Never Miss a Media Mention Again
Many, many moons ago when I started my first internship, one of my tasks was to begin every morning with a media search.
That’s right. I sat down with the morning’s physical newspapers and went through every single one to ensure we weren’t missing any mentions of my nonprofit that weren’t on the internet. (Katie one time told me she used to review faxes.)
My, how far we’ve come.
In the year that just won’t quit (also known as 2020), we recommend using FREE online media monitoring tools to ensure you’re never taken unaware by a media mention. Here are our recommendations for the best tools to use, along with a step-by-step guide for getting started!
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Using Automated Media Tracking
Wait. Can we go back…what is a media monitoring tool? Glad you asked.
Media monitoring tools scour the internet for you and send you email alerts when the search terms you’re interested in are mentioned in the media. (Or, if you set them up to do so, blogs, varied webpages and Twitter, too.)
Not all media monitoring programs are created equal—and they certainly aren’t all free. That’s why I personally use two separate programs: Talkwalker Alerts combined with Google Alerts. I’ve found that by setting alerts in both, you can ensure you’re seeing a comprehensive list of news mentions.
Your Step-by-Step Guide to Setting up News Monitoring
1) Sign up for the free versions of Google Alerts and Talkwalker Alerts.
2) Choose your goal for media monitoring. Do you want to make sure you catch any mention of your company? Your leadership? Stay up-to-date on a topic that is important to you? Consider your goals and base your search terms on them.
We recommend creating a list of search terms for your company that includes your organization’s name and a list of your team members who may appear in media stories. For example, you’d set alerts for your CEO, policy director and main on-the-record spokesperson. If you’re working on a big campaign or focused on a policy initiative, you can create alerts for that as well!
3) Format your search terms carefully. For both Talkwalker and Google Alerts, you can use quotation marks and plus signs to ensure you are receiving the right alerts. For example, if I included Forthright Advising as a search term, I would get alerts for all the media stories that include the words Forthright or Advising. That would be way too many alerts, and likely pretty useless. However, if I add quotes around “Forthright Advising,” I will only see the stories that include our full firm name!
You can be as specific as you want while setting up these alerts. If I want to see specific mentions of our founder, Katie, and her board work, I could do this by using a combination of quotation marks and a plus sign:
“Katie Test Davis” + “The Hope Center at Pullen”
Pro tip: Being intentional about the way you set up your search terms ensures you’re not slogging through hundreds of articles (that don’t even matter to you!) every day.
4) Customize your search. Both Talkwalker and Google Alerts allow you to choose everything from which language you want to monitor to what type of sources to include. My biggest piece of advice here is to set your alerts to arrive once a day, and in all one email. Unless you’re working on a crisis or on a rapidly evolving policy campaign, once a day is plenty. This way you can look through them all at once, ensuring you don’t miss anything important as emails trickle in throughout the day!
How do you track media mentions? What other media-related challenges are you currently facing? We’d love to hear from you!
