Knowing what people say about your business or your brand may have a much higher value than you imagine. Press clipping services give you an insight into how the media covers you and your competitors, a valuable resource that can guide your decision making.
But does your brand need newsclipping and PR clipping services?
Yes.
PR Clipping Services, also called News clipping services, provide a much more thorough brand and media search than you could ever perform by yourself and are tremendous time savers.
When you use a PR clipping service, you will be able to see in a single glance what newspapers think of your products, and magazines, webpages, social media, discussion forums, review sites, blogs, TV, and anywhere else your business name may appear.
What a Press Clipping Service Does
Simply stated, a press clipping or news clipping service tells you how many times your company, product or brand has been mentioned in multiple different media sources.
But a good service goes far beyond telling you your most recent service was picked up by 463 different media outlets.
It helps you understand:
With this information you can:
Our PR Clipping™ roundup below gives you a list of PR press clipping and news clipping services that will help you track your competitors and their products across a variety of mediums, from newspapers to magazines to web pages and Usenet groups.
Prices vary, but we show you some options with zero cost, others that charge plenty and links to software that can do the work instead. Our list contains the ones that we know, but you can find many more with a Google search.
Only when you know how the public receives your PR and marketing campaigns can you make decisions that can benefit your business. The best and most common of the monitoring services that focus on media requires a fee for the service. Some may seem expensive, but you get tailored information without hiring a researcher, subscribing to almost endless numbers of sources, and tabulating the resulting data by hand.
Let’s get started.
Brand24
Brand 24 monitors webpages and social media as it searches for the keywords that you provide. You can get an analysis of the results as well. Prices start at $49.00. The company does not offer a free version, but it does let you try it out for free.
Critical Mention
Critical Mention provides a media monitoring platform that makes managing earned media fast with accurate results, providing an understanding of the value of media coverage.
Mention
Mention provides a social listening and media monitoring suite that enables brands and agencies to understand audience perception across social media and the web. It specializes predominately in social and online media.
By using Mention you can easily monitor what is being said online about a brand or a product, get comprehensive analytics on their industry, and measure the impact of your marketing and PR activities. Start listening to your audience!
CustomScoop
This software as a service (SaaS) gathers information on social media and news outlets with varying levels. You can receive customized data and analysis on PR, sales and marketing, intelligence, and investor relations that can sharpen your business acumen. The lowest level of service clips news articles for you, while the upper tiered levels monitor business-related blogs and provide analysis.
CoverageBook
More than 5,000 PR professionals across 40 countries use this platform. Starting at just $99 a month, CoverageBook aims to make PR reporting fast with automated tools.
Dialog
Dialog boasts more than 1.3 billion specialized records and allows you to search the enormous database with precision. Its focus on products and services in the pharmaceutical, biomedical, and professional sectors lets you access massive content from the world’s authorities on technology, intelligence, and evidence-based medicine. Primarily a research tool instead of a typical clipping service, it conducts searches quickly. You need to pay a small fee to review the articles that it finds.
MetroMonitor
Metro Monitor’s Media Monitor Pro service provides comprehensive media monitoring tools, including
comprehensive news monitoring of TV, Radio, Online, and Social Media. Receive instant news reports of your media coverage as it happens or customize delivery.
Factiva
This news clipping service gives you access to an enormous database that contains more than 33,000 sources with custom alerts. Once known as Dow Jones Interactive, it lets you keep track of your brand reputation. As you may expect, it provides breaking news and gives you insights that can help you design corporate strategies. The service offers flexible delivery of updates in eight categories of information. The combined resources of Dow Jones and Reuters offer access to their archives of trade publications, and you can get radio and TV transcripts as well. Each article costs $2.95, but the service prefers subscriptions for different pricing levels.
Lexis-Nexis Communication Center
LNCC offers access to a massive collection of company profiles, public records, 40,000 news sources, and an exhaustive list of exclusive content. With options that resemble those at Factiva, the service provides more in-depth research opportunities that can contribute to effective decision making. You can find risk solutions for fraud, compliance, case law, and thousands of other issues if you need them. You may want to investigate the price structures to decide if you need to use one of the most popular services in the country.
