Media monitoring and analytics. Media monitoring and analysis systems. Criteria for comparing information and analytical systems

As you know, information is an important resource of any activity, the possession of which gives a serious advantage. Considering that today materials are endlessly generated and distributed through a variety of channels, processing a large data stream becomes critical and a prerequisite for successful activity. Especially when it comes to PR, and maintaining competitiveness through managing the media field around the company is your direct responsibility.

Operational monitoring of the current situation is no longer enough, it becomes necessary to qualitatively study the meanings and contexts that not only present a picture of the present, but provide a basis for forecasting. To cope with the growing volume of information, other main resources help to cope - time and money. It is the timing, tasks and budget that will determine the best way to monitor and analyze data.

In this review of relevant data search tools, we will try to figure out if there is a golden mean between fast / cheap / high-quality.

Printed publications

Printed publications are perhaps one of the most labor-intensive resources to collect and process. The choice of monitoring tool for them largely depends on the amount of time that you have when searching, and the available budget.

Free tools involve a methodical manual search on the web for suitable resources and publications. This will help:

• Electronic archives of publications (unfortunately, not all newspapers and magazines have them).
• Advanced search by source based on Yandex and Google systems (suitable only if the required periodicals are duplicated on the network).

Manual search becomes necessary when the qualitative component of the analysis prevails over the quantitative one or the search is exploratory. Then, with a smaller amount of information, the result is a meaningful description of the situation or object, which can become the basis for future in-depth analysis.

In what cases it is possible / necessary / convenient to use free monitoring methods:

• familiarity with a particular topic, checking the adequacy of the search query, preparing for a deeper analysis in terms of scope and penetration;
• solving short-term / current tasks that cover short periods of time;
• search for a specific resource/edition/source.

An alternative, but no longer free, option for searching through printed and other publications is electronic libraries.

This is an effective professional tool that provides access to full-text publications from hundreds of publications and resources at the same time. Such databases automatically collect and store information on a variety of media in Russia and the world. Access for permanent work in such systems is paid, but it is possible to get a test account - however, with limited functionality.

However, it will be enough to view simple queries and quick, introductory analysis of a small amount of data.

The most popular electronic media databases in the Russian and foreign markets include:

Electronic media and social networks

Electronic media and social media have their own audience and functional focus. On such sites, users give estimates and express judgments that are difficult to obtain by “formal methods” (for example, surveys).

The value of social media lies in the spontaneously created discussions around the object, which a skilled specialist can moderate and direct in line with current PR goals. There are also free and budget tools for collecting and analyzing such data.

Free social media monitoring tools

Yandex.Blogs. The service allows you to search for a keyword/object in blog posts and comments to them. Search is customizable. It is possible to set the search area (leaving only blogs in general, or blog posts, or only blog comments), you can specify the name of the blogger, the name of the community, as well as the location of the author and the search period.

Google Trends. The service, which is logical, is based on data from the Google search engine and shows how often users search for a certain object / phrase in relation to the total volume of search queries worldwide. The search results are displayed in simple and understandable graphs, where you can see not only the dynamics of growth / decrease in the number of mentions of the object of interest to us, but also the distribution of the popularity of the query by region, city and language.

Paid social media monitoring systems

Paid monitoring systems automatically collect data on social networks and blogs, offering as a result a summary matrix of messages with specified parameters (tonality, geography, authors, links to posts, the number of user responses - reposts and likes).

In the Russian market, such systems, for example, include:

Each system monitors and analyzes using similar algorithms, but the depth of resource coverage is different for everyone. The services do not cover forums and reviews in the same way, so the relevance of the final search results may vary. Separately, it is worth noting that automatic monitoring can make errors in the qualitative assessments of messages (for example, indicating the sentiment of messages), which leads to additional manual rechecking of the parameters.

It is important to understand that when automatically searching for blogs, only communities and profiles that are open to search engines get into the results. Closed groups and profiles are not indexed by search engines and do not fall into paid monitoring systems. Other resources that can also only be viewed manually include editorial comments, industry forums, reviews in online stores, and Facebook user profiles that are not covered by automated systems.

What information do we need?

An important role in modern business is played by competitive intelligence, which, at least in the West, is based on marketing information obtained from the press. According to experts, about 80% of the information required to support the strategic management process can be obtained from open sources, such as the Internet, traditional media, information and advertising materials of companies, etc.

