When evaluating a media monitoring service, there are many factors to consider: your scope of coverage, which provider to choose and the service tier that best fits your budget. However, while it may not seem to be a difficult choice, one of the most important decisions you will make is selecting the best keywords for your new monitoring account – keywords that will deliver the most relevant and targeted clips.

Choosing the right keywords and phrases is essentially a balancing act. If you pick terms that are too broad, they will return hundreds (or thousands) of clips per day, leaving you with a virtual stack too large to read through. However, if you pick terms that are too narrow (for example, just your company name or your name) – and you are not in the news at the moment – you may find you get very few or no daily results. In both of these cases, having too many clips can be as dangerous as having too few – both will leave you disappointed with your monitoring provider and its system capabilities. (more…)