For PR pros navigating today’s hyper-connected media landscape, media monitoring is imperative to track and understand how an audience perceives and communicates about a brand. It is a critical resource for tracking every mention of a brand, its competitors and the industry across conventional and digital mediums.
However, aggregating mention data is generally part of the service company leaders or clients expect. What was the context of each mention? Does the tone of the coverage skew positive or negative for specific entities? How deep in the article did the brand name appear? How did the brand’s coverage compare to competitors' who may also have been mentioned?
Navigating through the media hits and extracting valuable insights can present a challenge, often requiring a substantial investment of time. Nevertheless, as AI revolutionizes PR, it offers untapped potential to streamline such difficulties in media monitoring.
Muck Rack's recent research shows that about two-thirds of the industry utilizes AI for tasks like list building, content creation, and research. Still, comm pros are yet to experience its higher-level analytical abilities in media monitoring. Innovative monitoring tools leverage AI to cut through the noise and immediately deliver invaluable insights, modernizing media communication workflows.
Here are five ways AI is transforming media monitoring in 2024:
Fosters a Proactive Approach
In today's world of around-the-clock news, keeping up with a constant stream of media coverage can be overwhelming. PR professionals often worry about missing important mentions or becoming aware of a developing crisis fast enough to put out the fire quickly.
AI-driven media monitoring tools aggregate mentions across multiple platforms and deliver summarized insights. PR professionals can use these summaries to quickly understand the landscape and focus their efforts on strategic responses rather than data collection.
Enhances Media Communication Efficiency
AI-powered media monitoring will eliminate the manual labor of sifting through various mentions. Since AI will enable them to gather all the coverage and extract various insights from those articles, PR pros will benefit from hours saved by the technology, which will help with the heavy lifting of coverage analysis.
Modern media monitoring tools allow you to embed dashboard insights directly into media briefings, streamlining the communication process and allowing for faster sharing of crucial information. With customized dashboards for different departments, this ensures every stakeholder has instant access to relevant information.
Extracts Key Takeaways Instantly
As AI continues to advance, modern media monitoring tools will allow PR pros to generate and refine a variety of contextualized insights related to a mention—including sentiment, contextual analysis, brand and competitor mentions, and more—in virtually no time, so colleagues and clients will love your quick project turnaround.
AI can analyze the sentiment and context of mentions, providing instant insights into how your brand is perceived. By integrating these insights into your daily reports, you can keep stakeholders informed with up-to-date and accurate data.
Allows for Effortless Insight Sharing
Media monitoring tools, driven by AI, will allow users to include preferred insights in media briefings to relay the true impact of coverage—allowing for the quick, accurate and thorough delivery of results.
AI-powered reports can be customized and shared with internal and external stakeholders. This feature helps PR professionals streamline the reporting process, ensuring everyone has access to relevant and precise insights.
Provides Personalized, Interactive Analysis
In this era of content overload, AI has already accelerated the personalization of content. Some media monitoring tools can now utilize AI to extract customized insights that can be tailored to roles or departments, depending on their specific angles and needs.
AI-driven tools allow PR teams to create personalized dashboards that highlight the most relevant data for different departments. This ensures that each team member receives insights tailored to their specific needs, enhancing decision-making processes.
Media Monitoring with AI
Last year signaled a monumental shift in PR, with generative AI becoming a go-to tool for ideation, content creation and research. This year, organizations will continue to discover AI’s potential to improve other PR workflows.
This advanced class of monitoring and analysis tools will empower PR and comms professionals to deliver crucial takeaways instantly, streamlining the analysis and communication of key messages. The biggest shift we see with AI tools is that they are raising the bar and standards in public relations activities, be it in targeting, research, monitoring or analysis.
“The industry is seeing a whole new path forward in the AI age, and things are just getting started,” says Pragya Dubey, Vice President of Global Services at Agility PR Solutions. “When implemented strategically, AI will continue to streamline media monitoring workflows and enable PR professionals to derive greater value from their media intelligence.”
Are you ready for a new age of media monitoring and analysis? Stay tuned, because the future is on the horizon, and the value of your returns—and the availability of your precious time—are getting an AI-fueled upgrade.
Osama Saeed is content marketer at Agility PR Solutions.