The Advantages of Media Monitoring Services
For the modern public relations or marketing firm, media monitoring can be a hugely useful source of information from which taste and demographic composition can be inferred. Media monitoring refers to the constant process of analyzing media on a very basic level. This can include reading Twitter posts, watching online hosted videos, and looking at blog posts that have a relationship to whatever topic is being studied. By doing this, the observer can glean a lot of interesting information about public perception and consumer interest. It can be like a window into the general public's day to day life.
The bulk of media monitoring service involves data or web scraping. These terms refer to the compilation and preservation of various files and pieces of information on the internet by an application. How this generally works is that the party will first identify a specific type of file or data that they are interested in archiving for or compiling for further study. The targeted crawl location and the parameters of what content is to be saved is then given to an application, which will autonomously use this information to fetch the desired data, with little manpower required. Although these web scraping programs can indeed be implemented directly within a public relations or marketing office, there can be certain barriers to success. For one thing, it can take a certain amount of expertise to get the data scraping application to accurately and consistently pick up the right content. Another problem is that performing this kind of task can require a lot of bandwidth, which is not generally available in a normal office. For this reason it can be advantageous to outsource this task to media monitoring services. Media monitoring services can make benefiting from web scraping easy. |