Example 1 . An American investment company at the turn of the 80s and 90s of the last century was developing a plan for its strategic development. Working with media materials of recent years, she identified the most promising areas of modern business and science in order to invest money profitably. Press analysts were interested in the dynamics of publications on predetermined topics. It turned out that at least two trends deserve attention. Firstly, then the interest of the press to a new type of computer networks - the Internet, increased significantly. Secondly, at the crest of the peak of its popularity, publications concerning high-temperature superconductivity suddenly practically disappeared from the scientific press. The first testified that the Internet would soon become a mass phenomenon and it would be profitable to invest money in its development. The second suggested that the scientists' research on high-temperature superconductivity was classified, and this also indicates its exceptional promise. In both cases, the analysts were right.

The task described in example 1 was not solved quickly, not by one person, and practically without the involvement of computer technology. The problem of processing this kind of information is that it does not have any acceptable structure and in its huge volumes. Nevertheless, having convenient tools, it is quite possible to solve it. The task from example 2 was solved quickly, by one person using simple media monitoring programs.

Example 2 . A certain Russian firm planned to take over one of the enterprises of interest to its business. We decided to contact the shareholders of this enterprise and agree with everyone on the sale of their shares. But the company did not have a list of shareholders. Then the analyst, in a completely legal way, collected information about the main shareholders from the open regional and all-Russian press, and thereby helped his management quickly and efficiently solve the acquisition problem. (An example is given by Sergei Chistoprud in Profi magazine.)

According to foreign press estimates, 9 out of 10 large American companies spend an average of $1 million annually on monitoring competitors' activities. Invested funds pay off due to the right decisions made on the basis of selected and analyzed information.

Media monitoring tools

“Handy tools for working with information” refers to computer programs that help to collect and sort media materials. There are about a hundred such programs on the market, but all of them, as a rule, are engaged in organizing the storage of medium or large volumes of information, have simple search capabilities and / or a thematic rubricator, without offering any mechanism for qualitative analysis. And this is no coincidence, because a qualitative analysis of the text involves an assessment of such nuances as emotions, threats, the nature of relations between objects ... In these areas, the human brain, capable of accumulating experience and possessing intuition, is preferable. Although the evaluation speed is low, we win in quality.
When solving intellectual problems, a computer program is designed to make the work of a person as easy as possible: firstly, to provide him with a limited selection of documents, filtering out the excess by pre-installed filters, and secondly, to provide a convenient automated workplace (AWS) for assessments. Some of the programs are able to perform an "intelligent" search through the data array, selecting documents by a set of keywords, their frequency of use and relative location, and do this taking into account morphology. These programs are already capable of simple content analysis, i.e. semantic statistical processing.
The class of such analytical (according to the terminology of their authors, although not all of them fully correspond to this name) programs of Russian developers has good chances in our country. Where one has to deal with Russian texts and documents, domestic computer firms have no worthy competitors. Among them are manufacturers of legal databases and text recognition systems, search engines and automatic classifiers, dictionaries and translators into foreign languages.
And what can domestic computer thought offer in the field of media monitoring and analysis? Many are engaged in collecting information, few are engaged in analysis. We will only list the monitoring companies, but we will tell you more about those who offer products for discovering new knowledge in data warehouses (knowledge discovery in databases, KDD).
At least a dozen databases focused on the collection and storage of media materials can be found on the Runet. The most famous of them are: "Artifact" of the company "Integrum-Techno"; "Park" system created by "Park.Ru"; electronic kiosk Russian Story; National Electronic Library from NSN; ; UIS RUSSIA; media catalog from “SMI.Ru”. Work with all of the listed sources, except for “SMI.RU”, is paid, and all their owners offer not only the opportunity to get acquainted with media materials, but also some monitoring services. But the WPS company does not keep its electronic archive of newspapers, magazines, transcripts of television and radio programs on the Internet, using the Web as an advertising platform and a tool for promoting its own monitoring products.

