A colleague recently asked me whether we use FP Infomart for media monitoring (we do), and it got me to thinking about what a tricky thing it is to do right. You sign up with a commercial provider like FP Infomart or Factiva, and that can really save a lot of time. FP is great, and will be even better when they start picking up the Globe & Mail. I really can’t imagine what people did before these services existed (okay, I can, but it’s not pretty).
But of course, there are always sources that don’t get picked up by those aggregators, so you need to be diligent about checking other sources too. I’m using a combination of a couple of commercial vendors and free internet/search feeds, and that’s still not really enough.
Case in point: a couple of weeks ago, we were very embarrassed to find out that we missed a large supplement that one of our clients had published in the Vancouver Sun. Since it wasn’t news or editorial content–it was basically a large advertisement–it was not picked up by our commercial service. It would have taken a human actually looking through the paper to find it. So, okay, there are only four major papers to go through every day, but when you’re watching for news and ads that mention any one of scores of clients, it can get pretty time consuming. It’s not really efficient for anyone to do that, and would basically be a duplication of effort already being made by the commercial service. But still, being prepared when the client calls and asks “Did you see our article/ad/supplement?”…I hate to sound like a Mastercard ad, but that’s priceless.
‘Tis the season for sharing and whatnot, so perhaps we can compare notes. What’s your favourite media monitoring tool, and how do you catch those semi-obscure or easy-to-miss mentions and references?
As an afterthought, are there still companies where humans do this type of work, or is all done by computers now? Can we really provide good media monitoring without human beings vetting the results?
