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.

On July 10, I wrote a blog posting called Beware of the viral nature of media.

It dealt with the United Breaks Guitars video, which went viral across the web and mainstream North American media.

Joe Boughner responded to the posting quite rightly questioning how much damage was actually being done to United Airlines’ brand. Joe also hoped that someone would do a six-month post-analysis on the story.

Well, we decided to do a one-month analysis of the United Breaks Guitars story and have some interesting results.

Whether long-term damage was done is still up for debate, especially since our analysis covers only the month of July.

That said, you can find the complete analysis on the Resource Center on the MediaMiser website. You can access it without providing personal information.

For those who don’t want to read it, here are some of the findings, which are backed up by the analysis in the report:

• Even though blogs and Twitter may have alerted traditional media of the story, traditional media outlets supercharged the story and made it a real issue for United Airlines.
• The majority of micro-bloggers (Twitter), tend be heavily influenced by the mainstream media.
• Do not underestimate the influence of blogs.  Even though the popularity of other social media is on the increase, and the number of people writing blogs may be waning, many are still relying on blogs for information.
• Not surprisingly, United Breaks Guitars dominated the news for United Airlines during the month of July.

Chart showing the different media interaction over time.