The folks at PRNewswire have been listening to their clients and are now offering users who send a news release a “complimentary” service to find out about online “use” of a release that’s sent via their US1 wire. It’s called E-Watch Media Monitoring.
Beginning February 27, you can receive complimentary online media monitoring when you send a news release over any US1 newsline. US1 Media Monitoring will monitor thousands of online news sources for mentions of your organization for 30 days after the release is issued.
When you send a US1 release, you’ll receive an e-mail prompting you to activate your monitoring account. Once you click on a link in the e-mail, you’ll receive a username and password, allowing you to log into the site where you can view results, add keywords to track products, issues and industry players as well as forward articles to colleagues and save articles to download into clip reports.
Monitor more than 14,000 online news sources and blogs.
This is interesting especially since they mention blogs separately from news sources. I wonder what the difference is in a blog and a news service. I may have to send out a release through PRNewswire to see how they generate a report. I realize how much agencies in particular want to measure their PR efforts, something I think is difficult and very easy to mis-interpret and mis-represent. For example, let’s say you know how many reporters open and look at your release and maybe they even download an image or audio file. Does that mean they used your release? How would you report that information to your client? At least with online media like this service will monitor you can actually see the story. At least it sounds like it. Has anyone used this yet? How do you like it? Does it provide you with the information you need?