Analytical programs for working with texts

Analytical systems differ primarily in the type of data being processed - full-text or factographic. Methods for processing factual data have been known for a long time. Among them, OLAP analysis and Data Mining (identifying sequences, associations, decision trees, etc.) have recently become especially popular. These methods are now supported to some extent by all modern systems. They are partly implemented in MS OLAP Services and in Business Objects products. The most complete is in the PolyAnalyst system from Megaputer.
Text analysis methods are much less common. This is mainly thematic rubrication of the incoming flow of documents and counting the statistics of encountered words and phrases. To automate the rubrication procedure, the so-called autorubricators are used. The most well-known manufacturers of these systems and individual components are the Canadian company Hummingbird (a product of Hummingbird Knowledge Management), as well as the Russian companies Media Lingva (“Classifier”), Megaputer (TextAnalyst) and Garant-Park-Internet (its product is implemented on the basis of technologies American firm InterMedia). As a rule, their solutions also provide a calculation of the statistics of the words encountered.
Often, for faster and better analysis, statistics are collected using OLAP cubes. With their help, the analyst can quickly get answers to his questions as a result of standard operations. Here is an example of the simplest query: “Which of the politicians was mentioned more often than others in the leading publications of the specified region for the selected period of time?”. Of course, real queries are more complex.
For the successful application of such methods, the incoming stream is always subjected to pre-processing, including operator review, automatic spelling check, use of a stop-word filter, case normalization, etc. For subsequent contextual search, full-text indexing of the document content is carried out.

Brief overview of software products presented on the Russian market

(www.cognitive.ru/products/astarta.htm)
Cognitive Technologies offers the Astarta analytical research automation tool. It is an expert rubricator intended for collection, storage and semantic analysis of text materials. Analysis here means automatic categorization and grouping, as well as intelligent selection of information on a given topic. The technological basis for "Astarta" is its "big brother", a set of tools for creating electronic archives "Euphrates". The program has already been put into practice, in particular at Norilsk Nickel, where it is used to analyze the patent information base containing more than 100,000 documents. Astarta has a subsystem that can process materials from the media in streaming mode. With its help, the analysts of Norilsk Nickel make, for example, conclusions about changes in the interests of leading firms in the areas chosen for observation. At the end of 2002, the press reported on the beginning of the introduction of "Astarta" in FAPSI.

VAAL project(www.vaal.ru)
Within the framework of the VAAL project, two content analysis systems have been created: VAAL-2000 for the psycholinguistic study of Russian-language texts and the Vaal Toolbox for similar studies of English-language sources of information. VAAL-2000 allows you to use pre-installed analytical models or create your own. At his disposal, for example, is the methodology of psychoanalysis, the criteria of which evaluate the presence in the text of words related to sexual symbolism (according to Z. Freud), archetypes (according to K. Jung) and the expression of aggressiveness. And emotional and lexical analysis allows us to identify the emotional richness of direct speech according to the 15 most significant criteria for Russian culture.
This program was used in a study designed to answer the question: "What is the reason that the USSR disappeared from the political map of the world?". 1000 poems by 200 Russian poets of the 20th century were analyzed. The revealed dynamic dependencies of affiliation (the need for social support) and frustration (a state of depression and anxiety that arises in a person as a result of a collapse of hopes) show that the minimum of affiliation and the peak of frustration occur just at the beginning of the 90s of the last century.

Conclusions and perspectives

Many of the listed products have their own or built-in auto-categories and annotators, which means that these tools are gradually becoming standard for information and analytical systems. An urgent need for such a class of programs is the ability to work with a thesaurus (dictionary of synonyms) and take into account the morphology of the language: without these functions, it is easy to miss the necessary documents when searching. Since the results of research are most often transferred to high management, who are not inclined to sit at a computer, one should not forget about convenient means of generating paper reports.
Wanting to stay in line with the main trends in the development of the IT industry, many developers are moving their client-server applications to Internet platforms. All the products listed in the review, except Astarta and TextAnalyst, have a Web shell and use TCP/IP for data transmission. A very desirable property of complex systems for the customer is their modularity, which makes it easy to build the necessary (often cheaper) configurations.
And the last wish to the developers of analytical systems. When entrusting quantitative assessments to a computer as part of content analysis, one should not forget to provide a person with the opportunity to manually qualitatively evaluate the texts under study, which helps to fix and structure a new layer of knowledge for its subsequent analysis.
But a real breakthrough in the processing of media materials will be achieved when the authors themselves begin to accompany the text with some information structure that describes the meaning of the article and the “knowledge” set out in it, in other words, when the approach based on the separation of data characterizing the content, presentation and semantic meaning. Tim Berners-Lee, one of the founders of the modern Internet, is an adept of this approach. He proposes to combine documents of this kind into a single knowledge network, which will be called the Semantic Web. Knowledge representation languages ​​are also being developed - XML, RDF, OIL, DAMP, etc. But discussion of this topic is beyond the scope of this article.

