Turning News Into Knowledge

It’s no secret that technology rapidly changes. While this may be frustrating to some people on the consumer level, it poses many benefits in the business world. These benefits are especially true for media monitoring and analysis.

To illustrate this point, Tammy Mazerolle, Public Affairs Counsel with Atlantic Lottery, explains how the advancement of technology has benefited them with regard to their media monitoring process.

1) Better on the environment – monitoring has gone virtually paperless

“…before, all media clips were faxed to us in a clipping package that contained the actual, clipped and scanned news article. We then had to photocopy the package page by page and then manually distribute the photocopied package to senior management,” says Mazerolle.

In recent years most print sources have been made available online through news aggregator services, eliminating the need to purchase individual newspapers, and in turn producing less paper waste.

2) Quicker dissemination – everyone can receive the daily monitoring clips at the click of a button

“Today, with the new tools available to us, we simply distribute the daily media clipping package in electronic format to our core team,” says Mazerolle.

Rather than having to deliver paper copies of reports to everyone on a team or within an organization, the process has been made much simpler. With the tools and technologies available today the necessary information can be sent instantly to a much larger number of people than before; geography and number of people is no longer an issue.

3) Personalization – easy to ensure people only get the information they need

“[Through MediaMiser] we also have the ability to customize our clippings package so that the core team get a clipping package with full articles every morning, and then a summaries-only version is sent to others…,” says Mazerolle.

With the advent of tools made available for media monitoring, it is now possible to do things the photocopier never could.

These days the wheel is rarely wooden, light sources are rarely candles, and media monitoring is rarely photocopied.

How can these changes benefit you and your media monitoring?

Perspectives is a blogging series written, researched and compiled by teams of MediaMiser staff from Client Services, Sales, and R&D. This post was contributed by Samantha Ingram, Mark Durand and Lindsay Polak.

During the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, we monitored Canadian English-language online newspapers, news websites, and online magazines to determine the nature and extent of coverage of our medal-winning athletes.  Specifically, we analyzed coverage the day before, the day of, and the day after their wins.

The two athletes with the highest number of mentions were Alexandre Bilodeau (Feb. 14-16) and Joannie Rochette (Feb. 26-28). Rochette, who won a figure skating bronze, came out on top, garnering around 23 per cent more coverage than Bilodeau’s with his gold in moguls.

Rochette’s number one status is less driven by the colour of her medal and more by the human-interest angle. She was set to perform on Feb. 27, however, two days before her competition her mother passed away hours after arriving in Vancouver.  Rochette earned public and media admiration for bravely choosing to stay in the competition and skate in her mother’s honour.

While part of Bilodeau’s media popularity can be traced to his being the first Canadian to win gold on Canadian soil, his story too had a strong human-interest component – one that focused on his brother Frédéric, who has Cerebral Palsy (CP).   Throughout the games, Bilodeau credited Frédéric for his success, calling him “his inspiration.”

This emotional story also affected the amount of coverage about CP.  We found an increase of 943 per cent in online mentions between the week before Bilodeau’s gold medal win (Feb. 7-13) with the week after (Feb. 14-20).

The brothers’ story raised awareness of CP in two ways. First, because Alexandre’s gold medal win was so high-profile, and second, Frédéric brought a touching element to the story making it that much more special for the media and audience alike. This  provided a unique opportunity for audiences to get educated on cerebral palsy, and to broaden the awareness of various charitable organizations dedicated to CP.

See: Bilodeau’s esteem for brother sparks greater awareness of cerebral palsy

To further the human interest element of the story, Alexandre Bilodeau put his money where his heart is, donating his $25,000 cheque for winning gold to the Canadian Association of Paediatric Health Centres in support of research into CP, making the story that much more appealing and genuine to the media.

Has this heightened awareness of CP through Alexandre’s and Frédéric’s story translated into greater donations? We hope so, and if you do too, consider clicking here.