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Companies You Can Use to Track Media Mentions of Your Library PLUS the Secret to Make Sure Google Alerts Catches ALL of Your Mentions!

I don’t know about you, but I live in fear of something that I never imagined when I dreamed about working in library marketing.

My library is getting press coverage. I know it is. But am I seeing every article, TV segment, and radio interview? Are we getting credit for all the hard work we put into PR and media outreach? What if we’re missing something?

You can’t watch all the newscasts, listen to the radio 24-7, and read all the newspapers, magazines, online columns, and blogs. It’s just not possible. You probably ARE missing something.

That’s why many libraries pay specialized companies to monitor the media for them. Here are some of the best, from my research and from my own experience.

I’ve divided them into two groups: companies that list their prices on their websites and companies that makes you give them contact info in order to get a price quote (does anyone else find that to be annoying??).

I’ve also included a section on Google Alerts, and how to REALLY use it effectively so you don’t miss a mention!

Media monitoring companies with prices listed on web

Anewstip is basically a giant database. You can search for journalists, news articles, and Tweets. You can monitor your library or any of your partner organizations or competitors. Alerts are sent to you via email whenever the site gets a new “hit” on your search tips. You can sort by relevance or date. I really love this site!  It’s free for one person to use as long as you don’t want to pitch to the media using the site.

I knew BuzzSumo as a platform for content research but I recently learned they added media monitoring. Your library can track mentions by setting up an alert that’s emailed to you. They also tell you which piece of coverage is shared/engaged with the most. There is a free seven-day trial. The cheapest paid version begins at $79 a month.

Critical Mention claims their algorithm can find broadcast news coverage for your library eight times faster than their competitors. They can search more than 2,000 global television and radio sources and claim to capture 40 hours of video content every minute, though I have been unable to test this claim because my library isn’t paying for media mentions. They do come highly rated and have won many industry awards. They ask potential clients to email them and promise they’ll negotiate a package that fits your budget. Most companies pay between $30 and $100 a month.

Talkwalker Alerts is a popular free alternative to Google Alerts. I use it, and I find it to be very helpful. It crawls the web for mentions of any organization you wish, including your library and any competitors (I use it to spy on local museums and nonprofit organizations). It works very much like Google Alerts. You create an account, then set up keywords in the search query. You can focus your search if you like on just blogs or just social media, if you prefer. You can set it up to send you results on a daily or weekly basis. I use this All. The. Time.

Media monitoring companies that don’t list their pricing

Burrells Luce has full-service and self-service monitoring services. The self-service will probably cost less but require more work on the part of you and your staff. They come highly rated.

A lot of for-profit companies use Cision for their marketing and communication needs. But the company has a media monitoring product that allegedly searches more than seven million sources for mentions of your library. A Google search shows that prices are as low as $20 a month for basic services but I can’t verify that price includes media monitoring.

Media Library is the company with which I have the most experience. They can actually get copies of segments you know aired couldn’t record. If you know your library is profiled on the 11 p.m. news, this company can get you a copy of that report for a fee. I can’t find the fees on their website anymore (and their website looks original–like, it was created in 1995 and never updated!) But we used them from 2013 until 2017 and I had no issues with them. Their coverage is limited–they are only in 27 markets in the Midwest, so there are libraries for whom this company is not an option.

The secret to make Google Alerts work really well

One of the first things I did when I sat down at my desk at the library on the first day was to set up Google Alerts. It’s free and easy.

There are drawbacks. It often returns results from my own website. And it sometimes misses results. But for me, it consistently catches the segments on TV, radio, and in local print publications as long as they make it onto the website of the news outlet handling the coverage.

The trick to getting results is to set up Google Alerts for a BUNCH of terms, not just the main name of your library system. I have a Google Alert set up for every branch of our system (41 in all!) plus all of our senior leaders, and the names of our major events, plus our big vendors like Treehouse and Overdrive (The actual alert is for Cincinnati Library Treehouse and Cincinnati Library Overdrive).

