If the media influence all the spheres of our lives and information is a strategic commodity which often decides about competitive advantage and market success, is acquisition of information through media monitoring a service worth paying for? Is it worth investing in information which comes from public sources in the era of information society? Or should we rather search for information on our own and not spend money on the services which theoretically our company can do without? This article is an attempt to answer the questions concerning the usefulness of outsourcing such information services.
There are a dozen companies which provide services related to the acquisition, delivery, and processing of information on the Polish media monitoring market. These services include press-clipping, Internet, radio, and television monitoring, assigning priority to newspapers and websites, calculating the Advertising Value Equivalent, auditing, and preparing post-buy, sponsoring, and image reports. If we add innovative technological solutions offered by these companies to this list, we can say that this market is exceptionally innovative. Access to comprehensive and current information is crucial for the market success of the company. When economic transformation began in Poland at the turn of the 1990s, apart from Polska Agencja Prasowa there were only three companies providing services connected with the delivery of multifaceted information from national newspapers. The press/information agency “GLOB” was the oldest. In 1991 after the privatisation of Documentation and Press Analyses Centre of the Wielkopolskie Wydawnictwo Prasowe, Wielkopolska Agencja Informacyjna PRESS-SERVICE (which changed its name in 2004 to PRESS-SERVICE Monitoring Mediów) was created, and in 1994 Mediaskop was set up. Technological development made it possible to broaden the scope of the services offered. In the late 1990s Instytut Monitorowania Mediów offered its potential clients the service of searching information from radio and television programmes, and PRESS-SERVICE Monitoring Mediów created the first generation electronic information portal which enabled direct search through the stored information and data management. A real breakthrough in the area of media monitoring occurred in 2001-2002, when its scope was broadened by the Internet. Seven years earlier the first Polish WWW server, Polish discussion groups, and free electronic mail accounts had been created. The first multimedia portals, notification systems for new publications, solutions allowing for access to publications from the level of mailbox or on-line through a browser appeared. In 2007 NetSprint (founded in 2000) designed its own Internet monitoring system which was subsequently transformed into a separate brand currently known as NewsPoint. Its next step was to create a system which would monitor the content created by Internet users. Thanks to increasing popularity and development of mobile phones Internet portals started to be adjusted to the parameters of particular cell phone models (data transfer, full-screen scaling) and mobile platforms were created. The dynamics of growth of the market of information services over the last dozen of years has shown that there was a high demand for information among companies. Today the value of the commercial media monitoring market is estimated at 20-30 million, and the success of many projects depends on competitive advantage and image of the media monitoring company.
Clients and their expectations
A study conducted in 2007 by a trade vortal PRoto suggests that companies use media monitoring mainly to check their corporate image and see if the press announcements were interpreted well and the materials sent to journalists had been used by them. It is also employed in order to make communication actions more efficient. The last case concerned negative information about the company. The monitoring data was used to find out what critical arguments the journalists made and to enable future contact with the author of the publication in order to change their negative attitude. The results of the same study showed that 29% of companies monitored the media on their own, and 74% conducted their own analysis of the acquired data. Respondents who used external media monitoring services said that the key criterion for the choice of the monitoring company was the quality of portals and service. The scope of the monitored media and individual approach to the client’s needs were also important.
It is natural that the companies which offer the broadest range of services and a sound IT infrastructure are the most popular. The basic requirement of the clients is that current information is delivered fast. It is also important that the employees are competent and experienced and the company has a good IT infrastructure which allows to place materials from all sources – printed press, Internet, radio and television - on the server and to store them for long periods of time. It is believed that the applied information/communication solutions are the key factor influencing economic modernisation, and the technological pillar is the fundament of information society. The main characteristics of the technological pillar include: the availability of equipment acquiring, processing, storing, and delivering information, and the possibility to combine it in various configurations. Information portals, also called ‘dedicated portals’ in the professional jargon, are designed to meet these criteria. They are not platforms which gather current information only, but have the option of adding also publications acquired from backward monitoring. In time they become a reference resource archive divided into catalogues defined by the client. Users have the possibility to add or remove topics and move materials to catalogues. Additional options make it possible to discover fast the context in which the key words defined by the client appeared in the publication. Another useful solution is the possibility to change the format of edited materials to text, send them to other people, find the information about the source, date, and author of the publication, or statistical data. In brief, these portals have everything which enables efficient data management.
