Six Easy Ways to Improve Your Media Monitoring Results

Sophisticated Search Technology Can’t Replace Human Intelligence – Together They Bring Clients Valuable News

Editing capabilities make a huge difference in the overall service we deliver. Unlike ordinary search engines or monitoring services that don't incorporate the editing function as part of their standard production procedures, BurrellesLuce is able to confine reading instructions in meaningful ways that ensure more targeted results.

Here are a few straight-forward examples:

• If you are representing a college and want news about alumni, rather than current students, we can set search terms that will achieve that.


• If you are from a business and want news about your company, but not about your company's stock, we can do that.


• If you are a publicist and want news about a celebrity, but don't want reviews on that person, we can do that.

Our reading instructions set our search parameters and help us to limit our initial retrieval of news, but it is our editors who make the final decision on the news that is sent to clients. The combination of the two saves our clients countless hours and provides them with the news they really want to see.

Our editing staff is filled with people who started working for us as readers. Chris Clark is a perfect example of this. Chris started as a reader 9 years ago. He moved into our editing department five years later. Naturally, he is familiar with what a reader is looking for when he searches the press for our clients' news. "When you are looking through any publication as a reader, you are looking for hard references (proper nouns) and then looking at the article itself to see if it matches the criteria that the client has specified. You become very familiar with what clients are looking for and what kind of news they want to restrict and you eliminate the news that doesn't match up," he explains.

As an editor, much of the news that Chris sees has passed through this initial screening. An increasingly high volume of news undergoes an initial scanning that is performed using technology that retrieves every bit of coverage that contains a client's search terms. All the more reason to involve an editor in the process. "Without an editor," Chris claims, "most of what you would have is a mish-mosh of articles and a lot of redundancy. I've discarded a huge percentage of what was electronically retrieved today. I'm reading for an organization that uses an acronym and that acronym is a very common word so there are a lot of articles that technology is retrieving that don't have a thing to do with our client or their business," he explains.

It used to be hard to get your hands on news coverage outside of your geographic location. Now it is increasingly difficult to filter through the vast amount of what is retrieved so that you can focus on the news that is relevant to you. Take heart! BurrellesLuce educates clients every day on how to set parameters that will result in News You Can Use. Once good search terms are set, our editors follow them closely. The result - our clients get the news they are looking for without extraneous articles that are of no interest to them.