Searching in ImpactWatch
One of the benefits of the ImpactWatch service is that it archives all of the tagged information about your corporate news articles. We previously talked about how to create a clip sheet of your search, but let’s take a step back and look at how to actually do the search in the ImpactWatch News Center.
On the right hand menu of ImpactWatch you’ll see an option labeled “News.” When you click this option you will be presented with a page that has multiple search filters depending on how your news is being analyzed.
When we first set up an ImpactWatch for a client we help them determine the best way to tag and categorize all of the news we will be monitoring. This is an important step in both the setup process and in ongoing adjustments to the monitoring, but is easily customizable in ImpactWatch. You can imagine when you are not only monitoring your own news but that of your closest five competitors that the volume can get overwhelming without proper analysis and attribute tagging.
The search filters available in the News Center are the same as these attributes and tone ratings assigned by the analysts. You can choose the date range you want to search and, as with most search engines, one of the most powerful features is the “keyword” field. Any of the filters can be combined with the keyword field to further narrow down the topic, or help you find a specific article you are looking for.
One thing to consider is that if there is a large number of matches to the keyword field, ImpactWatch may consider that a common word and not use it in the search. This is used to filter out common words such as “the” or “and” in a search. It often happens, however, that because your ImpactWatch is set up to collect news on specific topics to begin with, that it may seem like a common word even though it’s not.
A perfect example of this was the ImpactWatch we set up to monitor news on the Mitchell Report back when it was released in December. If I do a search on the word mitchell, ImpactWatch considers it a common word because of the sheer number of articles that match.
The solution is to put the word in quotation marks. A search for “mitchell” brings up the correct number of articles.
