the go: all your contacts, your past activites with them, their publications are just a couple of clicks away to prepare an appointment or exchange information between planes.

On top of these major features, ComSuite’s menu system and media files have received an overhaul to mirror our Map, Engage, Measure motto more closely.

All three evolutions contribute to the common goal of enabling more varied, cross channel engagement while ensuring consistency of messaging and measurement, by providing a holistic view of all channels used to interact with specific contacts and analysing one by one what channel is best suited for a given person.

These are just the tip of the social iceberg being sculpted by our R&D. An iceberg that is integrating social identity deeper into every process and placing online and social media monitoring more at the heart of PR than ever before. Speaking of monitoring, we have great news coming soon. Stay tuned !

Filed under Augure News, Industry debate Tagged with , , , , , ,

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