Let’s say your business is a boutique PR firm called “Starburst PR”. Maybe you’re not getting a lot of traction in the news or on social media yet, but you’re working on it and want to keep track of your progress. You don’t want to be shelling out hundreds or thousands of dollars a month to a software firm, but you do need some way to get organized.
Welcome to the Absolute Beginners Guide to Media Monitoring. This step-by-step tutorial will help you set up email alerts to bring media mentions to you, reducing time spent and helping you keep track of engagement.
Let’s get started!
WHAT TO MONITOR
The first step is to make keyword groups so that your email alerts will be organized. Keywords will change as you gain more experience in how your industry is discussed online. This experience will also tell you how to limit industry keywords that bring too many results. For instance, “starburst” would bring millions of results but (“starburst” AND “public relations”) might be a good targeted search for your business.
Keywords may include:
1. Your company: any brands you use, names of executives or other words that potential clients might use to talk about your company.
2. Your competitors: competitor names, brands and executives.
3. Your industry: to find potential clients, look for ways that people refer to your industry and track those words. This often takes some hours of just reading through the results you already have to identify common words that may be used without a specific company mention.
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WHERE TO MONITOR
GOOGLE ALERTS – Blogs, News, Web General
Creating Google Alerts for your keywords will bring you all* mentions of your company in blogs, online news, video sites, web sites and online groups.
Additionally, it is useful to be familiar with other businesses using your name so that you can decide on keyword limiters. Over time, you will be able to determine if there are words that can exclude businesses with the same name without affecting results related to your company (ex: “Starburst” -candy -astronomy).
To set up an alert:
1. Go to news.google.com
2. Type “Starburst –candy -astronomy” into the search field.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the page, where it says “Stay up to date on these results” and click on “Create an email alert for Starburst –candy -astronomy”.
4. To the right, you will see a box with options to determine what type of alerts to receive.
5. Add the email of the person who will be doing your media monitoring.
6. Click create alert.
7. Receive and click on confirmation email from Google.
Alert Options:
Decide how often you would like to receive emails with search results. They may be sent at the moment that Google finds the result, every per day or once per week. Select your preference in the “How Often” drop down.
The next decision is whether you would like to receive different types of media results separately or as one email. You may choose “comprehensive” as the alert type to have all of your results sent together. Or you may create separate emails for blog results, news results, web results and others.
If you prefer to receive these separately, you will need to create a separate alert (going through the process above) for each type of alert.
Additional Keywords:
If you would also like to track competitor or industry keywords, you may add these to your email alert by adding a capitalized OR between search terms.
Ex: “Starburst PR” OR CompetitorName OR “industry keyword”
I like to run test searches before creating the search strings to see how many results it might return. This way, you can create separate searches for words that return a lot of results, and combine words that return few results.
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SOCIAL MEDIA
There is a plug-in available to bring Twitter results into Google but I don’t recommend it because it is more efficient to deal with Twitter results separately, as they are most likely to require a response.
There are many free programs available to create Twitter email alerts. I like SocialOomph for its ease-of-use.
You may use the same search strings that you created for your Google Alerts.
To set up alerts:
1. Go to socialoomph.com
2. Login or Register (in the upper right corner).
3. In the middle of the page, there are a series of blue boxes. Click on the one that reads “Other Tools”
4. A new blue box will appear below the first row. It will read “Keyword Alert Emails”. Click it.
5. Scroll down past the instructions.
6. Make sure to click the box next to Keyword Digest in order to receive email alerts.
7. Select the frequency of emails, as you did for Google Alerts.
8. Enter your keywords (see “Search String Creation” below).
9. Save.
10. Receive and click on confirmation email from SocialOomph.
Search String creation
SocialOomph’s searches are a bit unique, so if you have simple strings of a few independent words you may add them on separate lines.
Ex:
@starburstpr
“Starburst PR”
competitorname
industrykeyword
If your searches need to be more complicated and have exclusions or inclusions, I recommend using the wizard. Above the search area, click on “Open Power Keyword Wizard” next to the wand icon.
Be sure to add keywords for any Twitter handles of interest by adding @twittername as a keyword.
Not Twitter
For other social media sites, the results may be brought into Google or you may have to do a manual search on a regular basis. I recommend setting up a schedule for sites not covered by Google, such as those with password protection, at a frequency determined by the volume of mentions you see with a preliminary search of each site.
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HOW TO RESPOND
Think about how your company responds to people in real life and take that same approach in social media. If you pride yourself on answering every phone call, every email and every visitor, then respond to every inquiry online with the requested information.
You can also take a proactive approach to mentions of your company where the person is not specifically trying to reach you.
Examples:
Mention: I had a horrible experience with the receptionist at Starburst PR.
Reponse: I am the Office Manager at Starburst PR, would you share your experience with me so I can improve our process?
Mention: I am looking for a PR firm. Has anyone used Starburst? What did you think of it?
Response: I am a client manager at Starburst, please let me know if I can set up a visit for you or if you need any additional information.
This is also true for industry mentions where someone is looking for a recommendation. However, it is not appropriate to respond when the request specifically and only asks for information about a competitor.
Appropriate to respond to: I am looking for a public relations firm. Any suggestions?
Appropriate to respond to: I have a proposal from Shout PR. Anyone know of alternatives?
Not appropriate to respond to: Does anyone have information about Shout PR?
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ORGANIZE YOUR RESULTS
…in your email.
Once you have all of your alert emails set up, create a new folder called “Media Monitoring” in your email program to organize them. I recommend creating a rule to automatically send these emails to the folder. This avoids being distracted by these emails as they arrive so that you can work with them all at once in the time you have set aside for media monitoring.
…in your schedule.
Like any type of email, media monitoring results can interrupt your work day and waste a lot of time. It is far more efficient to set aside a time each day or a couple of times per day to read through your results and respond where necessary.
…in your archive.
While reading through your monitoring emails, make a record of any mentions that are significant or contain information that you want to track or measure. Also record any reaction that you made as a result of the mention.
This can be done in Microsoft Excel or any worksheet program. I recommend the following fields:
1. Media (blog, twitter, news, etc).
2. Source (url)
3. Date
4. Type of Mention (company, competitor, keyword)
5. Response, if applicable
6. Field(s) for any metrics you are interested in tracking. This can be products mentioned, sentiment of mention, a rating of how important to you the mention is, or any other information you want to record.
You can flag entries for follow up at a later date. You can sort them to keep a count of where, how and by whom you are being mentioned. You can create data reports to share with colleagues to help quickly show them information about your media coverage.
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So now you have a complete, yet simple and effective, system for monitoring your online media coverage. This is enough for most individuals and small businesses. Even if your volume of coverage or engagement means that you need to bring in the big guns (media monitoring software), this is a great start to help you understand and organize your needs so you can find a solution that works for you.
If you’ve got all this down, check out our Media Monitoring 101 post for more advanced tips on monitoring and measuring your media coverage.
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*This is kind of a lie. For some reason, Google does not send all results out in Google Alerts. I recommend a weekly (biweekly or monthly) manual search to make sure you haven’t missed anything. Despite the time delay and lost results, Google is still the best free aggregate search out there.
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Photo credits:
Katie Paine, a staunch advocate of measurement in PR, has posted a 
Public Relations Measurement 2010: Five Things to Forget & Five Things to Learn
