CustomScoop

Survey Says...

2010-06-17T18:25:34Z

Every year, CustomScoop surveys its clients, to see what we're doing right and where we can improve. We've recently sent out our annual survey, and the results thus far have yielded some interesting information. I won't get too specific as the survey is ongoing (if you're a CustomScoop client, it's open until June 30th for you to send us your thoughts), but a few key items do stand out.

Not surprisingly, our strongest results and best numbers come from responses to questions about our customer care. We love our clients and know our company is only as strong as our relationship with our customers. Anyone who has worked with our customer care team knows that they do whatever is possible within their powers to get what our clients need. In some cases, that has meant pulling one (or more!) of our developers into the mix to figure out a solution for a client.

Regarding the system itself, thus far, there's about a 50/50 split between people who primarily access their content through the automated email delivery versus logging into the system dashboard. Again, this is unsurprising as we know that for a significant portion of our clientele, committing the time to work within a dashboard doesn't work for their day--they are on the move, so our results are too. And also not a surprise, the vast majority--more than 70 percent so far--use the system daily.

What was surprising--to me at least--were a handful of questions about including Ad Value Equivalency (AVE) or something similar. While this was suggested by a very, very small number of respondents, I'm surprised it was requested at all. Yes, I know that for some this is what they know and understand. But I don't think we'll be providing anything like that in the future for a few reasons:

First, the Institute for Public Relations does not recognize AVE as a measurement tool, for all of the standard reasons: earned media is not the same as paid media, multipliers put in place to try and make them the same are also questionable, and it's just bad math and bad logic.
Second, to calculate AVE, CustomScoop would have to collect the advertising rates from the thousands of publications we monitor. Advertising rates can vary widely, and the published rate is usually different than the negotiated rate.
Building a measurement standard we don't believe in that shifts constantly into our tool would not be wise.

Trust me--I do sympathize with anyone who is being asked for this information. It can be tough or darn near impossible to wean off of this number, but it's important to start. The PRSA website has some alternatives to suggest. Weighted Media Cost (WMC), while presenting some of the same issues, at least has some research behind it and might be a place to start.

The Professional Services Division

2010-06-03T18:26:42Z

I've written before about how our internal team of analysts uses CustomScoop's ClipIQ service, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to explain a bit more about what the team does for clients on a daily basis. The shortest description of how to view ClipIQ: it can either be a DIY program where the end client sorts through the data themselves, or our internal team of analysts does the work and then provides the end client with the analyzed results of the data collected.

Anyone who has set up a monitoring program, whether it is focused on blogs or mainstream media (or both), knows that the key to finding good content is setting up keywords that are tight enough to screen out much of the irrelevant content, but not so tight that a story or blog post is missed by constructing keywords that are too specific. By casting the net a bit wider, sometimes volume will increase significantly. For a single keyword, or just a handful, the significant increase in volume that occasionally happens might be challenging, but it can be managed.

But if a monitoring program tracks a variety of topics in several areas, resulting in hundreds or thousands of blog posts, Tweets, and clips a day--and that content needs to be read, rated (I'll address why we don't use automated sentiment analysis in a post at a later date), and then analyzed--it's a significant time commitment, often hours a day. For some organizations, dedicating an employee to spend hours a day reviewing content isn't a cost-effective solution, especially as it requires someone with sufficient experience to understand the nuances of the client account. CustomScoop's Professional Services Division does this work for our clients, providing a finished product that contains the "actionable intelligence" clients can then use for briefings, reports, or to incorporate into communications strategies. This is particularly valuable for clients unable to dedicate part of every day to reviewing content. Reviewing daily is a must, due to the speed of online conversations.

Our analysts also spot things that machines can't--posts that are relevant to a client's interests that don't match any of the account keywords exactly, for example. Or, they can spot trends in the client's space that might be of interest. They have also, on a number of occasions, highlighted particularly damaging posts that could have been overlooked in a sea of hundreds of daily results--either lost in volume or because they weren't on large blogs (yet).

