IT Data Centered

Whether “in-house” or on the agency side, tech PR and marketing pros have used a number of approaches to track online “coverage” over the last 10 years.

They might use expensive clipping services.  They almost always use Google News alerts.  They frequently do searches on blog aggregators (like Technorati).  And now today they use “social media monitoring” services (from full-suite applications that claim to track the entirety of social buzz, to one-offs that track specific social channels like, say, Twitter).

As a user / evaluator of many of these services in the past / present, one thing that I’ve always found to be really perplexing is their inability to distinguish true “coverage” from “pick-ups.”

I think the relatively universal view of “coverage” is that an actual author *wrote* a specific piece of content that mentioned you or your company.  Content source notwithstanding (be it a publication, blog or social forum), someone actually took the time to write original content that mentioned or focused on your company.  Clearly this is an occurence that is incredibly important to monitor.

And clearly it is of great value to grok how a piece of coverage about your company was retweeted or shared through other channels, and to understand the patterns of how that piece of coverage flowed out to various audiences (beyond the original place where the content appeared).  Tracking social channels like Twitter and Facebook is not – by the way – something that ITDatabase currently does (though we track more tech bloggers than any other research tool).

But what about the many thousands of “aggregator” sites that merely re-post press releases and / or excerpts from other people’s original content?  I find these to be particularly problematic for tech PR and marketing pros in terms of how much time they dedicate to tracking them and understanding them.

Obviously if a blog or other content source (that has a large following) excerpts, links-to or otherwise republishes another piece of content, the benefits of increased traffic can be tremendous (for example, if Slashdot “picks up” a story about your company or your client that originally appeared on eWeek – the ensuing traffic will dramatically eclipse the traffic from the original content).  But for every “pick up” source that has that sort of incredibly positive impact, there are many thousands more incidents of pick up on junky aggregator sites that have very little readership or relevance.  Of course, SEO rewards linking, and there is always something to be said for the great benefit of many pick-ups from a sheer numbers perspective.

But what is really NOT at all helpful to tech industry marketing and PR pros is when the tools they use to monitor “the conversation” cannot distinguish between mere pick-ups versus actual coverage.

For many of the tools that I have used and continue to evaluate, I use tech keywords (like “virtualization” or “cloud computing”) as litmus tests to understand how the “results” they track compare to what we are tracking at ITDatabase.  And it’s pretty clear that these tools are almost universally just crawling the entire web indiscriminately and bringing back every instance of a keyword in any type of content.  How is that any more helpful than just typing in keywords in Google (which tracks the known universe) and then having to sift through the many thousands of results?

In ITDatabase, searches for “virtualization” and “cloud computing” show results from actual authors writing original content about these topics.  In the tools I evaluate, searches for “virtualization” and “cloud computing” typically just barf back enormous volumes of sites that mention those terms – and frequently the actual content is merely pick-up from someone else’s content.

As a company strategy from day one, ITDatabase decided to ONLY focus on actual content by tech authors.  We purposefully exclude aggregator sites and we purposefully exclude mere pick-ups of press releases.  And not because it’s easier for us.  In fact, it is MUCH more difficult (from a technical perspective and a QA perspective) to apply a filter and keep our tracking specific to original content from tech authors.

There are some great social media monitoring tools out there that track the ebb and flow of trending topics and conversations, and can approximate the relative “buzz” that is going on in social channels.  While I know many of these to be missing many important tech blogs and other sources (and therefore feel like they have an incredible margin of error) – they are nonetheless really helpful tools for companies / clients to understand their presence on social channels.

But every day there are thousands and thousands of actual pieces of coverage that are written by tech authors.  ITDatabase’s customers cite numerous benefits of being able to isolate actual coverage (instead of having to sort through thousands of junky “matches” in other tools they have used that track everything indiscriminately).