Centralized Management of Media Monitoring

Abstract

Media monitoring is the process of reading, watching, or listening to the editorial content of media sources on a continuous basis, and then, identifying, saving, and analyzing content that contains specific keywords or topics. Organizations are increasingly employing social media monitoring to assist public relations, marketing, competitive intelligence, customer service, product development, and so forth. An increasing number of successful case studies, better monitoring and measurement tools, and better understanding of data analytics continue to encourage more brands to embrace social media monitoring.

With the increased emphasis on ROI for corporate communications, effective media monitoring serves both as a media intelligence service and success story showcasing organizations’ public relations and social media programs.

However, to activate a robust media monitoring plan, large buyers must address the critical question, whether to centralize this function or to allocate authority and responsibility to various local entities (e.g., international offices, regional centers, retail stores, franchisees, etc.). Numerous global corporations centralize media monitoring at corporate headquarters, and delegate day-to-day media management and marketing to local entities. This article sheds light on how the local entities assist in creating a centralized media monitoring framework.

Media Monitoring

The Background Most companies, government agencies, not-for-profit organizations, and individuals, such as authors and celebrities, utilize media monitoring as a tool to identify mentions of their organization, its brands, and executives in news media. Some organizations also deploy media monitoring tools to track the success of their news releases, find information about competitors and specific issues relevant to the organization, benchmark performance against competitors, manage corporate or brand reputation, gather industry intelligence, better understand the strengths and weaknesses of corporate communications, identify new business opportunities, and other purposes.

Centralized Management of Media Monitoring

The coordination of communication messages for Fortune 500 (F500) organizations require the centralization of media monitoring, especially of political and business related activities. Media monitoring at the corporate and product levels will be centralized, and what remain at local or regional level will be news specific to departments and local operations.