Choosing to engage with the Professional Services Division typically revolves around two primary areas: one, if the volume for the client is substantial enough that it's more cost-effective to have us do the work; or two, if the client doesn't have the internal flexibility to dedicate time or personnel to reviewing content every day.

CustomScoop's Professional Services Division acts as an extension of our clients, doing the monitoring, rating, and analysis so that they can focus on acting on the intelligence we've gathered.

How To: Customize Using Tags

2010-05-20T19:51:53Z

One of the most useful features in ClipIQ that our Professional Services analysts use is the custom tagging feature. Pairing this with Clip Reports allows us to create engaging charts, and flag posts for future reference, measurement, or for building reports.

After building search terms and keywords into the system, our analysts set up Clip Reports. This helps to group many keywords and phrases into manageable amounts, as I explained in my last post, How To: Tackle a Mountain of Clips. By using the custom tagging feature, you can further categorize content in the clips, allowing you to easily perform higher-level analysis.

For example, if you are watching several issues for a single client, each issue will likely have multiple keywords and phrases. Feeding all of the similar ones into a Clip Report allows you to read and rate the clips quickly--and you can chart by Clip Reports too. By using the tagging feature, you can layer additional intelligence onto your clips. For some, this might mean assessing a priority code--say, a ranking from 1 to 10 based on client preference. Or, it can help you later identify which articles mention a client's messages. Since you define the tags, it's completely customizable to what--and how--you are measuring.

The tagging feature is also helpful for organizing clips for short-term issues that might pop up but don't need to be added as a new Clip Report. If you're monitoring for mentions of your brand, and a popular celebrity mentions it on her show, you can expect a sudden surge in blog posts, Tweets, and media mentions. By using the tagging feature and labeling those clips "Oprah," you can quickly go back and track down just those clips later.

CustomScoop's analysts write multiple daily and weekly reports for clients, and the tagging feature has proved invaluable for helping to organize articles and blog posts of note for reports. Having a very flexible tagging system assists our analysts in processing clips, developing reports, and adding intelligence to data gathered.

How To: Tackle a Mountain of Clips

2010-05-06T19:02:24Z

CustomScoop's Professional Services Group--our in-house team of analysts--reviews thousands of clips a week for clients. Although each client is different, one task that has to be tackled daily is to review clips and produce reports for clients, using CustomScoop's ClipIQ service. The team of analysts uses the Team edition, our most robust version of ClipIQ.

On any given day, an analyst can log into a client's account and be faced with 200, 300, or more clips to review on deadline. The ability to prioritize is a must. So how do we tackle so many clips quickly and efficiently? We use a number of built-in tools within ClipIQ to make the mountain manageable.

First, of course, we need to know what's most important to the client. Do they want just the most significant posts from the biggest blogs or newspapers, or are we reviewing all of their content? After this question is answered, we can approach the pile with a plan.

Get a smaller mountain

One approach is to look at fewer clips from all of those collected. This can be achieved in two ways.

Excluding 'Simple Mentions' - Enter the "clips" tab and exclude "simple mentions"--this will immediately reduce the number to be reviewed by filtering out those clips that only contain one keyword. Don't worry, the clips are still there, but now you are looking at the clips that have multiple keywords/mentions, meaning they are most likely ones that contain more information than a passing mention of your client or issue. Look through the clips with the most mentions first, and you're going to get to the valuable clips first.

Sort By - ClipIQ allows users to sort their clips in a number of ways. Options are to sort by: most recent; most relevant; state name; source name; headline; and Alexa rank. Each of these sorting options could help in different situations. Just looking for clips posted within the last few hours? Sorting by most recent can help. Only interested in clips originating from Texas? Sort by the state name. Only concerned about what's posted on sites with the highest traffic? Sort by Alexa rank.

Design a range of smaller mountains

Most likely if you're using CustomScoop, you are following more than one topic or keyword. By using the Clip Reports function, you can group different keywords into topic areas. This will allow you to design and save queries so you can review your clips in batches.

