Our Measurement Vendor Selection Guide begins down below. It is designed to be used along with Paine Publishing’s:
- 8 Quick Tips for Finding the Perfect Communications Measurement Vendor
- Checklist for Picking the Perfect Communications Measurement Vendor, and
- Vendor Evaluation Spreadsheet.
A decade ago someone posed me a question: “Hey Measurement Queen, how big is your realm?”
So I put it into context for them: Suppose there was an “empire” of paid advertising and marketing, and it was the size of North America. Then the slightly smaller kingdom of earned media (PR, social, public affairs, ESG, CSR, community relations, etc.) would be about the size of the US. The even smaller duchy of paid advertising measurement would be about the size of California. And the even smaller county of earned media measurement would about the size of Strafford County, New Hampshire. That would be my realm.
The county of earned media measurement has grown a bit since back then. It’s now the size of New England, if you believe the the G2 Report on Media Monitoring. But you can take that with a shaker of Gulf of Maine sea salt. I’ve been around this business for over 30 years and half the names on G2’s list I’ve never heard of. And apparently no one else has either, judging by the number of reviews they’ve received.
Too many “media monitoring” companies
Some of the names on G2’s list have already closed their doors (CyberAlert, for example). Others have been subsumed into mega-platforms like Cision and Onclusive. Others serve incredibly niche markets.
Many shouldn’t even call themselves “media monitoring” companies. (See our No Bullsh*t PR Measurement Glossary for what’s what on the lingo.) Alpha Sense is a great example. Yes, they monitor media. But their end result is to connect you with customers, not tell you how your communications program is doing.
The reality is that it is now so easy to crawl news feeds, and so much of your “mentions” happen in social media. So anyone can start a media monitoring company in their basement—and many probably have.
We do not need all these alleged monitoring companies. Which is why there is continuing consolidation in the marketplace.
The day-to-day problem for us in the business is that all these companies keep banging on our virtual doors to make their sales pitches. And most of them hide their prices, so you have to listen to find out if you can afford them. It’s no wonder that every other day there’s a post in the PRSA Forum asking “What’s the best media monitoring tool?“
Don’t talk to a vendor until you have your goals in place
No matter how often I tell people that “Selecting a Tool” is the second-to-last step in the measurement process, they still seem to think that tools are the first thing to think about. And when you probe for what they actually want the tool to do, the answers are all over the map.
[Click here to take a look at
our many articles on the 6 Steps of Measurement.]
Here’s a cautionary tale of why you shouldn’t talk to even a single vendor until after you agree on goals:
Several years ago, I spent a day with a very worthy non-profit defining their communications goals and processes. After about six hours of discussion, we all agreed that their goals were to “increase trust and engagement among employees and volunteers.”
Later, when we got around to talking about tools, they mentioned that they had just signed an $80K contract with a well-known media measurement company. They wondered if that would measure the goals and metrics we had just defined.
My answer was, “Noooooo! You just agreed to measure trust and engagement among humans. No amount of media monitoring is going to measure that!“
Don’t get me wrong. I think every organization today needs to monitor and measure what is being said about them in earned (traditional and social) media. Not necessarily to justify the PR budget, but to make sure customers and employees aren’t in open revolt about something stupid someone affiliated with your company has just done or said.
The 2022 edition of our Measurement Vendor Selection Guide
I grudgingly acknowledge that at least some media monitoring tools are essential for certain purposes. Which is precisely why we began publishing our Vendor Selection Guide about a decade ago. The updated 2022 edition is below.
Note that, unlike the G2 report mentioned above, we do not describe or list every tool. Our Guide is built around a series of typical problem scenarios that you might use a tool to solve. These are problems, questions, and quandaries that your average professional communicator faces every week. And this list grows longer every year.
The good news is that, given the volume of tools and technology out there, you will probably find a tool to solve every one of those problems. But it depends on:
- the size of your budget (both for communicating and for measurement),
- the nature of your business,
- your level of comfort with “do-it-yourself” solutions, and
- your patience with the sales pitches.
We hope you find our annual Guide useful. Let us know if we missed anything or anyone important.
The fine print, in the interest of transparency: It is our business here at Paine Publishing to fulfill some of the measurement needs that our Guide addresses. Generally, we help clients pull together existing data into dashboards and insight reports using whatever tools our clients have in house.
However, when our smaller companies have very specific needs, we find ourselves actually doing the research, be it surveys or media monitoring. When they need very specialized, human-curated daily news alerts, and the amount of media activity is so small that it doesn’t warrant the cost of a full-blown platform, we provide those.
So, in full disclosure, here are the tools we typically use: LexisNexis NewsDesk, because it fits our clients’ budgets and gets the specific media outlets that they need. Also, Talkwalker, AnswerThePublic, Hootsuite, SparkToro, Awario, Brand24, Google News, Google Trends, and Google Analytics—depending on how much data they need and what metrics their objectives call for.
[table “53” not found /]Big thanks for the image above to Arek Socha on Pixabay.
