Insights

Reputation is what clients, experts and market participants think and say about your company. That is why media monitoring is a vital necessity.

Media monitoring services are among the most important instruments for estimating effectiveness (or its’ absence) of communication strategy. However, answering the question "Why do we need monitoring of our mentions in the Internet?" does not seem so simple. PR-specialist, SMM-manager and business-owner will answer it differently.

Mention monitoring services

Before we get to understand why media monitoring is done, let's dwell on the search engines themselves.

In general, info-space analytics comes down to two directions:

• monitoring mentions in social networks;

• monitoring mentions in mass media and blogs.

Such division is caused by peculiarities and tasks of each brand.

Now there are various services at the market which help to monitor mentions. However, there is no tool that would cover 100% of all messages. It is more common that companies just need to monitor their reputation and understand the bigger picture. To do this, only relevant messages are needed, not all of the collected spam.

Anyway, before choosing a service, it is better to test a few variants and choose the most appropriate one. Fortunately, monitoring systems provide introductory versions.

Brand, company and person mentions

Any company needs to know what the brand is associated with, what consumers think about it, what reputation the product has got and how to correct it.

The toolkit of any monitoring system allows finding out not only the number of messages in mass media and social networks, but also the tone of each of them.

Media monitoring of the brand will help to find out the actual information about any product, to calculate where the brand is more recognizable, who its "haters" and "advocates" are, which experts it is necessary to involve for development on the market.

Monitoring negative feedback

Anti-crisis PR helps to detect a problem at the stage of a sparkle and not to let it develop into a wildfire.

Most monitoring services include alerts with huge variety of customization options allowing you to get necessary notifications in a convenient format. For example, if there is a serious negative newsbreak, your brand is mentioned in some monitored context, and more. The possibilities of this technology are truly limitless and depend on which monitoring system you use.

Negative reviews about large companies which were revealed through monitoring system can be carefully worked out by agents of influence, removed or pushed out of search results by new positive articles.

Understanding the agenda

Reputation monitoring helps to see changes in brand perception and react to them.

To build a successful development strategy, you need to analyze the info-space and regularly see changes and innovations in the industry. Knowing the interests and fears of consumers will help you increase user engagement and the content offered will be consumed more actively.

Some bosses demand that every morning they have a brief news summary on what important happened in the market of a particular sector and what of it can affect the future fate of the company. This helps them make timely adjustments to their communications and adapt to new realities.

Monitoring also helps to keep track of competitors’ activity. Within the framework of the analysis of similar companies’ direct competitors are searched, the rating is made, their positions in the info-field are traced. Sometimes it is possible to unexpectedly reveal new, earlier not considered rivals, to receive insights from blogs and others' advertising actions, to learn about the weaknesses of colleagues in the market.

The experience of competitors also helps to evaluate your own brand program, to identify the pros and cons within your business.

Trend forecasting

There is such a thing as trendwatching, which is predicting what is about to become popular. Can you tell what's going to shoot up tomorrow?

Mentioning in the media or monitoring news from the field of innovation and technology makes it easier to find trends. You can read about new inventions on specialized sites like Techcrunch or Mashable. You can see general selection and analytics of trends on Trendwatching and Trendhunter.

Trends are changing every day: algorithms are improving, new social networks appear (and die), and the mass consumer is increasingly influenced by opinion leaders. Ignoring these processes and running successful cases at the same time is simply impossible.

Info-field monitoring obliges to stay tuned to new trends and use them as tools. Voluntary rejection of what is now fashionable because "I-already-know-how-to-do-it" position will get you left out in the cold, along with your ideas and budget.