Media monitoring: Do you know what they say about you while you sleep?

It may sound unusual to people outside media and PR circles, but large brands and companies that care about their image closely monitor how the public perceives them, and for this, there has been a sophisticated tool for monitoring media mentions of their name, known as media monitoring, for years.

In recent years, media monitoring has significantly evolved and changed, primarily influenced by digitalization and, recently, AI. Traditional media such as print, television, and radio are no longer sufficient; social media, portals, forums, and even influencers, podcasters, and YouTubers must also be monitored. There is now even talk of monitoring mentions in the results of AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and similar.

These changes have been tracking shifts in the media landscape for the past fifteen years, explains Petar Ćuk, director of Mediaboard Croatia, which offers media monitoring services.

– With the emergence of social media and podcasts, the number of sources being monitored has astronomically increased. And with the advent of AI, media monitoring tools are beginning to provide new opportunities for reputation tracking as they can process large amounts of information in real-time effectively – emphasizes Ćuk, noting that AI specifically helps them define key messages, detect the tone of journalistic releases, assess the prominence of the subject, and determine whether the media conveyed all key communication messages.

Huge job

The complete transformation of media monitoring in recent years is also confirmed by Ivor Bihar, Chief Operating Officer at Determ, which, as its former name Mediatoolkit suggests, also deals with media monitoring.

– Digitalization has enabled the automation of processes that were previously done manually, thus opening the door to a broader market. Today, online and social media account for a large majority of releases, but quantity is no longer decisive – context and relevance are essential. AI allows us to process that information deeper, faster, and more qualitatively, so we do not just deliver data to clients, but real insights that help them make better business decisions – explains Bihar.

They use AI for text analysis, converting speech to text, segmenting TV shows into segments, summarizing content, recognizing patterns, and providing recommendations on how to react in specific situations. In addition to monitoring media and social networks, Determ has started tracking how often a brand, person, or topic is mentioned within large language models like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude.

– This is a completely new area, but we believe it will become as important as social media was ten years ago – adds Bihar.

Although it seems like a huge job today, experts agree that media monitoring, or better said, monitoring the entire digital space, is indeed necessary.

– A viral post can recently allow a small media outlet or influencer to significantly impact the reputation of a particular brand or organization – notes Ćuk.

Influencers are also important

Despite the common belief that influencers only create content and promote products, brands and companies cannot afford to ignore them due to their large following and influence. Influencers today are as important a communication channel as traditional media, notes Danijela Novosel, a public relations consultant at Agency 404.

– Most clients today decide at some point to involve influencers in their campaigns and communication plans, especially in sales industries such as tourism, fashion, cosmetics, gastronomy, FMCG sector, and similar. It is also important to consider the audience we are addressing. We will find young people on social media, not necessarily in traditional media. However, with influencers, it is not only the quantity of posts or likes that matters, but also numerous other parameters that can be good or bad for the brand’s reputation – explains Novosel, citing a practical example where timely monitoring of all channels has helped them identify potential crises multiple times, even while they were still at the level of a single post or comment.

– Just consider the number of all newspapers, portals, televisions, radio stations, podcasts, social media profiles… The amount of information on them is enormous, and without monitoring, it is impossible to have real-time insight into everything being published. However, in ‘repairing’ potential damages, the relationships of the consultant with the media and the ability to react quickly and timely are also important, as well as the assessment of whether, when, and how to react – notes Novosel.

In fact, for Agency 404, monitoring mentions serves as a source of data on which they build their communication strategy, rather than making decisions based on impressions. However, alongside the agency’s media monitoring services, they still ‘manually’ monitor all important sources.

– Artificial intelligence can help us with data analysis, preparing summaries, or extracting key messages, but for interpreting results and understanding context, we humans are still more important. With AI, we can speed up some processes, but the experience, knowledge, and instinct of PR advisors are still key – explains Novosel.

Thus, PR professionals still need to know how to interpret all the data and mentions from media monitoring platforms themselves, which is not always simple.

What your competitors are doing

Novosel also notes that their clients like to know what is happening with the competition, so they often monitor mentions of themselves and mentions of others. However, some are focused solely on their results, such as Aircash.

– In a dynamic industry like fintech, it is important to monitor the latest trends and activities of competitors, but we have a clear vision of the direction in which we want to develop our platform, so we are primarily focused on our own media presence – notes Lea Baričić Bićanić, director of public relations at Aircash.

To monitor mentions related to them, they rely on tools like Determ, and they monitor all markets in which they operate.

– As a financial institution operating in a highly regulated sector, we pay great attention to the accuracy of every release mentioning our brand. Media monitoring significantly helps us in this regard as it allows us to timely identify and correct inaccuracies, as well as to better understand the tone and context in which Aircash is discussed – adds Baričić Bićanić, noting that their team analyzes economic and social conditions and trends across different markets, aided by AI.

Better to monitor than to pay with reputation

At Aircash, they are aware that a good reputation takes a long time to build and is easily lost, especially in the financial sector, where user trust is paramount. Therefore, they consider media monitoring a necessary investment. Bihar, on the other hand, emphasizes that all companies, regardless of the sector they operate in, must be aware of reputational risk.

– Currently, the companies most aware of this are those that directly work with the mass market, e.g., the FMCG industry, and such companies allocate the most for media monitoring. Thanks to the technological revolution, media monitoring is now available to everyone. Every company, regardless of size, can monitor its reputation, key individuals, products, competitors, and the entire industry. Within an organization, everyone can receive personalized content – directors daily AI summaries about the industry, sales and marketing analysis of competitors, and PR teams reputation reports – says Bihar.

Regarding the cost of monitoring, it depends on the scope of the service the client orders, but this cost, says Novosel, is ‘always significantly lower than the potential negative consequences for the reputation or business of the company’.

– Especially today when anyone can publish whatever they want at any moment, and various inaccurate information can quickly reach a large number of people. Monitoring ensures that we react in a timely manner. Thus, the cost in the context of the PR budget is not high, but the value can be significant – concludes Novosel.

That everyone is subject to reputational risk is confirmed by Ćuk, as we live in an age where everyone is constantly on their phones, and ‘each of us is both a consumer and a creator of news’.

– Every organization, regardless of the sector, has a theoretical possibility for reputational risk. But most often, these are industries or sectors that affect the majority of the population: politics, the food industry, retail chains, and the tourism sector – emphasizes Ćuk.

Untapped potential

In media monitoring, companies and brands often repeat the same mistakes and believe in typical misconceptions, although most of them can be easily corrected. Ćuk mistakenly considers the failure to utilize the filtering power that quality tools provide and the reduction of the number of media being monitored. This, he says, leaves room for crisis escalation, which often starts in a smaller media outlet.

– Another typical mistake is monitoring media only to see the visibility of one’s company, but not using interactive analytics and metrics to improve communication – believes Ćuk.

Unfortunately, a large number of companies still do not fully utilize the potential of media monitoring, notes Bihar.

– Most often due to the habit that media monitoring is limited or too expensive – says Bihar, but concludes that every organization, regardless of size, can have access to the same data and tools used by the largest brands.