Today’s PR monitoring tools provide more than just a report on recent coverage. These tools provide PR pros with the capabilities to monitor their competitors, position clients as thought leaders, curate media lists, develop strategic content and provide insight for paid media opportunities.
What’s in our toolkit?
Our team has used, tested and previewed multiple monitoring systems over the years. While it is clear there is no one perfect tool, the following trio is a robust system that allows us to listen, analyze and create meaningful content for our clients.
Meltwater
Meltwater is a real-time public relations and social media listening and reporting tool. This platform provides daily reports on client coverage and can track coverage throughout the year to determine trends.
We use its functionality to take a holistic snapshot of your organization by viewing the content stream, and comparing data sets by platforms or geographic areas. We are also able to look at keywords, sentiments by source, emotional reactions and top-performing hashtags.
Meltwater also has a function to help curate media lists. This is especially useful for a specialist new to an industry or market as well as for people who are tasked with multiple roles within their organization.
What we love about it
- Easy-to-read visual representations of coverage, including a content stream with links to the news clips and print articles.
- Spike detection. Users receive an alert to an increase in coverage for their client or for their competitor. This is a useful feature in times of crisis as well as in support of reputation management.
- Robust dashboards. We can see all the things and break down insights for deep dives into online chatter and media mentions.
- The ability to dial in to trending themes. We see which words are occurring most often in the coverage and can use the insight to create meaningful thought leadership content.
If you are considering adding Meltwater to your toolkit, set up the platform at the beginning of a campaign or planning year and identify KPIs to determine what you will be measuring against.
Good to know
Meltwater, like other large monitoring services, does not have the ability to pick up small publications like rural and small-town newspapers. We use a separate tool to monitor those mentions.
Newz Group
Newz Group monitors small weekly and monthly publications. Its coverage maps are broken down by county. This allows us to see who is covering the topics and what geographic areas have room for growth.
Reports show us which outlets are covering an organization, as well as the keywords used in their coverage. This is helpful insight when creating paid media copy as well as developing concentrated public relations efforts.
What we love
- The ability to monitor client coverage as well as their competitors in publications with a smaller audience.
- Keyword frequency. We can see how many mentions appear in an article and can click in to determine the quality and sentiment of those mentions.
- Small-town papers tend to be widely read by locals. This tool provides us an opportunity to monitor this important medium.
Good to know
Reporting by Newz Group is not instantaneous. Newz Group actively reads the papers and clips articles. It is reasonable to expect a one- to two-week delay for reporting and uploads of articles to their system.
GlobeNewswire
GlobeNewswire is a leading wire distribution service for widespread news release distribution. This is a great tool for announcements or for targeting an entire state, region or industry.
What we love
- Ability to customize delivery by industry or geography.
- Wire distribution helps our clients be searchable and findable. This is especially important to establishing a reputation and building credibility.
- With or without news coverage, the release remains searchable and positions our client as a thought leader.
Good to know
There is a hard cost associated with each distribution. Those costs are determined by how wide the distribution is, the number of trade publications included in the distribution as well as the word length of the news release.
Ready to upgrade your toolkit? These tools can streamline your public relations efforts by helping you monitor mentions across multimedia channels, manage your company’s reputation, amplify your reach and be more strategic with editorial planning. Ready to learn more?