Media monitoring and daily news brief production is a ton of work, but you can scale your program effectively and ensure your team delivers the best possible ROI on media intelligence activities with the help of this step-by-step guide from Fullintel’s AMEC-certified experts.

Learn the important steps of planning and executing a full media monitoring program, from finding the right content – and working with content licensors to stay on the right side of copyright – to developing the most effective Boolean search strings to monitor for your company, products, services, competitors, or other topics and subtopics.

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Learn how to monitor the right way

For example, it’s easy for inexperienced teams to overlook the importance of developing the right Boolean phrasing, inclusions, and exclusions.

Keywords on their own will, unfortunately, inevitably bring in a ton of bad results without Boolean logic and modifiers. And lots of bad results equals more work for your team, typically very early in the morning as they’re monitoring the news and creating that morning’s news brief.

Examples of modifiers for inclusions and exclusions are parentheses, OR, AND, or NOT, along with quotation marks for phrases. Generic words, such as “apple” or “box”, should always have modifiers or you’ll be buried in irrelevant results. 

Similarly, some teams might overlook the importance of consistently monitoring and updating the health of your search strings over time.

The wrong keywords or search phrases – even a small punctuation mark that’s out of place – can negatively impact your results, sometimes with disastrous results.  

Additionally, things change. Companies can undergo rebranding, mergers, acquisitions, or other big changes that inevitably require changes on your end, as well. Indeed, what was once an accurate search string can become completely inaccurate in a matter of minutes.

That’s why it’s vital to continually assess and refine (if necessary) keyword lists as time passes and requirements change, and to catch any potential issues that may hinder your search over the long-term.

Tips from an award-winning team

Fullintel’s expert teams of media monitoring specialists, curators, and media analysts are certified measurement and evaluation experts by the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC). 

They’ve got years of experience developing and maintaining the media monitoring and briefings programs of major international brands, and even won three AMEC Awards in 2021 for excellence in communications measurement.

Our media monitoring and analysis team always deploys the latest in traditional and social media monitoring technology and approaches, including human curation for always-relevant actionable news and AI-driven media monitoring for accurate real-time results. 

At the same time, Fullintel’s deep knowledge around the best media metrics and methodologies to meet your goals can help your team make sense of your media monitoring results once your program is up to full speed.

Download our new whitepaper here. If you have any questions on how Fullintel’s award-winning media intelligence teams can help your organization’s PR and communications efforts, please contact us today.

Andrew is Co-Founder and President of Fullintel. His 25-plus years of media intelligence experience helps large organizations and Fortune 1000 companies such as Textron, AAA, Clorox, Kraft Heinz, MUFG, and Bell plan and implement day-to-day and crisis media monitoring and analysis strategies and best practices. He also co-founded dna13, the world’s first software-as-a-service media monitoring platform, which was eventually acquired by PR Newswire.