The Ultimate Guide to Media Monitoring for Your Business

As a business leader, one of your main priorities is to ensure that your company is performing the best it can be. Between customer relations, managing employees, and marketing, there is so much that goes on, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. 

Monitoring your media presence is another aspect of running a successful business. However, it may be something you haven’t put much thought into or even knew about. What exactly is media monitoring? How does it improve your business? How do you monitor the media? 

All of these are great questions to ask yourself. Below, you’ll learn about media monitoring and how it can and will impact your business. Learn more about any of these topics and connect with Turbine Labs to improve your company’s media monitoring. 

Table of Contents:

1. Missed Information is Misinformation: The In's and Outs of News Monitoring
2. The Top 3 Media Monitoring Tools Every PR Team Should be Using
3. Media Monitoring and Analysis: Why is it Impactful for Business?
4.  How to Track Your Organization’s Press Coverage
5. Media Misinformation: Avoid Bias and Incorrect Sources for Your Business
6. How to Gain Competitive Intelligence Through Media Monitoring 

Missed Information Is Misinformation: The In's and Outs of News Monitoring

Starting off, it is important to ask yourself, what is news monitoring? It’s simple, news monitoring is exactly what it sounds like. You can keep up with news from television sources, website articles, mobile apps, and more! However, it quickly becomes more complex as you start to consider the various tiers of what makes up “news” about your brand. You want to consider the following: 

• Major news broadcasting sources
• Opinions and conversations with large audiences
• General online conversations (Forums, Comments, Etc.)

You can also use:

• Manual and general searches done by yourself
• Tracking tools & alerts
• Smarter analytics 

News and media monitoring can help save your business both time and money. You can keep up to date with trends and hear what people are saying about you, your company, and your competitors. Not only does this give you clear data about what people think and how they view your business, but it also allows you to stay ahead of the game.

News monitoring plays a vital role in your company’s ability to respond in a timely and appropriate fashion to any sudden outcroppings of mentions and interest. It’s also key to long-term brand reputation management so you can react much more quickly to any future issues that may be popping up. Some of the key benefits of news monitoring include:

• Directly track what’s being said: You can receive alerts as soon as news is circulating about your company or your key employees and stakeholders. You can even look up specific keywords or phrases surrounding your business and see what comes up through that search. 
• Monitor brand reputation: Your organization benefits from always having an understanding of how your customers and the general public view your company.
• Understand your target audience: Along with monitoring sentiment, you can gain a deeper understanding of your market’s opinions about your brand. 
• Ability to mitigate risk: This is crucial for any organization. You can’t stop the story, but you can be poised to respond to it.
• Measure PR effects: Long-term resolution and brand enhancements strengthen your company, whether there’s been an incident or not. 

Learn more about the impacts of missed information and how media monitoring can help by reading our blog post. 

The Top 3 Media Monitoring Tools Every PR Team Should be Using 

When it comes to monitoring your media, there are so many opportunities for customers to speak about your business and their experiences there. Whether they review your company on Yelp or Google Reviews, or they simply post a story on their Instagram profile, consumers are interacting and speaking about your business at all times. 

The various platforms and opportunities for unpaid media advertisement have never been more abundant. However, keeping track of all the swirling opinions about your company can be extremely challenging. Addressing a customer complaint on social media can increase customer advocacy by 25%, but even finding these complaints can feel like an impossible task. 

With all this considered, media monitoring has never been more important. Media monitoring can take place in a variety of places: 

• Online media 
• Newspapers and magazines
• Radio
• Television
• Social Media (Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
• Podcasts

Three Tools Your Team Should Be Using

1. HubSpot PR Template

The HubSpot PR Template helps you stay on top of any information you might encounter while media monitoring. From there, you’ll be able to communicate with your customers. Whether it is to clear up rumors, handle a crisis, or highlight an impact that you’re making, you can easily access everything there. 

HubSpot has created templates to use to help you quickly draft professional press releases to help showcase your company and what it may be responding to. This way, you’ll know exactly what to do and not worry about how to format anything.

 2. Media Monitoring Software

Turbine Labs has created a media monitoring software that scours the Internet for mentions of your company or industry. Any time your work is mentioned, your PR team or executive leadership will be told about the source. You save time by receiving insights in context without all the useless information.

3. Thought Leadership Briefings

Thought Leadership Briefings help to combine all of the media monitoring findings into a custom-tailored email. These can go out to various people in your company, keeping everyone informed

Take a deeper dive into this by checking out our guide.

Media Monitoring and Analysis: Why is it Impactful for Business?

The potential for your company to receive media coverage in a single day is endless. While this may seem like an exciting aspect, it is important to understand exactly what media monitoring is and how it has a direct impact on how your business is viewed by the public. 

From manual searches conducted by a singular person to an entire communications team sourcing various media sources, monitoring media is a full time job. Media monitoring is exactly how it sounds. It is the process of continuously tracking media channels and gaining full insight into all mentions of your brand or business. 

Media monitoring helps you see exactly what is being said and how your business is being perceived. While many times this media is out of your control, what you can control is your response to it. Even if you may be receiving negative feedback, communicating and showcasing that off can help turn negative feedback into a positive experience. 

Media monitoring and analysis can take on various forms, this all depends on your organization and specific desired outcomes. Some of the most used media monitoring and analysis are as follows: 

• Share of Voice

• Top Media

• Sentiment

• Earned Media

• Follower Growth

Identifying Media Trends Through Analysis

Once you have collected and identified these media monitoring aspects, you can then take that information and use that to your advantage. The following ways you can utilize these are through: 

• Competitor Coverage

• Crisis Communication

• Audience Engagement
• Marketing Campaigns

All of these insights allow you more awareness of your brand's content and how it is doing out in the “real world”. This information can help you expand and stay in the know of what is going on, whether that is for your brand overall or for a specific service or product you offer. 