Comparative analysis of information and analytical systems for processing open sources of information

INTRODUCTION

It is generally recognized that one of the key factors for a company's success in the market is the timely receipt of reliable and complete information about changes in the external environment, as well as its effective analysis and correct interpretation. In recent years, due to the high rate of changes in the world around us, the amount of information that needs to be collected and analyzed has been rapidly increasing. Periodicals, TV channels, radio stations, news agencies, Internet resources daily report thousands of a wide variety of facts, opinions, assessments and forecasts. This leads to the fact that the collection and analysis of up-to-date information about the external environment of the company from year to year becomes an increasingly time-consuming and expensive procedure.

At the moment, specialists of Russian companies solve this problem, as a rule, in two ways:

• order services for processing open sources of information from specialized marketing or information agencies;
• independently monitor industry publications and information resources.

One of the tools that allow you to effectively and independently solve the problems of processing and analyzing information materials from open sources are information and analytical systems, to which this article is devoted.

PURPOSE OF THE ARTICLE, METHODS OF COLLECTING INFORMATION, ASSUMPTIONS

The purpose of this article is a comparative analysis of information and analytical systems (IAS) offered on the market and popularization of this tool among marketing specialists of Russian companies as one of the elements of a marketing information system.

As objects of comparison, we selected four systems that are the most popular in Russian companies (both among end users and marketing agencies) and allow you to independently carry out the most complete qualitative and quantitative analysis of the information received:

• Medialogy, Medialogy company;
• Artifact, Integrum company (hereinafter - Integrum system),
• Public.Ru, Public Library Company;
• Park.Ru, Park company.

This article has been prepared on the basis of the results of the analysis of information presented on the official websites of the companies developing the considered information and analytical systems (www.medialogia.ru, www.integrum.ru, www.public.ru, www.park.ru), received during telephone interviews with managers of sales departments of development companies, as well as based on the experience of working with these systems of company employees and colleagues.

In preparing the article, we made the following assumptions:

• the article considers only Russian-language information and analytical systems;
• systems are evaluated in terms of the convenience and efficiency of their use by employees of marketing departments or specialists of marketing agencies;
• the article does not advertise any particular system, the opinions and assessments of the authors of the article may not coincide with the opinions of other experts in the field under study.

CRITERIA FOR COMPARISON OF INFORMATION AND ANALYTICAL SYSTEMS

To conduct a comparative analysis, a list of criteria was formed that describes the main characteristics of the IAS considered by the user at the stage of system selection. Graphically, the resulting comparison scheme can be represented as follows (see figure).

Block "General description of the system" contains: a brief description of the system, the uniqueness of the product from the point of view of developers and users, a description of the tasks to be solved in the field of marketing, as well as groups of specialists for whose work the system is intended.

Block "Functional part" is divided into three logical subgroups: "Information Sources" (incoming data from the media), "Technologies and Procedures" (analysis) and "Results" (information for decision-making or processing within the company's marketing information system).

In the block "Marketing part" the cost of service packages is compared, additional services provided to the client are described (such as training the client to work with the system, assistance of a personal manager, user consultations, seminars for users) and options for familiarizing the user with the system.

RESULTS OF COMPARISON OF SYSTEMS

The results of the comparison allow us to conclude that there are no significant differences between the considered IAS in terms of such parameters as the target audience of users and the list of tasks to be solved. The systems under consideration with varying degrees of efficiency of use and visibility of the presentation of results allow solving a range of similar tasks facing the marketing department and the press service of the enterprise, for example:

• competitive analysis;
• information intelligence;
• study of industry markets;
• reputation management;
• operational media monitoring;
• precise search for information.

The target users of the considered information and analytical systems are mainly employees of marketing departments (marketing analysts, PR managers), press services and security services. In addition, the systems under consideration provide service packages for company management, which allow heads of enterprises and departments to independently study the necessary amount of information.

Medialogy system

The Medialogy system was originally developed for the internal needs of the IBS holding, which specializes in management consulting; Since 2003, the Medialogy system has been put into commercial operation. As the developers themselves say and the representatives of marketing agencies providing media monitoring services admit, a system with similar analytical and search capabilities does not yet exist in Russia. In our opinion, a unique feature of the Medialogia system, from the user's point of view, is a convenient and diverse toolkit for analyzing information and visualizing the presentation of results.

