15 Services Your Measurement or Monitoring Vendor Should Supply—But Probably Doesn’t

Elsewhere in this issue we go into a fair amount of gory detail about bad measuring/monitoring systems. In “Market Mergers Bring Good News to Shareholders, Not So Much To Customers,” we explain that recent mergers in the measurement industry have not, in general, brought better service for clients. And in “The 10 Biggest Mistakes When Hiring a Media Monitoring Vendor,” tell you how not to hire a vendor.

So now, let’s look on the bright side. Here are 15 services you should expect from a good, up-to-date monitoring/measurement vendor:

1. They pledge to adhere to all industry standards.
2. They have ability to collect all the data from your media list, regardless if it is social or traditional media.
3. They automatically provide clean data free of duplicate clips.
4. They work with you to refine the search string to ensure that you are getting the data you want.
5. They screen out press releases and other non-news items , like wedding and death notices, etc.
6. They deliver data that is free of spam content, like press releases who use links to a brand in the boiler plate in an attempt to create more Google juice.
7. They test and clean your search strings to ensure that they don’t bring in content that has no bearing on your client’s brand, like Tweets from people who share the name but nothing more.
8. They present you with a detailed set of collection and coding instructions that are tested and approved by you before they begin.
9.  They are capable of collecting and analyzing clips in more than just English.
10. They offer customer support when the client is working, regardless of time zone.
11. Their sentiment analysis is regularly tested and performs at minimum of 85% intercoder reliability.
12. They have the ability to analyze for messages and issues if required.
13. They seamlessly integrate social and traditional media data in to a single system. For extra credit they can also include social and web analytics data.
14. They can work with you to refine your top tier media list and define new influencers.
15. They under-promise and over-deliver. ∞