Northern Light Content Solutions
NLCS lets you search more than 7,000 books, databases, journals, magazines, and newswires for almost no charge. It costs nothing to explore after you register with a credit card, but the service requires a fee if you want to view articles. With advanced technology, it uses artificial intelligence to help companies find market research independent of their information technology departments. It also uses machine-powered knowledge management techniques for enabling research, social analytics, and competitive intelligence.
Universal Information Services, Inc.
As the name implies, the service provides clippings for all types of media. It includes construction reports, tracking of advertisements, online research, and analysis for companies in the United States and around the world. The company claims to provide better insight as to the most comprehensive monitoring service that “sees everything.”
Reputology
Reputology claims to “make review monitoring easy,” and it may provide some peace of mind for you. A focus on helping businesses improve their online reputation and customer relationships helps it track the most well-known review sites. You can imagine the accuracy of customer opinions that show up on Google, Facebook, online customer surveys, website feedback forms, and websites that search for industry-specific information. Best for users who can face the truth, the site gives business owners a chance to address unhappy customers with a fix that makes negative comments go away. Prices for the service start at $49.00 per month, and you can try it for free. The availability of information that helps you address issues promptly may help you understand why media monitoring is essential.
While you can spend hundreds and thousands of dollars per month to learn what people think of your company, you may want to pay a token fee or nothing. The proliferation of monitoring services that you can find with a Google search reflects the importance of the truth to your business. One-way communication lets you send your messages out to destinations without any assurance that they arrive. You get to know where your press releases go and who reads them when you let two-way communication give you information that may make a difference to you.
Avario
A fee of $29.00 per month lets you engage with a company that helps you “grow brand awareness.” You can join in discussions in real-time to let others know about your product as you share information with web and social media users. Some lively comments may occur and get people spreading the word through person to person marketing.
BuzzBundle
A social media management instrument lets you track references to your brand with keywords that describe your company, its products, and services, or even yourself. You may want to find the same kind of information about your competitors as well. Prices start at $199.00 per month, but you can use a free version.
Google News Alerts
You can search the web, blogs, scientific journals, and newspaper articles with Google’s alert system for free. Creating an alert requires only a few steps to type in the keywords and results that you prefer. The service can send you email notices when Google finds new results for your keywords, and you can search for yourself as well as any other keyword.
Before you take our word for the importance of the services, let’s dig a little deeper into what media monitoring can do for your business.
The information you receive from a press clipping service also allows you to manage how the media perceives the presentation of your marketing campaigns and initiatives.
On a broader scope, you can receive a composite picture of goings-on in areas that lie outside of your immediate purview. With it, you can strengthen the presentation of your brand.
You may think that it already does everything that you want, but the press coverage may see it differently.
Misconceptions that affect your reputation need correcting, but you first need to know that they exist. Knowledge of positive or negative comments on social media can require a prompt response that shows you care.
The money that you spend on marketing campaigns and press releases needs to satisfy customers, and you can put out an enormous amount of well-meaning information. However, until you know how your intended audiences receive it, you cannot measure its effectiveness. The sophisticated monitoring tools listed in our PR Clipping™ roundup above can collect and group the data that influences decisions and send them to you in an email. The evidence that it provides can confirm the value of your PR efforts or show that they need help.
Almost every creative person needs a fresh approach occasionally, and having an abundance of data will make this task easier. You can ask a service to alert you to trending topics that let you present a unique angle for your audience.
The intelligence-gathering tools above also produce information that broadens your awareness of the latest advances in your industry. You may focus on them as a coming trend that can create a demand for your products or services. Unawareness of your industry prevents you from finding out about opportunities too late. As a basis for planning, it can give you a competitive edge. While you ask a monitoring service to follow your industry’s activities, you may also want to find expert opinions that reflect well on your brand.
The abundance of communication and interaction opportunities on the internet probably exceeds your imagination of possibilities, and you can tap into sources to learn what users think of your products and services. While user data may have seemed impossible to access in the earlier days of the internet, the constraint no longer exists. Anyone who wants to find information about customers can do so with a variety of approaches that produce results. If you invested in a PR campaign, you deserve to know its value, and monitoring media sites can provide tangible proof of forms of outreach that work.
The power of the marketplace produced a proliferation of paid services, low-cost or free services, and monitoring tools that remove secrecy from the data and allow you and your team to access it. You no longer have an excuse for not knowing what customers think when many options offer numerous ways to view opinions that praise or criticize.