Robin Gurney of Altex alerted me to this Free Pint post. It is a very good run-down of tools that are available for monitoring more than just newspaper clips. Here are some of the search engines that Patrice K. Curtis recommends in her article.
IceRocket <http://www.icerocket.com/>-
Technorati <http://www.technorati.com/>-
Google <http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch>-
BlogPulse <http://www.blogpulse.com/> -
Blogger (Google-owned) <http://www.blogger.com/start>-
Bloglines <http://www.bloglines.com/>-
Feedster <http://www.feedster.com/>-
del.icio.us <http://del.icio.us/>-
Podcast Alley <http://www.podcastalley.com/>-
Podcast.Net <http://www.podcast.net/>-
Podzinger <http://www.podzinger.com/>
Monitoring in this digital age need not be scary stuff.
One would expect every PR person to be aware of such tools. After all, if you issue a press release to your favourite newspaper and it does not create Google Juice, it got lost in the post.
I would add 'The Daily Chase' and CyberAlert to the list to help my customers with thier on-line monitoring to ensure the sweep is as complete as possibe (news, Usenet and New Media - a bundle that costs justs over £450 per month – but less of the advertising already).
The issue that really faces us is the capability to extract, de-duplicate and and make sense of all this intelligence. There is far too much 'stuff' here to be read and digested and it would consume the life of any PR person to the detriment of pro-active work.
With Girish, the head of software development at the Springboard PR in Bangalore, I have been working on a capability that take any combination of RSS feeds and summarise the content under subject headings with access through to the original stories and posts (We keep a blog running on developments for those who have a technical interest).
The subject headings are derived as part of a Latent Semantic Analysis process in effect creating a newspaper 'on the fly'.
These are very Web 2.0 and are going to be valuable as we move from clippings and 'evaluation' towards intelligence gathering.
Picture: Mask Mashup by Bonnie Gillard
Just came across this post and I find your approach to media monitoring spot on - too much emphasis is put on the clipping aspect of media monitoring. As you have written about before, the most interesting aspect of media monitoring is where we can identify behavior changes (such as I link to an article as I find it interesting). The software project you are working on seems to be an interesting move in this direction.
ReplyDeleteGlenn