Mediaportal isn’t just a website – with Mediaportal alerts you can be notified of content anywhere, anytime. Read this post for more information, and download this Alerts cheat sheet for future reference.

As long as you’re armed with a smartphone, tablet or laptop you can log into Mediaportal wherever you are – or use the Isentia app. Sometimes though, you might want your daily media coverage to come to you without having to log in.

With Mediaportal Alerts, Mediaportal can push information straight to your email. You can use Mediaportal Alerts for a regular daily digest of coverage or to alert you to certain types of content as soon as it appears in your portal.

Mediaportal Alert features

Mediaportal Alerts now offer more options to customise the way you receive your alerts. You’re now able to:

• Customise your Alert Title to easily recognise the content of each Alert in your inbox
• Create a custom digest and receive multiple deliveries per day at set times e.g. 9am and 1pm
• Select specific days of the week you would like to receive your Alerts
• Tailor the look of your Alert by adding a custom logo, header image, or GIF
• Choose whether recipients of the alert are able to order broadcast files on TV and Radio content. Depending on client billing arrangements, this may incur extra costs.
• Sort and group the content within your alert e.g. Group by Media Outlet, sort by date

Check out the information below for more information on customising your alerts.

How do I set up a Mediaportal Alert?

Mediaportal Alerts can be set up on your Mediaportal briefs and folders. There are three different ways to set up a Mediaportal Alert:

• Inside the relevant Mediaportal folder
• From the “Alerts & Feeds” tab in the side bar
• From Coverage Options.  You can access Coverage Options from the Coverage area, just click on Coverage Tools in the toolbar and then select Coverage Options.

Setting up an alert inside a brief or folder

If you know which folder you’d like to set up an alert for, click on that folder in the Coverage area.

Then, when you’re sitting inside that folder, click on the dropdown Folder tools in the toolbar above.  Click on Email alerts in the Folder tools dropdown menu to see the pop-up where you can schedule and format your alerts.

Setting up an alert from the Alerts & Feeds tab

This is a great way to look at all of the alerts and RSS feeds that you have set up across your briefs and folders.

From the side bar click on Alerts & Feeds or click on the bell icon that appears on the coverage folder tiles.

In Alerts & feeds you can see a list of all of the Coverage Briefs and Folders in your Mediaportal account.

A clickable bell-shaped icon is right across from each folder to setup an alert. Click the bell icon to begin setting up your alert – a pop-up will appear to guide you through scheduling and formatting.

Customising your Mediaportal Alerts

Using either of the options above, a pop up will appear where you can schedule and format your alerts.

In the Email Alerts pop up there are three areas where you can customise your alerts so they meet your needs:  Alert Title,  Schedule, Format and Recipients.

Alert Title

Using the free text box, change the alert title to best describe the content of the Media Alert.   The title will appear in Alert headers and in the email subject line, this will improve email recognition in recipients inboxes.

Schedule

In the Schedule tab you can create a scheduling option for your alert that suits you best. You can choose whether to receive your Mediaportal Alert as new content arrives to that folder, or set the alert to a schedule.

Selecting the for each new coverage item option will mean you receive an alert whenever a new item is added to this folder. This is useful for issues you need to know about immediately but can result in quite high volumes of emails.

With a regular digest, you can choose what days of the week you would like your Mediaportal Alerts to be sent on, and select to receive them every 15 minutes, hourly or daily.

If you choose a daily alert you can even choose the most suitable time for your daily delivery.

With a custom digest, you can set up multiple sends a day at the times that suit you best. If you’d like to receive a morning and afternoon digest, schedule your morning alert and then simply click on ‘Add another time’. You can also choose the specific days of the week that you would like the alerts to be sent on.

If you’re receiving large volumes of social content you may want to select the Summarise social media coverage with a link to view items online check box.

Format

In the Format tab you can control the level of information in your Mediaportal Alert.

First, you can customise the look of your alert by choosing to include a header image or GIF. If you would like to include your company logo, simply click “Select Image” and upload your logo from your computer.

Next, you can then control how much detail is included on media items in your alerts.  You can choose from headlines, summaries or full text.

Then, you can use the Group by and Sort by menus to customise the order of the media items in your report. You might choose to group your items by media type and sort by date.

When grouping by Media Type or Folder, you can also set the order in which you want each group to be displayed.  Hover over the name of the group you want to move and drag and drop it into place.

In the format section, you can choose from HTML or Plain Text formats. HTML Mediaportal Alerts will be more visually appealing but you might want to choose plain text if you will be opening your alerts on an older mobile device.

You’ll also notice two checkboxes at the bottom of the Format area.

You can use these checkboxes to include the thumbnails and logos on media items or to allow alert recipients to purchase audio and video files for broadcast content. Note that allowing recipients to order Radio and TV content may incur an extra cost for your account.

If a Mediaportal Alert has 300 or more media items, it condenses the alert into a summary format with items summarised by media type – this alert links to Mediaportal for the client to login and view the content. The reason for this is the size of the alert both in terms of readability (the amount of content user has to scroll through negates the value of an alert), as well as putting a limit on the size of the actual email.

Syndication in Alerts

The syndicated items drop-down can be used to help you manage syndicated media items in your Alerts. By default syndicated online and print coverage will appear in your email Alert as individual media items.

There are three different options for syndications in Alerts:

1. “Do not send” – this option will  include the original parent article (the first article picked up) in your alert, but will exclude syndicated items.
2. ” Send individually” – this is the default option. Parent articles and syndicated content will appear in the alert as individual clips.
3. “Send grouped” – this option will group syndicated print and online articles as links under a  under a section of the parent article titled “Also appeared on”.

For more information on syndicated content, you may like to read the Syndication in Mediaportal article.

Recipients

Finally, you may want to add additional recipients to your Mediaportal Alert. You can do that using the Recipients tab.

If you want to send this Mediaportal Alert to people who don’t have a Mediaportal login, just type their email addresses in the text box

You can also quickly select other Mediaportal users in your organisation to receive the alert.

When you’ve set your alert schedule, format and recipients, just click Save to begin receiving your coverage via email.

Mediaportal folders with an alert running off them will show a darkened bell icon in the Alerts & feeds area.

Creating Mediaportal Alerts on certain topics

Mediaportal Alerts run off Mediaportal folders – your alert will contain all of the items that have been added to that particular folder. If you’d like to only receive alerts on certain types of content, you might want to set up a personal folder capturing that content. For more tips on using personal folders, check out this post.

You can then set up an alert on your personal folder, the same way you would on a brief. If there is a particularly sensitive issue for your organisation you may want to consider setting up a personal folder tracking this – for example, you could set up a personal folder tracking mentions of protests. You can then set up an alert in the ‘Alerts and Feeds‘ tab in Coverage Options to let you know straight away when content is added to that folder.

Modifying a Mediaportal Alert

If you ever want to change your alert set up, you can always edit it by going to the Alerts & feeds tab in the sidebar.  You will notice that folders with active alerts have a highlighted bell-shaped icon. Just click the icon for the alert you want to modify.

You’ll then see the same popup window as when you created the alert – you can change the alert title, schedule, format, media coverage appearance and add/remove recipients.

To disable your alert entirely, just select No alerts for this folder in the Schedule tab.

Screenshot of selecting No alerts for this folder

Push Notifications are also available

If you find it convenient to receive your media coverage via email, you might also find coverage notifications useful. You can receive push notifications on your smartphone when you download the Isentia app. There’s more info on using notifications in this post here.