The only foreign product comparable to "Medialogy" in terms of capabilities for processing information from open sources can be considered the American IAS Factiva (www.factiva.com/ru), which is a joint development of Dow Jones and Reuters. However, today the Factiva system is not of interest to most Russian companies due to the limited number of Russian-language sources to which it has access.

Sources of information. The database of the "Medialogy" system includes materials contained in open print, electronic and media media. About 2.8 thousand Russian resources supply information to the system database: the largest TV channels, news agencies, publishing houses, Internet resources, and about 200 foreign sources. Russian media materials are available for reading and automated information analysis, foreign media materials are read-only. The information database is replenished promptly: media materials (television and radio programs) enter the database an hour after going on the air, publications of the periodical press - when the issue is signed for print, electronic media data - in real time. When entering the system database, all information is translated into a single text format, however, the user has the opportunity to receive the original material (for example, for printed publications - a print of a strip in PDF format, for television and radio materials - a video with a fragment of the program).

Analysis technology. The information analysis technology in the Medialogia system represents the process of intelligent data processing, which combines automated analysis processes and manual information processing by Medialogy specialists. This technology makes it possible to better study informational facts, identify links between individuals and / or companies, track the dynamics of their information field, the policy of covering the situation by individual sources or authors.

Convenience of the interface. In our opinion, the Medialogia system is the most client-oriented of the four information and analytical systems under consideration. The uniqueness of "Medialogia" lies in the possibility of pre-configuring the user's workplace by combining standard solutions, while the client gets the opportunity to supplement it with other services. This means that for a user who enters the system for the first time, a personal profile has already been prepared with a connected set of services for searching and analyzing information from the media and pre-configured options for preparing reports that are agreed upon at the stage of signing an agreement with a client.

Working with the Medialogia system does not require the installation of additional software (a regular web browser is enough), which makes it possible to work with the system from different workplaces.

The main way to search for information when working with the Medialogia system is an object-oriented search, when an individual, company or brand is indicated in the system as a separate object. The advantage of this search method is that a list of marker words is attached to each object, with which it can be designated in information sources, and the search is carried out using all possible designations of the object. A group of geographical objects (regions, regions, cities) is also identified, which allows you to build distributions of mentions of persons, companies and brands in relation to a specific geography. In addition to object-oriented search, the system provides contextual search (similar to search in the most popular search engines "Yandex" or "Rambler"), search by individual fields and attributes of documents, as well as search for information in personal sets of information sources defined by the user.

The results of the search and analysis of information in the Medialogia system can be presented in various forms: publication feeds, graphic information (diagrams, tables, maps, color coding of messages, favorable index, reflection of the positive or negative content of messages), contextual selections and ratings. Analytical reports of various types are used as tools for systematizing the received data, which can be created both independently by the user and to order by employees of the Medialogy company. The user of the "Medialogia" system can receive reports with the results of information search and analysis both online (during a session in the system) and offline (by e-mail or to an FTP server).

The archive of requests created by the user and reports that have ever been generated is maintained in the system automatically and stored in the user profile. At the request of the client, it can be moved to a local computer. Searching for information in the archive is possible; the search method is no different from the search for information in a common database.

As noted above, the Medialogy company is maximally focused on working with clients, and in order to make its product accessible to small and medium-sized businesses, the company developed the Medialogy Basic system, which, according to the developers, is an inexpensive and effective tool for solving the most common problems of analyzing information from open sources.

The Medialogy company offers its customers a line of typical products, such as:

• "Operational media monitoring";
• "Press clipping and TV clipping";
• "Analysis of PR-activity";
• "Reputation analysis";
• "Competitive Analysis";
• "Business intelligence";
• "Industrial Market Research".

The number of analysis methods offered to the client within the framework of a typical product depends on the selected level of access to the system (Basic, Advanced or Expert). An interesting solution, in our opinion, is the formation of ready-made "jobs" for users by connecting certain standard products. In this way can be formed:

• "Workplace of a marketing manager";
• "Workplace of the PR-manager";
• "Sales manager's workplace";
• "Workplace of a top manager".

