Monitoring is fun! (No, really…it is.)

The Thanksgiving travel (Vegas for my brother’s birthday, my fiancé’s parents’ for Turkey Day), hustle and bustle is over. However, the rush of the holiday season is upon us and I’m looking forward to the end-of-the-year client wrap-ups, doing some well-needed file organization and – what I’m really looking forward to – an unexpected trip to our office in London. In advance of a class I’m putting together, I thought I would take a few minutes to share some notes about a subject us junior staffers know and love oh, so well: media monitoring.

I remember physically cutting stories out of the Chicago Tribune from the heaping pile of newspapers on my desk when I worked at the Ravinia Festival, gluing them to Legal-size pieces of paper, fuddling with the copier for hours and finally coming out with my weekly clip report, only to find that I had accidentally turned a page backwards and had to start over again. Now, it’s a different ballgame during a crisis and GoogleNews, Factiva and others make it easier to sift through thousands of pieces of information to find what is most vital to our clients. Below are some basic monitoring tips some fellow PR people may find helpful.

It’s painful, but it’s important
We may not like to do it, but in an issues management or crisis management program, monitoring can be one of the most important pieces of intelligence used to make decisions. A valuable monitoring report gives the client a snapshot of their communications environment: Are our messages being communicated effectively? What are our stakeholders saying about us? How has the situation changed in the last hour, day or even year?

Know your neighborhood
Every person, company or industry that needs monitoring intelligence has its own set of publications, web sites, blogs and forums that are critical to watch, aside from the client’s hometown newspaper or TV station. Know the most influential blogs in your industry and read them once (even twice) per day. Find the communications channels in their neighborhood and stick to them because those will be where news often originates.

Use your trash detectorThe more you search, especially in the web space, the more bogus items you will find. News aggregators, fake blogs and an endless supply of information on the web can make it extremely difficult to identify the most important information. The more time you spend getting to “know your neighborhood,” the quicker you’ll be able to pass over the less important sites. If it doesn’t look important at first glance, it probably isn’t.

Have an extensive toolkit
It seems that every day there is a new “innovative” way to collect and analyze information online. Research as many monitoring tools as possible and find the ones that are right for you and your clients. The tools may change from client to client, and that’s a good thing. Also, don’t be surprised if you need to go through a few tools before you find the right ones. For starters, try: GoogleNews, Google Blog Search, BlogPulse, Technorati or BlogDigger.

Analysis counts
No matter what they tell you, all the monitoring tools in the world can’t make up for human analysis. Use your tools as an information-gathering service and use your gut and your mind to write intelligent analysis. After all, clients pay us for our strategy and our insight, not just to get a report full of only articles and hyperlinks.