For example, if you are using ClipIQ to track mentions of your product and two competitors' products, you have multiple keywords and key phrases set up for each--let's say you have 10 keywords for each. Set up a saved Clip Report for each called "My Product," "Competitor X Product," and "Competitor Y Product." When you create each clip report you customize it by telling the system what time frame you want to look at, and which keywords you want to store. So each Clip Report will pull all 10 relevant keywords into one report, so you can prioritize your review process by starting with the report most important to tackle on any given day.

Another bonus of saved Clip Reports is that you can chart based on them, easily graphing the number of clips you and your two competitors get--I'll tackle the charting feature in a future post.

Reputation Vampires

2009-10-29T21:02:05Z

Sometimes, the need to monitor from a reputation management perspective hits really close to home. We recommend clients use our service to closely monitor their mentions online to alert them to any potential problems or negative posts, and of course we use the system ourselves.

At CustomScoop, we're very proud of the work we do and are accustomed to coming across accolades more often than complaints. When we do see the occasional complaint, it's something we'll look at objectively, to see if there's a way we can improve. We realize we can't make everyone happy all the time, and that's fine--it's how we learn, refine, and improve our products and services.

On very rare occasions, there are the Reputation Vampires. They suck the life out of your day.

Today we came across a very negative complaint, where someone purporting to be a customer said that we failed to deliver on a job to remove posts from blogs made by a former employee.

We can certainly see how we would be unable to meet his expectations in this -- it isn't a service that CustomScoop provides. We're an online media monitoring, measurement, and analysis firm, not a reputation repair firm. Clearly, the person leveling the complaint is at best confusing us with another firm--at worst? Let your imagination run wild.

It's one thing to know that you shouldn't chase every rabbit. But it can be difficult to heed that advice when someone levels a completely unfounded accusation at you. It's even worse when you see that unfounded accusation on page one of your Google results. You want to ask the site to take the fraudulent accusation down, and that's a natural--but in this era, futile--response. (As to the typical corporate response, we're New Englanders and too cheap to call our lawyers. That doesn't work either anyways.)

We tell clients all the time that it is important to have an active monitoring program, and that it's incredibly useful to have a blog in place to use to correct the record and respond when needed. Check and check. We'll continue to focus on what we do best: providing timely, accurate, online monitoring to our clients.

And, once more, with feeling: we do not offer reputation repair services!

CustomScoop's New & Improved Analytic Charts

2009-10-29T17:49:52Z

As the leaves continue to dazzle us here in New England with their vibrant colors, our Dev Team has added some great new enhancements to our Analytic Charts within our ClipIQ Media Monitoring solution for you to dazzle your customers with brilliant charts & graphs.

Within ClipIQ, we have an Advanced Analytics Wizard that allows our Customers to create their own analytical charts to be used for media measurement, competitive analysis, key performance indicators, etc. It is a great way to have a visual representation of the data in their account and create stunning graphs for their reports. Our Customers have always loved this feature of our product, and based on their feedback, we've made it even better!

Some of the features we've added include a more user friendly interface, depth control for 3D charts, the ability to add Custom Titles, control over Tick Mark Intervals, creation of Custom Chart Sizes and the ability to Reorder Criteria. As a bonus, we also added the ability to create Area Charts. We just rolled out the feature this week and so far, the overall Customer response has been fantastic!

But don't take our word for it, try it out for yourself. We offer a no obligation 14 day free trial of our ClipIQ Media Monitoring solution. Simply click here and try it out for yourself.

CustomScoop Sponsors Maine Public Relations Council Annual Conference

2009-10-02T20:43:22Z

Mark your calendar! CustomScoop is proud to once again be a sponsor of the Maine Public Relations Council's Annual Conference. This year's conference will be held on October 15, 2009 at the Wyndham Hotel in South Portland. They have a great line-up of speakers, including Peter Shankman of HARO fame!

This is a great local event and is always a lot of fun. I know I'm looking forward to seeing everyone at the event. For more information, please visit the Maine Public Relations Council website.