Setting up a ton of alerts does mean I catch a lot of mentions that are not related to my library, but I just spend a few minutes a day deleting the stuff that’s irrelevant. In the mix, I always find the mentions I need.

You can set Google Alerts to send you an email when it finds something or you can set it to once a day at a specified time (that’s the option I’ve selected). And you can go in later and modify and delete alerts easily.

Do you use a media monitoring service not listed in this article? If you like it and want to recommend it, please tell us about it in the comments.

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Lessons From The Greatest Press Release Ever Written!

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When I left journalism for marketing, one of my big worries about switching careers centered on the dreaded press release. Organizations love writing and sending them. They’re usually glowing, self-congratulatory reports of amazing events, awards, and services. They make us feel productive, important, and authoritative.

But journalists hate them. They mock them. They look on most press releases as pretentious attempts at self-promotion by organizations with inflated egos. Most of the time, they file them in their assignment book and never look at them again. I know that’s probably not what you wanted to hear. I’m not trying to be mean. You deserve to know the truth because you work hard on those releases. It takes a lot of effort to write a release that makes all the invested parties happy and it takes forever to get them approved in the library bureaucracy. But they’re not an effective means of getting our message not–not in the current form, anyway.

I’m not saying we should ditch press releases. I’m pushing you to change the way you write your press release. Commit to writing in a way that will interest journalists and make them want to cover your library. Use storytelling techniques to turn our news into an irresistible story. That’s how we get more press coverage.

I found inspiration recently when I came across this amazing, astounding, awesome press release, sent out BY THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT no less. The year was 1921 and the U. S. Department of Agriculture had spent nearly a decade and thousands of dollars trying to hunt down a destructive wolf.

A little background is necessary. I first heard this press release read aloud while listening to This American Life with Ira Glass. According to Glass, when settlers arrived in the American west, they killed off the animals that wolves used to feed on– bison, elk, and deer. The wolves starting killing livestock for food. That angered the settlers, so ranchers and the federal government set out to exterminate the wolves. Between 1883 and 1930, more than 80,000 wolves were killed. The government wanted to tell everyone what a good job they were doing and so they put out press releases. Like this one.

Read The Great Wolf is Killed

An amazing piece of press work, it contains four major lessons for libraries looking to write a better press release. If you want to draw journalists in, make them want to cover your library, and get you more press, here’s what you need to do.

      1. Write a story, not a bureaucratic diatribe. Journalists are an audience that you need to engage. They don’t respond to rhetoric and library jargon any more than a general audience does. They want a story, with emotion, drama, good guys, bad guys, and a plot. Write your release as if you are writing the real story for the publication which you are targeting. We know many newspapers and magazines lift copy right from the release–why not make it something they’ll really want to print? They’ll want something with a catchy headline and a story they can tease to their viewers to get them to watch/click/share.
      2. Ditch the dry, fact-based language and be a journalist. Get real quotes from the real stakeholders… stop making up quotes full of inspirational language that no one will really ever say in real life.  Journalists can see right through that. Interview the stakeholders and use their real words in your release.
      3. There is no right length. The wolf release is four pages and 1500+ words long. And it’s perfect. Write the story. If you have 1500 words and they’re riveting, a newsroom will read and print all 1500 words! Focus on writing great, not writing short.
      4. Spend some time coming up with a great headline. “World’s Greatest Animal Criminal is Dead” is a show-stopper. I usually brainstorm headlines in a word document… I just write freely until I’m clean out of ideas. Then I pick my favorite three or four and run them through the same tests I use when creating an email subject line. Then I sit on it awhile and think about it. Do the same with your press release headlines. This isn’t a throwaway task. It’s the first thing a journalist will see… it could be the catalyst for the final decision they make about your story. Don’t waste it!

Subscribe to this blog and you’ll receive an email every time I post. To do that, click on “Follow” button on the bottom left-hand corner of the page. Connect with me on Twitter and Snapchat–it’s where I talk about library marketing! I’m @Webmastergirl. I’m also on LinkedIn, Slideshare, Instagram and Pinterest. Views in this post are my own and do not represent those of my employer.

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