Companies are interested in acquiring specific information connected with their industry. The fact that hundreds of press titles and thousands of websites are monitored is sometimes of secondary importance. Specific titles are crucial. If there are few trade press titles on the domestic market, the company will certainly be able to extract information from them on its own on condition that it allocates funds to the purchase of trade newspapers and additional remuneration of its employee, or the employment and training of a new one. Is it worth the effort? The valuation presented by a media monitoring company takes into account the number of key words (topics), predicted number of materials and the costs of their acquisition are related to the selection and additional description of materials so that they fully comply with the requirements of the order. If the price quoted by the media monitoring company is lower than the estimated cost of media monitoring carried out by the company’s employees, it pays off to consider ordering this service. Obviously, it will require trust in the reliability of service (the completeness of monitoring) and potential additional costs if a monthly subscription limit of materials is exceeded. It would be best to consider the usefulness of this service in the context of the client’s satisfaction with the amount and quality of information provided. It would be most desirable if the reply to the client’s enquiry would be longer than the enquiry itself. Strictly speaking, apart from relevant information, the client would also be informed about the things they did not ask about directly because they were unaware about their existence. It is called the satisfaction of hidden information needs. In the case of media monitoring information needs are expressed mainly as the issues, topics, and key words which are supposed to be monitored. Clients want to monitor particular press titles and sometimes define narrow and specialist areas of interest. Moreover, they expect to obtain precise information and relevant materials. To meet these needs it is necessary to specify the key words well, explain what information is relevant and what isn’t, and define the context in which the key words should appear.
The clients expect the broadest possible monitoring scope. They order many key words and ask for increasing the number of monitored websites. At the same time, they expect that the information from the new sources will be placed on their portals promptly. They do not realise that every system has its limitations and it is not always able to locate all the desired data in highly changeable Internet resources. Some materials will not be detected if e.g. the address of the website defined for monitoring changes. When clients increase the number of the monitored key words, they expect the information to be delivered on the day of publication, almost in real time. Acquiring all relevant information and sending it to clients in the shortest possible time is still a challenge to media monitoring companies. At the time being efforts to combine these two extremes affect the quality of service.
Specificity of media monitoring
Searching on the basis of key words is often connected, especially in the case of Internet monitoring, with the risk of finding messages of low informational value. Media monitoring companies do not conduct additional analyses of Internet sources. Therefore a subjective assessment of the reliability and quality of the material provided cannot be a reason for potential complaints. Nobody can guarantee either that all the relevant information is found and delivered within 24 hours. Unfortunately, delays will occur. It might also happen that the same article was published by various information portals and will be placed on the client’s portal in several copies. Depending on the information needs of the client, it might be useful to establish the range of a sponsored article, for example, but also a reason for complaints as then the service provider would charge a fee for the same article several times treating the copied material as separate publications. One should not forget that not all online publications have a date. If a given article did not have a date of publication, the search engine might detect it in daily monitoring as current information despite the fact that it was published online many months or even years before. It can misinform the clients and affect the company negatively. If clients complain about such problems, it means that the media monitoring company should improve its system of material searching and identification and for example add the standard service of monitoring the comments of Internet users as they always are published with a date. We should not forget that the date of publication of information on a website is not always identical with the date of its indexing by a search engine. Because search engines index websites within 24 hours, only current information is browsed. Older content may not be detected.
Similar problems concern the printed press. Clients usually are not willing to pay for the articles copied in other press titles, treating them as repetitions. In both cases the content of the article is more important to them than the information about the number of potential recipients, unless the client is a PR agency or the article was sponsored. All depends on the planned use of the monitoring data. Another difficulty concerns the access to information from all newspapers. Fast acquisition of information from regional media is still problematic due to the low availability of some titles and the costs related to it. One can never be 100 per cent sure that all titles are monitored or that information is placed on the portal on the same day as the newspaper is issued. The Internet is the chance for fast access to the information from regional media. Sponsored articles might also be problematic for press monitoring. Companies often publish materials promoting their new products or technological solutions as a part of marketing campaigns. If the client does not want these materials to be included or repeated in the monitoring results, he should send his service provider the information which would allow to locate the articles (press title, date of publication, pages). It is also possible to define the key words for which sponsored articles should be omitted before the start of the monitoring. The role of an analyst who will eliminate unwanted materials from monitoring results is crucial in this process. Then, however, the cost of the service will be higher. The delivery of publications whose acquisition and processing (selection of materials and content analysis) was more difficult is more expensive. It concerns specialist topics in particular.
If the radio and television monitoring results are placed on the portal within an hour and a half or two from their broadcast, it should be considered a good result. At present it is impossible to meet the clients’ expectations and monitor these media in real time. Taken the number of the monitored radio and television stations into consideration, there should be a separate media broadcast analyst employed for each of them, and their preferences concerning the type of programmes should be considered. Moreover, the employee’s experience must be matched with properly defined key words in order for the service to be effective. If for example the programmes about the Polish Financial Supervision Authority are searched for, the analyst cannot omit its Polish acronym – KNF – which should be associated with this institution. Knowledge, experience and being up to date with current events are crucial here. Some of the media monitoring companies have recently introduced solutions which reduce the human factor in radio and television monitoring processes. Speech-to-text programmes aim to make the search for key words more efficient and tighten up the system. Does this solution eliminate the gaps in tagging? It depends whether the system is supposed to monitor radio or television broadcast. One should not forget that only speech is registered and analysed. In case of television programmes, the information from the news ticker and captions identifying persons appearing in the programme will be omitted. Thus a speech-to-text programme will only be useful for radio monitoring.
