As mentioned in the post about the launch of CustomScoop’s new user interface, one of the new features is the ability to sort, manage, and arrange content for either one-time delivery or set up as a scheduled delivery.
In other words, you can arrange your results within CustomScoop’s tool, rather than creating a newsletter in another program. This saves tremendous amounts of time–we use this feature every day in the Professional Services group preparing reports for clients.
How does it work?
For Professional Services accounts, we’re typically sorting through the content and applying some level of additional categorization or analysis. We’re rating the content on sentiment, applying client-designated tags to speed up analysis, and adding notes and comments. Sometimes the client reports will contain all of the content the system collects, other times the clients just want to know what the most influential blogs and online sources are saying about issues of interest to them.
Either way, the next step after reviewing the results is to select the “newsletter” tab, where there are several templates for newsletter designs–do you just want to send content? No problem. Want to include a chart? No problem. Just select the template, and off you go! If you need a custom template to match a client’s newsletter design, contact us. We’ve had great success in developing custom templates for clients. (There is a charge for this, but it’s a one-time set up fee.)
Next, select a report or enter the parameters you want included by selecting “create a report.” You can select the length of time the newsletter should cover, and what content do you want included (only rated and tagged material, or only items rated positive, for example). Then sort if you’d like to–by Alexa ranking, time, headline, source name, or circulation.
The wizard will then walk you through the remaining steps, such as adding a logo or chart (if that’s the template selected) or adding header or footer text.
You can then save the criteria, and schedule the report to run and send automatically. It’s an easy, fuss-free way of generating a polished report.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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