Oksana Kononova, CEO of LOOQME media analytics and monitoring service, explained how monitoring works, why it is needed and who should not spend money on it.

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The material was first published on MMR.ua

Media monitoring is not new. It originated at the beginning of the 20th century, when the periodical printing press appeared. At the same time, so-called clippings arose: people bought newspapers, cut out articles from there, collected them and sent them to the client.

However, as the number of media outlets grew, so did the amount of work for the people who studied them. The turning point was the emergence of social networks, which significantly changed the media environment.

“There is a very clear need. Every year, the amount of information that goes into the public domain increases significantly: about companies, people, and communities. We help companies see what is being said about them: on television, in print media, on radio, on social networks,” explains Oksana Kononova and adds that it is also important to collect and analyze similar information about competitors in order to understand what is happening on the market.

What to google to explore the market?

With the help of open source analytics, you can collect a lot of information. And knowing how to analyze it, it is possible to draw up an almost complete profile of the company that interests us. Oksana Kononova explains this using the example of entering foreign markets.

The algorithm is as follows:

1. Explore a new market, find out its main players.To do this, in Google you need to search for ads and articles about companies in the desired field. Having found a few basic ones, it is worth analyzing what exactly they advertise and for what price. So we will know the cost of advertising outputs and will be able to plan the advertising budget.

2. Study the social networks of future competitors.We study the topics and formats of publications, as well as the reaction of the audience to them. In this way, it is possible to plan how many employees and funds are needed to develop the company's social networks and what trends in their content are.

3. Analyze the websites of companies.It is important how the lead generation is arranged, where the links lead and what they offer, whether there are pages with pricing. This information is needed to understand market trends.

4. View job page or LinkedIn. By what specialists the company is looking for, you can understand what its development plans, projects, new activity vectors are.

5. Additionally, it is worth studying the section with press releases and official information.If the company is public, it has mandatory reports for the exchange. In the first report with which it went to the IPO, there should be a section with market analysis. This is useful information to check out.

6th. Media field:what write about the company, what its employees write in social networks, what employees who are the company's speakers write.
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“All this does not immediately give general information. But when you collect a piece from here, from there a piece, a whole picture emerges. We also look at crisis cases: what they were related to, how companies responded to it. This is to understand what the sensitivity is to in the audience and how we will react to it,” explains the CEO of LOOQME.

This is a free way to explore the market that you can do yourself. However, the expert advises to delegate such monitoring, because there can be a lot of information, and its collection and interpretation will take a lot of time and effort.

More customers — more references

Oksana says that the market share of a company operating in the B2C sector is almost always correlated with the number of mentions in the media.

“Almost always the share of voice (which is the share of the voice of each of these companies in the media field) will correlate with the market share of these companies. This does not mean that they will coincide in percentage, but they will exactly match in proportion. We see the example of many companies: when they become leaders, they automatically get more coverage and more outputs than smaller companies. They just write more about them. Plus, if these companies release their press release, they will quickly take it away, because they already know them,” says the media specialist.

However, mentions in the media and social networks are not always positive. But when these are isolated cases among customers of a large company, do not worry too much.
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“If people know you, they write about you. Writing is not always good, but this is the case when bad PR is also PR. There are plenty of mentions and you stay top of mind anyway. The negative (if it is not something very terrible) will soon be forgotten. For example, PrivatBank or Nova Poshta. There is no way that everything always works perfectly. There will always be problems: someone will lose a parcel, someone will lose a card and will not be able to restore it — and people write about it. But such things are forgotten while a positive impression of the company as a whole remains,” explains Oksana.

However, these patterns do not always work for B2B companies. They are more closed and less likely to have a product that can be tested by a wide audience. Accordingly, receiving publications in the media is much more difficult. How can companies become more media savvy? The manager can act as an expert in some field or join thematic ratings.

“We studied the legal market. And I got the impression that lawyers communicate with themselves. They publish in legal publications, write articles of a level that is difficult to understand if you are not a lawyer. There was only one company that tried to speak to a wider potential audience. And this was very noticeable against the background of the general approach,” says Oksana Kononova.

Who (does not) need monitoring

For small businesssuch as coffee shops or service stations, Oksana advises using a chatbot that offers keyword monitoring from a limited number of sources. At the same time, you can use services for automatic notifications from social networks - and that should be enough.

“When the business grows, then you can connect some other products and services. If this is a startup that has decided to look for investments, it makes sense to connect monitoring and read about other startups, about investors, what events there are, what news about you in the public sphere. Because that's what investors will see when they go Googling you. Likewise, when a business launches a new product, launches a new communication and wants to track it,” says the expert.

For an average business, you need to be guided by the number of publications about it in the media. If 30-50 mentions are released about the company in a month, there are probably more of them, but they are not tracked. In addition, at this level, it is already necessary to analyze the media activity of competitors. In general, this is already too many mentions that need to be tracked, and it is extremely difficult to do it yourself. Here monitoring services will help.

“Likewise for non-profit organizations. When they are engaged in communicating reforms or some major change in society, they almost always benefit from monitoring. Not only to watch what they do, but also how they react to it, what additional narratives arise. Because surely you will be in conflict with some force that does not want these changes. And she will, through social networks and the media, promote her point of view, which must be monitored. And when these are political organizations and parties, they always conduct monitoring before the elections,” notes the head of LOOQME.

According to Oksana, monitoring is not needed:

- For a very small business - it is too early for him to engage in monitoring.

- For those companies that do not care. A business that does not depend on what is said about it.

- Companies that need a very selective version of monitoring. For example, when the owner has unpleasant stories in the past and you need to check only mentions of him.

“Monitoring is not necessary for those who do not write about,” concludes Oksana Kononova.

The material is based on the materials of the podcast for the Telegram channel “Marketing and heresy”. Full version of the podcast you can listen here.

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