A Simple Guide on Measuring Media Coverage of Your Story......
You are an organisation with a story to tell and you've made contact with the media - print, TV, radio and online - perhaps in the form of a media release. Now you want to know how your efforts have fared. You have two options. One, you could scour the media yourself, including setting up a Google Alert and seeing what pops into your email box.
Or, secondly, you could hire a media monitoring agency, who can not only scour on your behalf but apply a bit of science too.
If it's latter, then read on.....
According to Wikipedia, the first press clippings media monitor was set up in London, in 1852, by a Polish newsagent called Romeike. It says: "Actors, writers, musicians and artists would visit his shop to look for articles about themselves in his Continental stock and he realised that he could use this vanity to turn a profit."
Originally, gangs of early-risers would read all the newspapers and physically cut out articles of interest to their clients, a process known as ‘black-handing', for obvious reasons. Eventually, these cuts would be faxed over, then, more recently, scanned as PDFs.
Nowadays, some companies by-pass the newspapers' print editions altogether and scan only their online content.
And, increasingly, the ‘traditional media' of print, TV and radio are being joined by websites, social networks and blogs as places that merit monitoring.
But there's more to monitoring than just collating namechecks and column inches. It is possible to have one's media coverage evaluated for tone, positioning (eg where on what newspaper page) and how much it would have cost to have taken out advertising instead.
And of course, media monitoring can also be deployed to track the media profile of rivals and also the progress of trends, such as pieces of legislation.
One of the UK's biggest media monitoring agencies is Edinburgh-based Press Data (here), which also has an office in London. It supports allmediascotland via advertising.
But don't forget to ask one vital question: what are one's obligations regarding having a licence issued by the Newspaper Licensing Association www.nla.co.uk and the Copyright Licensing Association www.cla.co.uk?