The expansion of the range of tasks to be solved for the formed "workplace" occurs by connecting other standard products, which forms a "Corporate solution" that meets all the needs of the client company.

The cost of the access level, which allows to carry out a qualitative and quantitative analysis of information and view about 50 thousand articles every month, is about $1.2 thousand per month. Large clients are provided with a personal manager and the possibility of consultations in their office.

To evaluate the system's capabilities, Medialogia offers its customers not only a presentation and demo versions of the product and final reports, but also a real opportunity to test the system in test access mode.

Integrum system

According to the developers, the Integrum system (on the market since 1996) is by far the most complete electronic archive of Russian-language media, created on the basis of materials from open sources of information.

The uniqueness of the information-analytical system "Integrum" for the user, in our opinion, lies in the possibility of obtaining information from address-reference and legal databases, Rospatent, Goskomstat, as well as from specialized literature (editions in PDF format).

Sources of information. The database of the information and analytical system "Integrum" contains both materials from print, electronic and media media, as well as data from a number of other sources: bulletins, catalogs, information publications of official institutions, address and reference databases and statistical reference books. Information providers for the system database are more than 5 thousand sources, including those in foreign languages. Translation of texts from foreign languages ​​can be carried out using an automated service.

In the "Integrum" system, data arrays are formed on the basis of agreements with the editors, according to which copies of materials are supplied to the database when the issue is signed for printing. Information is stored in the database in its original form (full text of articles) under a unique title in text format. The main database array is updated daily, but there is a group of sources (for example, news feeds) for which the array is updated in real time.

Analysis technology. The basis of the analysis technology is automatic intellectual processing of texts, which is based on the modules of graphematics (a method of linguistic analysis, in which the source text of a document is divided into paragraphs, sentences and words, as a result of which it is possible to build an external representation of the text), morphological analysis, semantic analysis, homonymy detection , as well as handlers for proper names and special object highlighters (for example, names and dates in any form of writing).

Convenience of the interface. In the current version of the Integrum system, a single profile is used to organize the work of users, which provides access to: the Artifact information retrieval system, various types of prepaid services and reference information on working with the system (for example, standard queries, query language). The system interface is intuitive, simple and easy to use. Currently, Integrum is planning to further improve the user interface.

The degree of compliance of the results (informational materials) with the search parameters largely depends on how well the user knows the query language. In order to teach clients the language of requests, Integrum specialists offer consultations to clients on the formation of standard requests, which is useful at the stage of implementation and launch of the system.

Work with the "Integrum" system is organized in the same way as with the "Medialogia" system: the user does not need to install any additional software on the computer, the work is carried out through a regular web browser.

For large companies, an additional advantage of the system will be the ability to organize work in the database under different accounts (depending on the tariff, the client is provided with from 1 to 60 accounts). If access to the media database is necessary for employees of several departments of the client company, then the use of different accounts makes it possible to control the amount of information that was received by each of the departments. For a number of companies, such a service can be very relevant, since access to the system involves payment by item.

Organization of information search. The main search method in the Integrum system is a contextual search, which is carried out using a logical query language developed by the company's specialists. Search in the system can be carried out both over the entire database as a whole, and with the introduction of conditions (for example, you can create personal selections of information sources or search for a certain time interval). By default, users are offered a collection of standard queries that make it much easier to find the information of interest. In addition, the user can independently (or with the help of company managers) formulate a request to the system using a logical language. Any request made by the user is saved and can be used again.

Presentation of the results of the work. The results of work in the Integrum system can be presented in a variety of formats: article text, news feed, contextual selections, graphs of comparative and relative mention in the media, factual references. Based on the results of work in the system, a report is generated, in which, thanks to a special module of the system, all the information found is brought to a single form. The client can view the search and analysis results in real time or receive a report by e-mail. In addition to an accurate search, the client is provided with a wide range of additional services for collecting information of interest (for example, monitoring documents on a given topic, compiling a consolidated news feed, compiling ratings and references); at the same time, these tasks can be solved both independently by the client, and to order by employees of the Integrum company.

Maintaining an archive of requests and reports. The archive of queries and reports ever created is kept automatically in the user account; as in the Medialogia system, it can be moved to a local computer. A relative disadvantage of the "Integrum" system is the lack of the ability to search the archive: in order to find the necessary material in a previously generated report, it is necessary to view it in its entirety.