Go Beyond Positive, Negative & Neutral

2009-10-02T19:52:45Z

One of my favorite unsung features in our Media Monitoring product ClipIQ is our Ratings Manager. We built the Ratings Managers from the feedback we received from our customers who wanted a more flexible solution when they were rating their clips. Instead of the basic, "Positive, Negative & Neutral", they wanted something more flexible and more powerful. For the basic needs of some customers, the default of "Positive, Negative & Neutral" is enough. But, for those power users who want to customize not only the Rating Name, but also the color, well, the Rating Manager is the tool for you!

Our Ratings Manager allows for complete customization of name and color. You can pick your color off a color palette, or for the true techies, you can even enter the "Hex" color code of the color you want. Very cool stuff!

And, as you would expect, the color choices you made in your Ratings Manager flow through to the Analytical Charts you create:

This is just one of the many features found within our ClipIQ Media Monitoring solution. If you want to learn more about this feature or want to just test drive the product, we offer a no obligation 14 Day Free Trial.

Simply click here and start your free trial today!

Change is in the Air

2009-10-01T20:57:00Z

Today, I am stepping up to the role of Chairman of CustomScoop and giving up my day-to-day responsibilities as CEO.

I have been involved with leading CustomScoop ever since I co-founded the company in 2000, so this is certainly a change. However, I will continue to be involved as a shareholder and as Chairman. While I won't direct the company's daily activities, I will remain a part of setting the overall vision and providing strategic guidance and advice.

Truth be told, my role in starting more than a half dozen other companies during the past decade has often led to prolonged absences on my part from daily CustomScoop management, so this isn't something entirely new.

We are fortunate to have an extremely talented team in place at CustomScoop, led by Executive Vice President Steve Bracy, Vice President of Professional Services Jen Zingsheim, and Director of Technology Dave Underwood. They will continue to deliver innovative, quality products with outstanding customer service.

For those of you interested in my next move, I encourage you to check out the post on my personal blog where I explain that I am joining DCI Group, a Washington, DC public affairs firm as Chief Digital Officer.

Make Your Clips Come to You

2009-08-14T13:46:09Z

I admit it. I can be lazy sometimes. Plus I get distracted by tasks that crop up.

But I always want to know as quickly as possible when someone mentions me or my brand online or in traditional media. Part of that's ego, but mostly it's good business. If I can respond quickly to feedback -- positive or negative -- it gives me a leg up and helps my reputation and CustomScoop's reputation.

Of course, I regularly check in to my CustomScoop ClipIQ account for this kind of information, but I also have email alerts set up to come to me virtually instantly when this sort of important intelligence gets uncovered.

I do that through the "Email Alert" tab in the product that lets me set up an unlimited amount of customized email alerts. These are all based on the Clip Reports that I discussed in an earlier post that enables me to segment clips by pretty much any criteria I can think of.

For my purposes, I have configured email alerts for mentions of me and CustomScoop, but I have also set up reports focused on Competitors and Industry News that come to me early each morning to help me digest the current environment as I get my day started.

You may also notice that I have a daily email come to me with Twitter posts from across the spectrum of topics in my account. I like to get that in the early evening because I will often try to sift through that backlog while watching a game on TV at home.

The bottom line is that I make the information I need come to me when it best suits me. Sure, I can login and get access whenever I want, but there's something comforting about knowing that my own product is keeping a watch out for me and letting me know instantly when I don't want to overlook something important.

Slicing and Dicing Clips with Saved Reports

2009-08-12T13:34:07Z

One of the things I have found with CustomScoop over the years is that we find so much information that we really need to find ways to slice and dice the data to get the most out of it in the least amount of time. That's even more true now that we have introduced Feed Keywords to help mine data from other search engines, monitoring providers, or any other source that produces and RSS feed.

Fortunately, we have some nice tools that have been created or enhanced over the past few months to help me do just that. The cornerstone of this effort is the Clip Reports tab that allows me to access a set of standard clip reports as well as the ability to create saved reports using virtually any criteria I can imagine.

Here's what the Clip Reports tab shows:

You can see that there are plenty of options for looking at data from a variety of standard views, including segmenting newspapers vs. broadcast vs. online. Or zeroing in on a specific language or country.

