How you use monitoring – understanding platform features that provide service
When looking for a media monitoring platform, features are frequently top of mind. To get the most out of any service, you will need to understand how it will perform the tasks you expect of a monitoring tool.
Knowing how often a monitoring tool searches for new content, for example, is crucial to understanding what you can expect out of the service in terms of updated reporting.
Large, global organisations may need a range of language capabilities so a platform’s capabilities in this area should be investigated. Language content capabilities can be quite a broad range, so fully understanding the differences between services will help you to determine which is the right fit.
Data speed, quality, and use
How frequently does the tool scan sources for new content?
News and social media both move very fast. Some services monitor social content periodically throughout the day, but scan traditional media sources only once or twice during a 24-hour period.
Sometimes, this is dependent upon the technology used, which is why the in-house vs. off-the-shelf point mentioned above is an important question to ask. Or, it can be a question of timing. For example, if the monitoring service collects data from a prominent international source once a day at noon, and you receive a daily digest of content at 8:00 a.m., the content in your morning digest will always be around 20 hours behind the current news cycle.
For some applications, this delay might not matter much. But if you are depending on a monitoring service to deliver news that you can act on—in other words, if timeliness is important—determining how frequently your monitoring service scans news sources is a critical question to ask a potential provider.
How does the system treat gated content?
Talk to them about hard-to-reach datasets, such as paywalled content. Increasingly, mainstream media organisations are seeking to monetise their content, and trade publications have long required subscriptions for access. Many of these types of publications can charge because they are considered top-tier media. The absence of these results would be missed—so if these results are important to you, find out how the monitoring provider manages paywalls.
How may wider stakeholders interact with data generated by the software?
This is a straightforward question when one considers what companies use media monitoring for—namely, the discovery and assessment of media content identified through keyword searching. Clearly, you want to be able to provide those results to circles of stakeholders beyond just the team doing the direct monitoring. However, the answer to this question can surface some of the challenges the current media climate is facing, such as paywalled or gated content.
It is, therefore, an important question to ask and have answered before you sign up for a service. If stakeholders receive an email digest of daily content, are they provided links to the original material? If the results are from broadcast media (such as television or radio), are transcripts available? Are charts and graphs static or interactive?
The answers to these questions will be important to you as you consider how a monitoring service will meet the reporting needs of your organisation.
Can the platform deliver specialised reports?
The capabilities of the platform should at least match what you are doing now in terms of reporting. In a best-case scenario, if you are considering replacing an existing vendor the new service should help you to improve and expand your reporting processes.
Have examples ready, or ask what they recommend. Make note of whether it is easy to develop reports, or challenging. Ask about email formats, or “white labelling” if those features are important to you. How are graphs or other visual features exported? Can you quickly design professional reports?
You want a monitoring service that makes your work easier, and that should include reporting out results.
Technology and Integration
How are you using AI?
It is important to learn as much as possible about technology features, such as artificial intelligence (AI). AI has a great deal of potential to improve and streamline media monitoring services, but in some cases it is being deployed as a gimmick rather than actually improving a service.
What are your language capabilities?
Language capabilities are features heavily dependent on technology—this question could reasonably be included in either section. Companies with global reach should ask about language capabilities, and how the tool treats international content. Is it siloed region by region, or is it fully integrated as a global monitoring service? Technology can differ, even within a monitoring company as some use different toolsets in different areas. This can mean there is no connectivity between regions, making global analysis challenging.
How does the monitoring firm treat APIs?
Application programming interfaces (APIs) basically allow software applications to work with one another. An API is what allows a monitoring tool to pull information from a platform like a social network and then process that data for use in the monitoring platform. This permission is important to reach datasets, and for troubleshooting if it is ever necessary.
Essentially, in a monitoring service, media sources are both the product and a third party. So, if any problems arise with the technology that prevent data from flowing correctly from the source to the platform, having authorisation to pull the data—through an API—means they are much more likely to try and correct the problem.
Conclusion
The data delivered to your monitoring dashboard is important to your success. Asking questions about where the data come from, how frequently it is sourced, and how it can be distributed should be part of your search process. Find features truly relevant to your needs, and the monitoring firm should be able to explain to you how they are investing in the user experience. The ability to access data and use it should not be an afterthought.
