Monitoring what is being said about your brand, your company, and your executives must be an essential part of day-to-day public relations and marketing operations. When any type of media outlet mentions your product, today’s tools give you give you the ability, not only to know about it instantly, but also to curate, redistribute and share that news with others via social media and your online newsroom.
There are three ways you can begin monitoring your organization’s news depending upon your budget:
1) First (and free) is Google News Alerts. It is simple, yet powerful and you can setup multiple alerts on various keywords that you track. Opt to have those alerts emailed directly to you in real time or as a daily synopsis. You can also monitor your social mentions using a free tool like Hootsuite that gives you the ability to track tweets, re-tweets and manage any messaging through social media.
2) A second, albeit more expensive option when monitoring news about your organization, is to subscribe to one of the services such as Lexis Nexis or Meltwater. These news monitoring companies have great partnerships with the various media outlets and can provide you with detailed analytics about your targeted keywords. Generally this is a separate system, non-integrated and depending upon which service you select can be expensive. Exporting the data and bringing it into a usable format can also be difficult.
3) A third option would be to have an all-inclusive online newsroom where you receive daily monitoring reports and have real-time access to mentions of your organization. Two examples of companies with online newsroom platforms are TEKGROUP and Cision. The clips are integrated into the newsroom so that you can easily select positive ones to display in an “In the News” area of your website and can seamlessly be emailed as a daily report to executives right alongside your news releases.