But the part I use most is the Custom Clip Report section that enables me to create customized reports based on my own needs. You can see that some of my reports include "Ego Clips" (you have to know when you get mentioned on a blog or in the media, right?), plus others to track coverage of our company and brands, as well as our competitors and industry. I also have saved reports to track discussion of our resellers and other business partners, as well as one to keep an eye on companies that we might have some synergy with down the road.

You may be able to tell from the screen shot above that all of the reports can be viewed in the primary ClipIQ reporting dashboard interface, but they can also be easily printed, downloaded in PDF form, exported to a spreadsheet for further custom manipulation of the data, or delivered as an RSS feed for you to consume in a feed reader or custom application.

I can also schedule these reports to be delivered to me via email as new clips arrive or on a scheduled daily or weekly basis. That gives me tremendous flexibility in consuming the information in the way that it suits me best and gives me some good options for sharing data internally with my colleagues.

In a future post, I'll discuss the email scheduling capability more because it has capability that goes beyond simply sharing these saved reports, as it also will deliver charts & graphs and other reports.

Feel free to check out the Clip Reports tab for yourself in your own account. Don't have an account? Sign up for a free trial of CustomScoop ClipIQ today and see what I'm talking about.

CustomScoop "Sucks In" Search Results and RSS Feeds

2009-08-11T14:29:54Z

There are days when I really enjoy eating my own dog food, as they say. Today is one of them. We recently added functionality to the CustomScoop ClipIQ product to enable it to consume RSS feeds of the user's choice and integrate it with the data gathered from our proprietary search technology.

That means our entire suite of tools can be used not only for the data we have always provided, but also news and blog posts from wherever they can be found online. You can now import all of the posts from an important industry blog, for example. Or you can take in an RSS feed from one of the many blog search engines out there. Heck, you can even take an RSS feed in from another monitoring vendor so that you have one-stop shopping for all of your important clip data.

CustomScoop even dedupes the results from your RSS feeds and your customized ClipIQ data so you don't have to wade through multiple copies of the same clip/post as you do when you use most feed readers.

I find this immensely useful as I try to wade through huge piles of information every day to stay on top of the latest trends and ideas, as well as mentions of CustomScoop, our partners, our industry, and even competitors. Previously, I had to manage multiple RSS feeds to go along with the proprietary data we create. This makes my life so much simpler and my effort so much more effective. (When I write stuff like this, I can't help but feel like that guy from the Hair Club for Men commercial from way back when where he said something like "I'm not just the founder of the company, I'm also a customer!")

How does it work?

You have two options. Using our new Feed Keyword Manager, you simply check off which popular search providers you'd like to integrate (we have set up several already with more on the way). Then enter your search terms in one easy to use set of boxes (no need to know the search syntax for each provider -- we take care of all of that behind the scenes). Click "Add" and presto you are now searching beyond the already robust CustomScoop source database to help ensure you don't miss a beat.

If you prefer to use an RSS feed provider that we don't already have custom configured, simply open up the RSS Manager to add in the RSS links directly. This is how you would take in all of the posts from a publication like Media Bullseye, for instance. Or import a feed from another search engine or a different clipping provider. And we know some of you are the kind of experts who just like to use the most geeky approach possible. Whatever the reason, the functionality is there at your fingertips.

Check it out for yourself today in your own CustomScoop ClipIQ account.

Don't have CustomScoop ClipIQ yet? Try out a free trial of the service for yourself.

What Our Customers Say About CustomScoop

2009-08-05T20:02:43Z

We just wrapped up our Summer 2009 Customer Survey and are combing through the results. I thought I'd take a moment to share some of the comments I'm proudest about, as well as some of the feedback that will lead to future product enhancements.

First, a sampling of quotes from our customers about our service:

"It captures articles in small newspapers that have information of value"
"The product is great, but the customer service is amazing ... If I ever have a problem it is solved within hours if not minutes"
"a clear concise summary of news hits"
"It finds just what I want"
"It presents all the media I need in one neat package every morning"
"I like the fact that all of the clippings are grouped into categories by the name they are found ... this is very helpful"
"Easy way to review and process a lot of different information. OUTSTANDING customer service"
"Finds clips from foreign sources that would otherwise be difficult to locate"
"It is very user friendly"
"I like the web interface, spreadsheet, and the customer service"
"I can send the boss an email each morning about the stories generated then quantitative reports at the end of the month (or whenever asked)"

Kudos go out to the entire team here for making so many customers so happy. And, of course, thanks to all of the customers who took the time to share their feedback -- the level of participation was phenomenal!

