| Amanda Meriwether 
Spring is in the air and with the blooming of my garden’s first tulip, I start to daydream about vacation season. Naturally I want to get out of town. But where do I go? What are the latest travel trends? What have my friends planned for their vacations? How can I convince the rest of my family to take the trip I'm dreaming of? While these are the thoughts that come to mind when planning a much-needed trip, brands must deal with similar concerns when planning their next step. If your PR and marketing strategy is going to deliver results, you have to answer questions like: Who is talking about our brand? What trends are impacting our industry? What's being said about our competition? How does it compare to the way customers, journalists, and investors feel about us? And, finally, how can we show stakeholders that our brand's message is making a difference in the marketplace? The last thing you want is to be caught unaware of what's being said about you. For better or worse, your audience's opinion can spread in a moment across Twitter, blogs, online news and review sites, and other traditional and digital media sources. Moreover, that opinion can turn on a dime. Miss out on a media mention and your brand reputation can suffer a damaging blow. 
When you don't keep a pulse on what your audience is saying, you risk: - Losing touch with what your audience wants
- Overlooking relevant trends that connect to your brand's story
- Neglecting customer complaints that should be addressed
- Neglecting customer kudos that should be highlighted
- Missing valuable media coverage that demonstrates your campaign's success
To stay on top of your industry's conversations, you need the right tool. Just as you would compare different airlines for your vacation, you should weigh different monitoring options for your brand. In the white paper Justifying a Media Monitoring Service, we delve into all of the ways a comprehensive monitoring service can benefit your brand. However, you can sneak a peek at the differences by taking a look at the quick search I did for my vacation. Using a free web monitoring service, I set up an alert for the phrase "air travel" and received 19 articles related to my keyword search. 
Source: Google Alerts I then went into PR Newswire's monitoring platform and searched for the same phrase over a 24-hour period and saw more than 300 media mentions from online, print, TV and radio sources. 
Source: PR Newswire Agility Platform Although a 250+ difference in media mentions is nothing to sneeze at, the difference here is not just about quantity of results. Investing in a more comprehensive tool will impact the quality of results by helping you: Save time. Streamlining your monitoring into one platform can eliminate the hours of work that go into manually tracking brand mentions across multiple channels and organizing those mentions by geography and media type. Take action. Your media outreach should focus on the journalists, bloggers and influencers specifically covering your niche. Look into whether your monitoring tool makes it easy to not just monitor the topics that matter, but also target outreach to the individuals molding those conversations. Make money. Using a monitoring tool that provides sentiment analysis can help you pinpoint opportunities for growth before a competitor swoops in. Conversely, it can also aid your identification of potential issues before they spin out of control and irrevocably damage your reputation. While complimentary services are a great way to dip your toe in the monitoring waters, your brand won't thrive unless you dive into the waves. For more tips on finding a tool that handles all of your brand monitoring needs, download Justifying a Media Monitoring Service. Author Amanda Meriwether is a director of customer engagement at PR Newswire, working with global customers to monitor their brands and analyze trends. Connect with her via LinkedIn. | 
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