There’s a big difference between good press and bad press.

Corporate PR and communications professionals in large companies and government organizations are always working to get traditional as well as digital media coverage. These same personnel are also tasked with scanning news media, clipping articles where their company is mentioned and assembling briefing books for senior executives that say what all of this coverage means. The Internet has provided some great tools for monitoring media, especially outside of a local media market, so now anyone can be alerted whenever their company is being mentioned.

The problem is, with so many publications and social networks in this age of information, PR people can’t keep track of where their story gets picked up nor can they make sense of the media spin put on each story. Sure, they can use Google Alerts, but receiving alerts all the time doesn’t help them summarize these individual mentions and get the overall gist of what’s being said about them.

MediaMiser helps organizations tell whether they’re getting good or bad press and helps them get the big picture of what is being said about them. MediaMiser collects and measures media coverage, sharing it with clients via a web-based solution. This solution frees clients to focus on analyzing the coverage and responding to it.

MediaMiser’s in-house team of media analysts gives buyers the option to outsource their news clippings and analysis. Alternatively, customers can opt to use the software-as-a-service product themselves. With its easy-to-use design, MediaMiser Enterprise becomes a hub that can be leveraged for individual departmental use (PR) or benefit an entire organization.

The Enterprise product works well for both on-going or ad hoc analysis on a specific crisis or issue. Imagine you are the CEO of a company who has to hold a press conference in reaction to a product recall, a labour disruption or alternatively, a new product launch or a new plant opening. You need to know how your message is being received in the media so that you can be “in tune” with what’s going on around you. Software from MediaMiser can brief you with charts and graphs showing both how prominently you are being covered as well as the tone of the coverage. Enterprise can do this with the help of weather-related icons assigned to articles: good coverage gets tagged with a sunshine icon and bad with a thunderstorm. Toning can also range from -5 to +5. Only when an organization has this information can its PR and communications team respond effectively.

Stories are like weather systems, you need to track them to see if they are getting bigger or smaller, better or worse. Media and PR people also need to see if they are getting covered enough to evaluate media relations efforts. Which influential writers do they need to pitch to get more coverage? What angles do those people need to receive in order to keep writing about an event or issue? MediaMiser Enterprise provides trends of news in Canadian publications that can be tracked on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

MediaMiser’s Unique Model

MediaMiser entered this marketspace in 2003, which at the time was dominated by large clipping services. Thanks to cheap bandwidth and storage, they can start gathering data on a prospect from the first day sales meets with them. In the next call, MediaMiser proves its value through a demo that is both personalized and topical. This gives MediaMiser a definite advantage over clipping services who would have to assign manual resources at their own cost to do this.

MediaMiser’s business model calls for both a product and professional media analyst services. This follows one of co-founder Brett Serjeantson’s core principles, that a human element is still needed for accurate analysis. A room full of media analysts also provide optimal “beta testers” for the development team, so the product is always getting better.

Marketing & Selling to the Whole Enterprise

MediaMiser sells its Enterprise product in the same way that Cognos positioned its business intelligence software; both companies aim primarily at mid-level managers. In Cognos’ case, middle management put in data and created dashboards which they showed to senior management. MediaMiser sees this same phenomenon happening with its clients, where mid-level managers are the heaviest users. Even computer-averse senior executives are using the tool in these organizations, because it’s an easy way to get views from across their organization on a news story. All those views are compiled, of course, in MediaMiser Enterprise, which arms these top executives with information that can help them make critical decisions.

How does MediaMiser market itself? In addition to generating leads through trade shows and traditional campaigns, it builds a community through its always-active blog, Turning News into Knowledge, which most of the staff contributes to. MediaMiser runs internal contests to promote writing for its blog. This team-based approach helps them keep timely updates on the site.

MediaMiser also makes inventive use of some well-known media stories, like “United Breaks Guitars” or Vancouver 2010 pre-Olympic coverage. It shows people how its tool tracks an issue in the news, highlighting how quickly it gets picked up by various print or digital media and how long it stays in the public consciousness. These reports are put out freely to show off the tool and drive home the point that companies need to pay attention to news coverage about them, or ignore them at their peril.

What’s next for MediaMiser?

Now that MediaMiser has gained traction with clients and has been positively growing, it’s shifting its focus on itself—having staff using the software for its own company monitoring and analysis. They are “eating their own dog food,” as the saying goes. This shows them where they get written about so they can take deliberate actions to raise awareness about their own company.

It’s no secret that the emergence of social media and web journalism has radically transformed where news can come from. To respond, MediaMiser is adding social media searching to its Enterprise solution so that companies can now see how they are being described on twitter, blogs and other social network sites. This Ottawa startup has many more innovative plans for serving the PR and communications needs of large organizations. Stay tuned.

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