Of course, we got lots of helpful feedback and suggestions, too. In the coming weeks, you can expect to see a number of enhancements -- many of which are being developed or accelerated specifically because of this feedback. In particular, there will be a number of enhancements as it relates to the measurement and analysis functionality of the product.

Watch this space for announcements as we roll out some of those new features later this summer.

Choosing the Right Media Monitoring & Analysis Service

2009-04-24T17:50:51Z

Not surprisingly, I am often asked about the best solution for meeting someone's media monitoring and analysis needs. Of course, I am very biased in favor of CustomScoop, but I also recognize that some solutions may be better fits for certain individuals, organizations, and needs.

That's why I wrote a white paper on the subject. In it, I try to address some of the questions and dilemmas I most often see:

Can I get by with a free service like Google News or Google Blogsearch? Sometimes, that answer is yes. The paper explains this in more detail, but the most basic assessment must be the volume of search terms and clips that result. The fewer things you are searching for and the fewer clips it returns on a daily basis, the more likely you are to be able to get away with free. For instance, most solo bloggers just doing ego searches are better off using a free service than paying a company like mine.
If I need a professional service, how do I pick among all the monitoring services out there? You need to look very carefully at your needs and make sure that the service you select has the tools and information you need to be effective. At the same time, you want to make sure you aren't paying for too many bells and whistles that you won't be taking advantage of. Ultimately, it will all come down to your comfort level with the solution and the people behind it.
Should I go it alone on analysis or use a service? Like the free vs. paid monitoring question, the issue of using DIY tools provided by your clipping service versus paying for specific analysis largely comes down to volume. Is your time better spent compiling reports or doing something else while you pay a vendor to analyze coverage? Of course, there are other considerations as well, including third party validation and resource efficiency.
What about automated sentiment analysis? A number of companies provide the ability to "automatically" rate clips as positive, negative, or neutral based on computer analysis. This can be a great time saver -- if you are willing to sacrifice a bit on accuracy.
When is expert human analysis the right answer? If you want daily digests of just the key information and/or regular reports with careful, detailed analysis of trends, a professional analysis service may be your best bet. As good as comptuers are at organizing raw data (and even applying some sentiment scoring), there really is no substitute for people. That comes at a cost, so you will need to decide whether or not the media intelligence provided and the time savings offered justifies the expense.

The white paper, titled "Choosing the Right Media Monitoring and Analysis Solution," goes into much greater detail on these and other points to help you evaluate your options for effectively and efficiently tracking traditional and social media.

CustomScoop Helps PR & Marketing Pros Choose the Right Media Monitoring & Analysis Solution

2009-04-24T14:13:32Z

White Paper Explores the Role of Free & Paid Monitoring, Automated Sentiment, and Expert Human Analysis

CustomScoop, a leader in customizable media monitoring and analysis services, announced the availability of a free white paper entitled, "Choosing the Right Media Monitoring and Analysis Solution." Intended for public relations and marketing professionals who currently monitor news and blogs for their organization, this paper explores the advantages of different types of solutions, including free ones.

"As an entrepreneur, I hate spending one penny more than I have to in order to get the results I need. That's why I wrote this whitepaper to help people decide which media monitoring and analysis solution is right for them. It covers full-service, DIY, and even free options," said Chip Griffin, CEO of CustomScoop.

The white paper will teach readers how to:

Determine whether a free media monitoring solution, like Google News or Google Blogsearch, might be a viable option;
Evaluate paid subscription monitoring services based on needed capabilities; and
Assess automated sentiment analysis versus professional reports written by experts.

A free copy of the white paper can be downloaded at: www.customscoop.com/resources/whitepapers.cfm