OP-ED COLUMN
By Rex
I recall signing up for my first Google News alert in early 2003. It felt great. Suddenly, without having to lift a finger, I had news about a specific issue, company delivered to my e-mail inbox, as soon as it was posted to the Web. Even better, it didn’t cost me a thing. Mainstream newspapers quickly caught up with the trend and saw to it their articles were included in Google News as well.
Then came the blogs. Technorati, Google Blog Search, Ice Rocket and many other blog-specific search engines emerged as the must-have news monitoring tools. Blogs continue to shift the balance in the news space today and the relevance of social media monitoring services is more important than ever.
In 2008, a media monitoring strategy that does not include the tracking of social networks will not get you very far. Thanks to tools like Twitter, online conversations occur in an instant – well before they materialize as posts on blogs or as articles in mainstream media. These tools add a completely new element to the whole media monitoring mix. As with Google News, many bloggers and mainstream media have already taken note and are using Twitter as a distribution channel to promote new content.
Services like Tweet Scan allow you to easily track conversations on Twitter. Simply start by typing the name of a company or product, and I promise you will learn something new about it very quickly. Many news monitoring services have already included Tweet Scan type of features; and some large cable companies are rumored to be tracking complaints on Twitter to help their customer services do a better job.
It would be fair to say that in the past five years we have learned that “news” doesn’t have to actually be newsworthy to have a significant impact; and the way that news is distributed changes as fast as the technology of news-making itself. Today’s online conversations are faster and shorter then ever – and will be even more so tomorrow. You didn’t really think it would all end with blogs, did you?