If you want to know what is media monitoring, understand that this strategy is about monitoring and analyzing news, and building reports to report communication results.
This is the premise of the clipping strategy, which is also called media monitoring or simply “clipping”.
However, it is important to remember that there is a fine line that separates understanding what is clipping and building a good media monitoring strategy.
After all, it is necessary to think about structure, keywords, objectives and, especially, the alternatives for monitoring journalistic content on a daily basis.
What is clipping in the press office routine?
Those who work with press advisory know that media monitoring is one of the bases of the profession.
After all, from the analysis of mentions about brands, companies and celebrities that have been covered by the press, it is possible to monitor the news:
- Understand how the press sees the brand.
- Identify triggers of crisis.
- Anticipate problems.
- To manage the brand’s reputation in the media.
- To understand the media that guide the brand.
- Accompany the competitor’s actions.
- Monitor political and economic movements.
- Identify image associations.
- Analyze the sentiment of the mentions.
- Obtain data to execute a more strategic communication.
In other words, news monitoring goes far beyond the act of clipping stories and filing them away, as was done in the old days.
Today, clipping takes on a strategic role to ensure a complete overview of a company’s image in the media. And this helps the press office to avoid slips in the brand’s reputation, for example.
In addition, to understand what clipping is, it is necessary to understand that press relations have suffered several impacts with the digital environment.
This means that today we have to follow up mentions in traditional and digital vehicles, as well as in social networks.
Also, it is necessary to go beyond media monitoring. It is necessary to analyze the journalistic content from a qualitative and quantitative point of view.
Only this way we will be able to act strategically in the press office, ensuring satisfactory results to communication clients.
However, to do this, it is necessary to know how to structure a results clipping. And this is where many professionals make mistakes.
How to structure a results media monitoring
To structure a news monitoring of results, it is important to think about the concept of clipping and organize the ideas in steps.
These steps will help you achieve a more schematized vision to explain to your client what is clipping and the impact of journalistic content on the image of brands.
Furthermore, organizing the process in steps makes it easier to create reports. After all, you will know what the objectives of a particular monitoring are.
So, let’s go to the steps of a good news clipping.
1. Definition of objectives
The first step in good news monitoring is goal setting. This is where you will identify what you want to track and what you want to understand with clipping.
In other words, this step is building the floor of your strategy.
Without a good definition of objectives, all the other steps become noisy and with uncertain results.
After all, how can we choose keywords or metrics to analyze journalistic articles if we don’t know what we want to achieve?
So, before understanding what is clipping as a structure, go back a few steps and ask yourself the following question.
“What is the context of the media monitoring I want to do?”
From this you will be able to organize the clipping into categories such as monitoring about the client, about the competition, about crises or political movements.
2. Choice of keywords
The second step in good clipping is the choice of the keywords that will be monitored.
And it is as important as the definition of objectives. After all, key terms are the basis for searching content in the digital environment.
It is from them that we will segment the scope of the clipping or that we will make the search more comprehensive.
So from now on, before you get down to business, take a breath and define which keywords matter for your news monitoring.
And you can organize this process as follows:
- Go back to the objectives of your clipping and understand what is the context you want to analyze.
- From there, map the relevant terms for clipping, according to the important themes for the strategy.
- Think about terms related to the brand you manage.
- Include terms related to the competition.
- Don’t forget keywords aligned to the brand’s industry or political context.
- Understand that keywords can be the name of the spokesperson, the brand name, product names, among others.
Also, understand that the definition of the keywords is aligned with the effectiveness of the clipping.
After all, the more precise the words are, the richer results your monitoring will achieve.
3. Clipping execution
The third stage of a good clipping is the way we perform news monitoring and analysis.
In other words, this is the time to choose alternatives to optimize the clipping and bring effective results aligned to your professional context.
And one of the things we need to consider is that, today, clipping is much more comprehensive than printed newspaper, radio, and TV.
This matters, of course, but we cannot forget the digital stories as well.
Media Monitoring Services
The first alternative to optimize news monitoring is to invest in a media monitoring service companies like Knewin Monitoring.
In fact, clippers are usually the first answer when you think about what clipping is. After all, they are partners and extensions of the press office work.
To summarize, the clipping service helps you optimize the monitoring and analysis of news from a team that is responsible for the task.
With the premise of uniting customer service and technology, media monitoring service companies such as Knewin Monitoring act as a curator for clipping and ensure the delivery of qualitative and quantitative reports on the news.
Finally, if you want to know the work of a clipping company, click here and get to know Knewin Monitoring.
4. News monitoring analysis
With the clipping done and the news list ready, it’s time to analyze the contents from qualitative and quantitative angles.
The most used qualitative criterion at this moment is the categorization of the journalistic contents in neutral, negative and positive, according to the impact of that story on a company’s image.
In other words, this is the time to do sentiment analysis.
So, assess the impact of a particular story, keyword, or theme. In fact, it is important to make this differentiation in order to understand the repercussion of a particular term or subject in the press.
After organizing the stories monitored by sentiment, you can calculate the centimeters (advertising equivalence), evaluate the motivation of the content (spontaneous or provoked), and even understand what the tier of the media is.
The important thing is to understand that this clipping analysis is individual and has to be aligned with the objectives of news monitoring.
5. Creating Reports
Reporting is the last step in understanding what effective clipping is. And they have to do with the act of reporting communication results.
It is at this moment that you will show your client the impact of the journalistic articles on the company’s image and reputation. In addition, you will also be able to demonstrate the value of the communication work from the insertion of provoked and spontaneous stories.
However, the important thing is not to leave reports aside and to organize the strategy according to the needs of your professional context.
You can create daily, weekly and monthly clipping reports, for example. Each one has its particularities, but all can be optimized with the help of media monitoring service companies.
In addition, you need to remember that reports can be built from the news listing or they can go further, focusing on the metrics used to analyze the news content.
Finally, if you want to achieve an effective clipping that is inserted in the digital information scenario, click here and talk to one of our consultants. We have solutions to make your news monitoring much more strategic.