In addition to a simple search in the media database (exact search), Integrum offers its customers the following services:

• "Personal newspaper";
• "Teletype";
• "Today in faces";
• "Who? Where? When?";
• "Relative mention";
• "Comparative mention";
• "Individual information service".

On the basis of the listed services, four products have been formed in the Integrum system:

Every day mass media and social media (blogs, forums, social networks) publish gigabytes of textual information and media files. Navigating in this information space is difficult, but extremely necessary, since a lot of information relates directly to your activities. The purpose of media and social media monitoring is to help you collect only the information you are interested in - in full (!) and without informational noise (!). The principle of monitoring is simple:

• Gather as much information as possible from a variety of sources;
• Only the necessary information is selected from it, on given topics;

It's like a personal newspaper: you open a newspaper in the morning, and there is only the news that you are interested in, and nothing more. All information is structured and organized.

Where is media monitoring and analysis used?

Media monitoring is a tool that is relevant and in demand today, but far from new. It is known that the key to the successful policy of Winston Churchill during the Second World War was his information and analytical activities. He received copies of all European newspapers before they went to press, and he began each morning by studying the papers. If he did not have time to get acquainted with the news on his own, subordinates compiled for him a digest with the most important political information that he analyzed and considered in strategic planning. Modern media monitoring performs the same function - it allows you to quickly respond to events covered by the media and make decisions based on full awareness.

Media monitoring and analysis is used in completely different areas. Companies and large commercial structures use media monitoring to analyze the external environment: brand monitoring (what and how they say about the company), competitive intelligence (what they say about the activities of competitors), public procurement monitoring (what government tenders are played in this industry), monitoring changes in legislation (what new legislative acts relate to this area) and many other topics that small and large businesses need to monitor in order to build a successful development strategy. State structures and budgetary organizations are also actively involved in monitoring and analyzing information: for example, in the prefectures of some districts Moscow has systems for monitoring news about incidents in the district and for systematizing citizens' electronic appeals.

Types of media monitoring and analysis

Since World War II, monitoring technology has come a long way. If in Churchill's time it was usedmanualmonitoring, there are now systemsautomaticmonitoring, which quickly process and structure huge amounts of information. Their advantage is in the completeness of the coverage of sources and the "total" analysis of information, that is, with automatic monitoring, the omission of important news is practically excluded. Manual monitoring is still widespread, although usually "manual" collection of information is still based on automatic pre-processing by the system, since completely manual monitoring is ineffective.

The types of monitoring differ according to the sources for collecting information: monitoring can be complete or partial source coverage. Main sources of information:

• printed press
• TV and radio
• Internet resources:
  • News and thematic sites
  • RSS feeds
  • Blogs
  • Forums
  • Social networks

95% of the information is provided by the monitoring of Internet resources, since now the vast majority of the world's media publishes information on the Internet. The advantages of Internet monitoring are the minimum interval between the publication of the news and its delivery to the user, as well as, if necessary, the coverage of a large number of foreign media and social media. But at the same time, there are still 5% of information that is not published on the Internet, usually these are regional media that cover information of local significance.

Some full-featured monitoring systems (for example, the system of the LKS Analytics company) installed on the technical base of the customer, in addition to the sources described, offer the connection of the customer's internal resources: e-mail, ftp and the file system, which allows you to safely process and structure large volumes of internal information.

A whole group of monitoring services stands out (IQBuzz, YouScan, Babkee, etc.), which are focused only on monitoring social media - blogs, forums, social networks and review sites. These services are used to track brand mentions and build an effective PR strategy for the company. When a new product is released, a company can accurately monitor consumer reaction to this product and adjust its marketing strategy in a timely manner.

Media monitoring differs by the type of end product that the client receives. There are two main options:

• Digest(news summary in text format)
• Media monitoring and analysis system(a program or online service that allows you to independently analyze information)

Digests usually contain information automatically collected by the monitoring system and presented in the form of a report that the client receives by e-mail. This is a convenient and inexpensive way to stay up to date in your field and at the same time spend 5 minutes a day watching the news. The cost of a subscription to digests varies from 5 to 20 thousand rubles per month. Some companies, for an additional fee, offer in the digest format not only monitoring, but also analysis of the information given in the digest.

