Why track media release coverage?
Connect gives users all of the distribution tools they need, right inside Mediaportal. With a Connect subscription you have access to media contact information, and tools to send and track media releases, right inside your monitoring platform.
Inside Mediaportal you can send a media release and then track the media coverage generated by that release. This ability to track earned coverage, seamlessly integratedwith media monitoring is a key strength for Connect.
How can I use Connect to track media release coverage?
After you hit Queue this release and either send or embargo your media release, you’ll see this screen:
To begin tracking media coverage, click Add a monitoring folder:
If you missed this screen when sending your release, you can also link a monitoring folder for any of the releases sitting in the Releases section. Just click on Releases in the navigation sidebar and then click on the title of the release you’d like to track.
When you click through to the media release, you’ll see this:
To begin tracking media coverage, click “add a monitoring folder”:
Adding a monitoring folder
When you click “Add a monitoring folder” you’ll see this pop up, showing all of the briefs and folders you have in your Mediaportal:
Adding a brief or folder will link all of the coverage inside to the media release. Just select the brief folder you’d like to link to your media release and click Add.
Should I add a brief or folder?
When you go to add a folder to your media release, you’ll see that you can select both briefs and folders:
- Briefs or Oragnisation briefs relate to the briefs your organisation has on file with Isentia. These briefs contain the keywords, brands and companies that your organisation is tracking media coverage for. To review or update these keywords you can go to Coverage Tools in the Coverage area, and then click on Coverage Options. Then, navigate to the Brief Keywords tab. If you’d like to significantly change your keywords or add/remove folders it’s best to talk to your Account Management team.
- Folders or Personal Folders are created by you or members of your team inside Mediaportal. Personal folders work a little bit like a folder in your Gmail or your Outlook, where you can add emails into an “Important Stuff” folder or set up a rule that every time you get an email from Rachel it goes into your “Emails from Rachel” folder. You can use folders to manually or automatically filter and organise the media coverage in your organisation briefs.
Adding a brief or folder to your media release will link all of the coverage inside to the release. Personal folders are great for isolating relevant coverage, so they work well for linking to media releases.
Setting up a folder
You can create a Personal Folder to isolate all of the coverage relevant to your media release. When you create your folder you’ll be able to manually add content yourself, or set up search criteria to add content automatically.
In the Coverage area click the Add a folder button.
When you click to create a new personal folder, you’ll see this screen:
When you create a new folder you can:
- Name your folder e.g. CEO Mentions
- Add a description for your folder for future reference e.g. “this folder is capturing coverage that mentions our CEO”.
- In the Filed under section you can select a category in which to file your folder: Brands, Competitors, Personal or Spokespeople
- You can also choose to share your folder with other Mediaportal users in your organisation, so they’ll see the folder in their Mediportal login. This is really useful if you’re working on a campaign or a report with your colleagues. Just select the users you’d like to share the folder with – you can choose whether or not those users can modify your folder too.
If you’re planning on manually adding content to your folder, you can click Create Folder when you have named and categorized your personal folder. Your personal folder is ready to use. If you’d like your personal folder to capture content automatically, now is the time to set up some search criteria.
Folder criteria
You can set up personal folders to automatically capture media items based on criteria that you set up. This can be really useful for isolating content that mentions a certain spokesperson, event or issue. You can also use this criteria to capture coverage relevant to a media release you’ve sent. For more information on using personal folders to track media release coverage check out this post.
When you’re setting up your folder, just enter in the search terms you’d like to capture. For example, if you’d like to set up a personal folder capturing mentions of your CEO enter his or her name as a search term.
You can be extra specific about the type of content you’d like to capture in your folder – use the search criteria to narrow down to certain media types, geographic regions or outlets.
When you’ve finished adding your criteria, just click Create folder. Your folder will now be visible in the Coverage area.
Your personal folder will start capturing content from the moment it’s created – if you’d like to add any older data to this folder you can search for the content in Search Coverage and then manually add it, using the process below.
Manually adding content to personal folders
If you plan on only manually adding media items to your personal folder, you don’t need to set up any search criteria. You can also manually add items to any personal folder at any time.
Just find an item or items you wish to add in the Coverage area and then tick the check box to the left of each item. When you select the item/s you’ll notice a dark blue bar appear at the bottom of your screen.
Select the Folder icon to add the item/s to a personal folder. You can create a new personal folder at this stage as well.
These items will then be added to your personal folder.
You can also manually add items to personal folders on your Isentia mobile app. Check out this post for more information.
An important note about content and personal folders
Folders can only capture content that is already being delivered to your Mediaportal via your Coverage Briefs. To review or update these keywords you can go to Coverage Tools in the Coverage area. Select Coverage Options and then navigate to the Brief Keywords tab. If you’d like to significantly change your keywords or add/remove briefs it’s best to talk to your Account Management team.
Tracking your release coverage
Now that you’ve linked a folder to your media release, you’re ready to start tracking your coverage. Head to Releases in the navigation sidebar, and then click on the title of the release you’d like to look at.
In the Media Coverage section you can see the volume of media items your media release generated, and cumulative ASR and audience figures for this coverage. You can see how much content your media release generated and how many people your media release reached.
Expand the Media Coverage section by clicking the downwards arrow expand icon. Here, you’ll see the media coverage generated by this release represented in several Analytics charts. This helps you visualize the success of your media release.
For more information on tracking your media release sends, check out this post.