Find out more information about media monitoring and analysis and why it is impactful by reading our blog.

How to Track Your Organization’s Press Coverage

Press coverage is an incredible way to promote your business for a multitude of reasons. One of the reasons is that it is free of the monetary investment that can come with paid advertising. This earned media can come in various forms of news coverage, customer reviews, or articles. However, generating a lot of press can also come with its challenges, like keeping track of and making sense of all of your mentions. 

There are also a handful of tools that you can use to track your organization's press coverage and see what your consumers are saying about you. 

• Google Alerts: The most common form of news tracking can come from simply looking up your company’s name. Google Alerts saves you the burden of Googling your company every few moments. With this tool, you’ll receive an email each time your selected keywords appear in a digital space. 
• SocialMention: SocialMention looks similar to a basic search engine, but it performs insightful analysis on all of the results it delivers. Type in your brand name, and you'll discover the average sentiment, level of passion, and reach associated with it. 
• Tracking software: Turbine Labs naturally integrates into your existing technology to provide real-time feedback about your digital presence. Using automated tools from a reputable company also gives you the backing of a professional team, available to answer questions and help you make sense of all the valuable data you get in return. 

From press release distribution and social media coverage, there is so much that you can do to track your organization's press coverage. 

Learn more information about tracking your organization’s press coverage by reading our blog.

Media Misinformation: Avoid Bias and Incorrect Sources for Your Business

Many forms of media tend to have some type of bias or underlying message that they may be putting forward, which could influence business leaders to make uninformed decisions without realizing it.

This is why it is so important for consumers to understand what to look for when it comes to bias and misinformation. In recent data from Statista, 38.2% of Americans have accidentally shared false information, and over two-thirds of Americans believe that false information leads to a great deal of confusion.

Eliminate the risk of using biased news when making key business decisions by eliminating consumption of that news in the first place. Keep reading to learn more about what you can do to stay informed and prevent the possibility of making uninformed decisions due to untrue data and media.

There are three large categories of media misinformation. These categories are:

• Misinformation: Misinformation is any type of information that is presented as factual that is actually incorrect. It can be anything from statements, misleading information, or information that is full of omissions. Typically, this information is unverified. 

• Disinformation: Disinformation is deliberately incorrect. This type of information is written by someone whose goal is to misinform you for whatever reason they may have. 

• Bias: Bias can be both deliberate and unintentional, which is why it is important to look for it. Depending on what the bias is, this information may be swaying towards one perspective over the other. Bias can be relatively easy to spot. However, if you’re unsure of the media site your information is coming from, it may be more difficult to catch. 

While these forms may be harder or easier to identify depending on the source you’re getting the media from, there are ways that you can avoid media misinformation. 

Tools to Avoid Media Misinformation

Media misinformation can easily happen, and it is almost impossible to avoid. Most media is being written by a real human being, which is why it can have implicit notions within it. However, there are some tools that you can use to help avoid that misinformation. These tools are as follows: 

• Use multiple sources 

• Consider publication history

• Beware of bias by omission

• Identify the agenda

• Look for implicit bias

• Go beyond the initial headlines

• Consult experts in that field

• Utilize technology and media tracking tools 

To learn more about how you can avoid media misinformation and what tools are most useful, view our guide.

How to Gain Competitive Intelligence Through Media Monitoring 

While every business utilizes the data they collect to learn more about their customers and what's going on internally, it’s also extremely important to monitor how your competitors are doing. Understanding your competitors is one of the most essential ways to develop strategic marketing, products, and sales goals. 

While competitive intelligence can get overlooked, it is easier than ever to stay up to date and proactively monitor the media that is surrounding your business. Media monitoring can include everything from what people are saying about your company to what other similar businesses are doing within the industry. You’ll be able to learn both the good and the bad and grow from there. 

Media monitoring and competitive intelligence offer a world of benefits. Of course, you’re responding to real-time reviews, comments, and concerns, but there are so many other benefits you will experience, including: 

• Avoiding stagnancy

• Finding direct and indirect competitors 

• Investigating and learning more about your competitors

• Finding new business opportunities

How to Start Utilizing Competitive Intelligence

Manually 

You can use competitive intelligence by manually using search engines, like Google, and to find information on your business there. You can also search for similar businesses in the area and conduct your own research. 

While this is a great way to start, it can be extremely time-consuming and even lead to information overload. You could also be missing key information.

Using Technology

Utilizing technology to do the work for you allows you to get real-time and accurate data about your competitors that you can use to your advantage. It's quick, easy to use, and gives you key information that you can use to your advantage. You can even see what your competitors are doing, which can help you learn and grow or help you avoid mistakes that they may be making in their media. 

Learn more by checking out our blog post.  

Master Media Monitoring with Turbine Labs

Our world is dominated by the media, and you can use it to your advantage. Our technology will scour digital sources for misinformation, disinformation, and bias and deliver you content that truly enhances your publications. Not only does this help you get the information you need, but it also helps you avoid potential issues and know how to respond to various problems that might affect your business. 

Utilizing media monitoring in your business is one of the best ways that you can grow, outshine your competitors, and best serve your customers. Turbine Labs shows you everything you need in order to accurately monitor your media. If you’re ready to get started, connect with our team and schedule a demo today!