The media monitoring system allows carrying out full-fledged information and analytical activities. It automatically monitors the emergence of new information on given topics 24 hours a day. Then the user can independently analyze structured information using various functions: news database search, graphical and statistical analysis, analysis of factual information (search for people, organizations, dossier formation) and other functions that vary depending on the specific system. Access to an online media monitoring service can cost from 25,000 to 50,000 rubles a month on average, while the full cost of stationary monitoring systems and their customization for large analytical departments starts from 500,000 rubles, and most often amounts to millions.

Two main types of monitoring should be distinguished − constant and operational. Constant monitoring is a daily selection of information on certain topics. Operational monitoring is the solution of urgent analytical tasks and monitoring of messages on new topics. It is often impossible to confine oneself to the same topics for monitoring: for example, the emergence of a new competitor, a new field of activity of the company, some kind of emergency - require a quick and complete analysis. Obviously, operational monitoring and analysis of information is possible only within the framework of full-featured systems ("Metapoisk" - an application to the "LKS Analytics" system), but not digests that offer information exclusively on specified topics.

Another important difference between different media monitoring services and products is the uniqueness of monitoring topics: for example, a number of companies offer ready digests on standard topics (oil industry, chemical industry, banks, ecology, etc.). Such digests are collected by keywords: for example, for the oil industry, the keywords would be oil, petroleum, oilman etc. But more effective for information analytics are unique topics for monitoring, as monitoring should be customized and fully meet the interests of the customer. Moreover, it should be taken into account that the complexity and uniqueness of the topic for monitoring practically does not affect the cost of the final product, a ready-made digest and a digest on individual topics will fit into the same framework - from 5 to 20 thousand rubles / month.

What is effective media monitoring and analysis?

The main rule is that effective monitoring must meet the objectives! To choose the right monitoring, you need to answer a number of questions:

1) Is media monitoring your main activity? What time and labor costs do you expect?

If you need to be aware of the latest developments in your field, then it is enough to receive digests on topics of interest to you. If you have at least one employee in your staff who is directly involved in information and analytical activities, then for greater effectiveness, he should be provided with monitoring tool. If the organization has an entire analytical department, then the need for media monitoring using the system is even higher: full-featured monitoring systems have the ability to create profiles for different users and differentiate their rights in working with information, so all specialists will work in a single system, but everyone will work in their own field.

2) How many and what topics do you want to monitor?

Determine how unique your topics are: if, in addition to the state of the industry, you are interested in some other topics, then you should contact a company that provides individual monitoring settings, especially if the task of monitoring itself is not trivial (for example, you need a detailed study of topics, separation information into negative and positive, monitoring of information in other languages, etc.). The cost of monitoring within the selected product depends on the number of topics.

3) What sources do you want to monitor?

This question will help you to solve in the company to which you apply for monitoring services. But you need to keep in mind that the selection of sources depends on the topics for monitoring. Blogs, social networks and specialized review sites (review.ru, yandex.market) are suitable for competitive intelligence and brand monitoring. To monitor political topics, central and regional media, as well as blogs, should be taken as a source. If the topic is specialized, then you should pay attention to monitoring thematic forums, where you can find a lot of unique information on the topic. That is, in each specific case, the set of sources, as well as the set of topics, must be individual so as not to collect unnecessary information, which could potentially contain "garbage". The price of monitoring services can be affected by the number of sources, as well as their uniqueness: usually companies already have a database of sources, but if you need to connect some additional sources that are not included in the already formed database, then the cost of monitoring can increase significantly.

4) What type of monitoring - permanent or operational - do you need?

If it is enough for you to set topics once, then constant monitoring, which is provided by all companies, is suitable. Operational monitoring tools that allow you to set your own monitoring topics and quickly analyze incoming information are a development that not every company has. Therefore, there is some intermediate option, according to which the user can, if necessary, make changes to the composition of the original topics, and the company providing monitoring services adds new topics for monitoring in a few days.

Results and prices

So, within the selected product (digest or full-featured media monitoring system), the cost of services will vary depending on the following reasons:

• Number of topics and sources
• Uniqueness of topics and sources
• Availability of tools for operational monitoring

But when choosing media monitoring and analysis services, always remember: monitoring should not be evaluated on a scale of "expensive" - ​​"cheap", the main thing in monitoring is its effectiveness. And the effectiveness does not depend on the price, but on how individual the chosen type of monitoring is. Only with fine tuning of monitoring you will be able to rely on the collected information in making strategically important decisions.