Media Monitoring 101: Making a Plan
March 24th, 2009Posted by: Hannah Del Porto Posted in Media Measurement, Media Monitoring, Resources
PLANNING
The most important component of using the media to further your business goals is to have a (good) plan. If you’re a bigger company with PR and Marketing peeps, ask them to do this or steal ideas from the plans they already wrote. Then skip to “How are you doing it?”. If it’s just you and a dream, read on.
WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
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Mission Statement
You should write a mission statement. I know it’s old school and all, but we need to get organized. Want to double the size of your business? Build a reputation as the warmest & fuzziest company in the world? Write down what your media program should be working towards.
Once you have a mission for your program, you have to figure out what objectives will fulfill your mission. Ask yourself – What do I want the end results of my media program to be? What business results are worth the work? Then think about ways to achieve each of those results.
Objectives, Strategies and Initiatives
I have made an example list below. These are just a few things that came to mind. Each Objective will have nearly unlimited Strategies to achieve them. Likewise there are infinite Initiatives you can include when building your Strategy. Your version of this table is going to look more like a bunch of webs.
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| Objectives (What are your goals?) |
Strategies (How will you approach them?) |
Initiatives (What are the specific actions you will take?) |
Financial -Leads/Sales/Participation |
Financial -Driving traffic to sales site. |
Financial -Link building and trackbacks. |
| Service
-Customer Service resolutions |
Service
-Personalized response to customer comments. |
Service
-Contact every person who mentions your product. |
| Marketing
-Brand Awareness |
Marketing
-Controlling information about brand. |
Marketing
-Become #1 source of info on your company. |
| PR
-Influencer Relations |
PR
-Identify early warning signs of brand crisis. |
PR
-Measure your product and brand sentiment. |
| Development
-Product/Service feedback |
Development
-Tracking/incorporating customer feedback. |
Development
-Organize meeting to discuss customer suggestions. |
By now, you have a lot of pieces of paper lying around and are wondering why I’m having you make a marketing plan when all you want is to track your media coverage. I promise that there is a reason for this.
Monitoring your media coverage is utterly useless if you’re not going to do anything with that information. Additionally, we won’t know what to monitor until we know what you’re looking to accomplish.
HOW ARE YOU DOING IT?
Organizing Your Data
So, the next step is to look at all those little webs you just made and pick out data points. Make a list of all of the data you will need to inform your strategies and initiatives. You’ll break this up into two lists: Tags and Metrics.
Tags
You should think of this as topics and keywords – attributes that you will use to “tag” a media mention. So, “Products” is a tag, then you list all of your products. I think it’s helpful to imagine that you already have a monitoring system in place and are now creating reports and action items. What tags will help you sort and search your coverage data?
Other ideas:
-Business units/op cos
-Competitors
-Competitor product names
-Industry issues (subjects)
-Geographical distinction (country, state)
-PR campaign (if you have organized campaigns)
-Company executives
-Competitor executives
-Industry analysts
-Other actors (regulators, activists, any group affecting your biz)
-Promotions
-Product Initiatives
-Corporate Initiatives
-Marketing Messages
-Customer segment
-Customer comments
-Action to be taken on mention
Metrics
These are the measurements that you want calculated using your tags. Like the tags you choose, your measurement options are nearly unlimited. You can measure anything from traditional metrics such as volume, circulation and share of voice to a wide variety of social media metrics (note that many measurements will apply to all types of coverage).
If you decide to use professional media tracking software, the tags and metrics you use will be largely automated, so each media mention will have lots of tags and you will be able to quickly sort and search your data. If you are doing this by hand, you will probably want to pick only the most critical distinctions for categorizing your coverage.
For super bonus points, prioritize your lists!
Data Format
The next question is how do you want to see your coverage and measurements? Think about your current workflow and determine how your media coverage data will fit in. Also consider how you expect to be acting on your media mentions.
- Will you pride yourself on immediate response to customer contact? You’ll want to receive email alerts of your coverage at short intervals (on the hour, 3x per day, depending on volume).
- Do you have several product managers or business units managing their coverage? Get your alerts and reports divided by those tags and sent to the appropriate party.
- Want to track trends in your media coverage? Monthly, quarterly and annual reports will do the trick.
- Planning discrete PR or marketing campaigns? Short-term initiative reports can measure the success of your efforts.
Also think about what on-the-fly searches you will want to do and what other ways you will need your data presented. If you plan to do your monitoring and measurement work in-house, go ahead and use your tags and metrics lists to create report mockups. Creating templates ahead of time will help you organize your coverage as it comes in and help you get it out to interested parties more efficiently.
Your wishlists will also be useful if you plan to outsource any part of this to a 3rd party. Many software providers have one-size-fits-all systems. They offer the same data and options to all customers. Which is fine…if what they are offering coincides with what you want in a platform. This is why you made your list BEFORE looking at vendors. I want you to match their services to your needs, not the other way around.
Data Flexibility
How often will you need to change what you are tracking? Will you add new products, competitors, messages or other attributes often? This is an important point to consider when shopping around for an outside service. Are the number of tags or keywords limited? How often can you change them? What kind of access do you have to administrative tools? What is the process for adding a new metric or report template? Do they offer retro-tagging in case you want to apply a new tag to historical data?
Make sure you think through how you will use the data collected so you can find a service, or create a process, that meets your needs.
Next, we’ll focus on organizing your internal resources.
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Photo credits:
Tea bag – JanetMCK
Measuring tape – Aussiegall
Filing cabinets – Specialkrb
Flexibility – Nicolasnova
Tags: initiatives, media analysis plan, media measurement, Media Monitoring, metrics, objectives, strategies, tags
March 25th, 2009 at 8:29 am
This post is a great resource.
March 25th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
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