The last problem which should be discussed to present a full picture of the usefulness and functionality of media monitoring is copyright. In April this year the Chamber of Press Publishers announced that legal changes in this field were necessary. It was a reaction to the activity of several press monitoring companies which earned a profit of press clippings without the knowledge and permission of publishing houses. They ignored the obligation to pay the fees for the commercial use of their materials. This problem does not only concern media monitoring companies, however. It is worth emphasising that clients also sometimes do not respect copyright and the laws protecting intellectual property. Some of them falsely assume that the materials delivered by the media monitoring company are their property because they paid for them. It happens from time to time that the publications are copied directly to their websites.
Realising the need for a useful service
When a client needs to acquire information, he usually searches for it in the sources which are easily accessible and about the existence of which he is aware. In 2008 LexisNexis and PBS DGA conducted a survey about the usefulness of monitoring services for economic briefing. Its results showed that 26% of the surveyed managers mentioned the monitoring of business press as a basic source of information about their competitors. They said that professional materials were not only easily available, but also the information presented in them was clear and relevant. Although the respondents evaluated the usefulness of information for their business activity highly, their opinion concerning the method of its acquisition is worth considering. The data suggests that it is best to collect the relevant strategic information on one’s own and using one’s own methods (personal contacts, fair, exhibitions, conferences, browsing through the press and Internet). One may wonder what influences this attitude. It is said that entrepreneurs are not aware of the existence of ready and simple solutions and know little about their usefulness. Moreover, the level of information culture is low, managers do not trust the companies which offer to acquire information for money and believe that the best information is collected on one’s own. Facts and statistics show, however, that 68% of the surveyed managers had a negative attitude to the providers of business information and justified their reluctance to use their services by saying that they simply did not need them. Over 60% of managers said that obtained information on their own, depending on the needs of the company. This information, then, was carefully chosen by the people with good knowledge of the market, customers, and local business. The clients’ conviction that the information acquired on their own is valued the most is strengthened by the prices of the services, which are too high in comparison with the quality of the delivered information. In the opinion of the clients, the information is too scarce and sometimes out-of-date. Analysing the results of this survey it should be added that the monitoring data usually concerns big companies and general industrial trends. Its usefulness for local small and medium size enterprises may turn out to be low.
What can media monitoring companies offer Polish businessmen? The monitoring results are certainly a good source of general knowledge. This knowledge is very precious if you know how to use it. They can serve the informative function, but are not the only source of information. This data certainly requires verification, adding details and comparison with information from other sources if decisions based on it are to limit the financial risk to the minimum. However, the evaluation of the delivered monitoring results will always be connected with subjective interpretation of the acquired information and the time of its delivery. Is it worth investing in media monitoring? Most information is published in generally available sources. The difficult part is to find it, extract the relevant bits from it, process it in various configurations, and analyse it. Doing it all on one’s own is time-consuming. Unquestioned advantages of media monitoring include: a broad scope of the monitored media, flexible approach to information needs of clients, and stability of the acquired data. The information is collected systematically and in the long-term perspective, thanks to which it is a good material for detailed analyses. Thanks to the present technological solutions this data can be stored at functional Internet portals protected by passwords which are available to authorised users 24 hours per day 7 days a week. Because the time during which the data is available is unlimited, the archive of publications becomes in time a reference information bank. We can access the data stored there any time and find information about the efficiency of media publications and broadcasts, advertising costs, news from the industry in which the company operates, the condition of its competitors, or the legal changes. Another strength of media monitoring companies is their expertise, so the clients who do not feel competent enough in certain fields can outsource some tasks to them.
To my mind, the awareness of the flaws of the offered products and the potential problems related to them are crucial in answering the question whether media monitoring is useful or needed. One can of course acquire information without external help by delegating this task to the company’s employees. This task is possible to accomplish, although it may be problematic due to the following factors: poor availability of sources (how much information from all over the country can you reach in one working day?), the knowledge of employees (who will gather and select relevant information and will they have the necessary skills?), the time spent on analysing the publications found (who will define the criteria of analyses, conduct them efficiently, and present a report?), the number of materials gathered (what percentage of publications from a given day will be omitted?) and the company’s costs related to all these factors. Considering all the potential profits (savings) and losses should help one answer the question whether to monitor the media on one’s own, or to outsource this task. Usefulness is one of the key features of a product and it should be kept in mind when ordering media monitoring services. An unpredictable accident (bad weather, power failure), or technical problems with the company’s information coding systems cause delays in data updating or lack of particular publications. Media monitoring is a process involving both people and machines. One can never be sure that it will not be interrupted. The question about outsourcing media monitoring services should be answered after due consideration of the problems presented in this article, time, money, and personal experience in data acquisition.
RAFAŁ ŚWIĘCICKI
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