What is worth monitoring
and how do you get the information?

Media monitoring is an increasingly common way of obtaining information from public sources, in order to answer specific questions related to the image of a business, its performance, its competition or new trends. But how to choose what to monitor and what to do with the information obtained? These are the questions we are going to answer.

In the previous article we have already mentioned the main sources of public information: radio, TV, printed or digital press, social networks, podcasts, and streaming services that include news. The problem lies in making the most of the information accessed. When it comes to text (websites, forums, posts written on social networks) there is no problem, any current analysis system (of which there are dozens) is able to find keywords, relate them to each other and draw some conclusions or pass the material to a Big Data analysis system that does the hard work.

But what about video or audio elements? On YouTube alone, 720,000 hours of video are uploaded every day. That’s a lot of potential information that traditional systems can’t interpret. That’s why advanced media monitoring platforms like Videoma Monitor make it possible to analyze video and audio, making transcripts of everything that is said, with what is passed to a text medium, which can be processed by the aforementioned Big Data systems. But not only that. With face and object recognition systems, a whole set of extremely valuable metadata can be created to analyze and get more context from a video. This is the trend today in AV Broadcast, as video can add additional dimensions to the analytics being performed.

“Media monitoring is an extremely valuable source of information for gaining insights into economic, social and political aspects of current affairs.”

What information can you get?

As in all disciplines of data analysis, the information that can be obtained is limited only by the imagination of the researcher. In the specific case of media monitoring, following are some of the possibilities, but the uses are virtually unlimited:

  • Number of mentions. This is one of the most common metrics and indicates how many times the searched information has appeared, what day and what time and, most importantly: how long it was or what fragment has been published.
  • Potential or estimated reach. It’s the value that indicates how many people have been able to see the impressions that have appeared, in order to evaluate the success of a given campaign or statement.
    Trending topics. It allows to show if the searched words are currently trending.
  • Share of Voice. This indicates what part of all current mentions belongs to the client being searched for, and what part belongs to the competition.
  • Sentiment analysis. A somewhat more complex metric, which requires the intervention of AI to perform semantic analysis to find out with what tone and in what context the searched terms have appeared.
  • Top profiles. Indicates who has spoken the most about the terms we are interested in, which allows us to assess the interest in the information and in which sectors it appears.
  • Top locations. Similarly, this metric provides a list of the main locations where the topic under analysis is discussed.
  • Top sources. And, to round off the information, with this KPI (closely related to the first one) it is possible to know which media have echoed the information the most.

“The data set that an advanced analytics application is capable of obtaining from simple public media input is spectacular and can answer very complex questions.”

Media Monitoring uses

With all the above information it is easy to see that the uses of media monitoring are practically unlimited. Not only in the area of communication and marketing, but also in security, politics, medicine, sociology and other fields it is important to know how a certain information is disseminated and by which media channel. Thanks to artificial intelligence and Big Data systems, digital media analysis is possible on a large scale and by linking hundreds or thousands of information sources.

Whether it’s discovering an emerging market trend, measuring the performance of sales or marketing efforts, analyzing the competition, monitoring reputation or mitigating potential crises, media monitoring can help. And today it is available to anyone, as technologies are so advanced that with minimal investment or even as an on-demand service, the desired results can be achieved. The time savings compared to traditional analysis is considerable, and it also makes it possible to improve services and the focus of public or press actions.

Historical monitoring

Strictly speaking, media monitoring, by its very nature, does not take into account historical data, but only what is happening right now. If the analyst needs to take into account trends or evolutions, you need to combine the data obtained through media monitoring with other historical data (preferably from the same channels to allow comparison) and perform a completely different analysis.

To learn more about the usefulness of media monitoring in today’s world, check out part I of this article from ISID.