Universal Information Services

The Need To Monitor News

For public relations, corporate communications, and public affairs professionals, monitoring what is said in the news and media is critical. Historically, professional communicators have monitored the news through tools that basically search, find, and deliver results. Universal Information Services recently launched Alpha Clips as a new way to better monitor and absorb the news you need. Whether tracking earned media for a political campaign, or evaluating the impact on your brand from shared media exposure, PR pros need to monitor the media. [I’ve read enough. I want a demo now.]

What are Alpha Clips?

Alpha Clips are the result of a totally new approach to identifying the news you need through Artificial Intelligence (AI). These Alpha clips include the origins of news stories that are commonly shared online, delivering them in a format that is more quickly read. By tracking the time a news article is published or a web page posts, we can often show you the first mention of your topic and then “stack” repetitious articles within a click-through link for easier review.  Seeing the origins of your potentially shared news, in a concise mobile or desktop platform, we streamline news monitoring to allow you to quickly consume key information and use that data to adjust desired outcomes.

How are Alpha Clips Different? 

Alpha Clips is the first news monitoring service to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to summarize, cluster, and deliver media monitoring results so a subscriber can digest their data 75% faster than regular news monitoring reports. Here’s how we can save you 75% of your news monitoring time.

First, our system intelligently summarizes each published or posted article and generates only 2-3 key phrases to capture the essence of that news item. Instead of having 12 paragraphs to read through for details, you can quickly see what specific information was extracted as it pertains to your search strategy. This summary process allows you to review your coverage reports four times faster than reports from competing news monitoring services.

Second, because our (AI) platform can consider both the subjects of your found results AND the time when it was processed, our Alpha Clips can better organize your earned media exposure. Within your mobile or desktop report, the Alpha Clip summary is displayed, with additional “like” results listed underneath. We don’t display the full summary of each additional “like” result, but give you access so you can click-through to see how your story appeared in other sources. Clustered results so closely match the alpha clip that it can be assumed they shared the same origin.

Third, the format and interface of the Alpha Clips results allows a subscriber to more easily find and share key news stories with internal stakeholders. As this short video shows,  monitoring news with Alpha Clips creates a fast, mobile environment any professional communicator can use. See your results more quickly, organize the ones you need, share them with internal team members, and then focus all the time saved on more mission critical activities. Our research shows the Alpha Clips format is the most intuitive media monitoring report on the market. [OK! Now I’ve read enough and want a demo immediately.]

The Benefits of Alpha Clips

• Faster access to breaking news across email, desktop, and mobile app environments
• Streamlined reading that reduces article length by up to 75%, allowing the reader to consume the content much faster
• Clustered articles that are closely related to the Alpha Clip, showing the reach of a story
• Click through access to see full-text stories and images as published
• Immediate sharing within your organizational family, according to licensing
• Newsletter creation and “pinning” of key stories that should be shown first in a report
• Archive searching so you can find and explore specific topics within your results

How Do We Charge for Alpha Clips?

Universal has two easy options for subscribing to our Alpha Clips service. You can choose the flat-fee subscription or use the volume based pricing. Over the long haul, paying for the volume of press clippings (web stories are a flat fee) usually saves a little bit of money. However, for the ease of budgeting, our flat fee pricing allows you to plan what your monthly costs will be. In the end, the additional cost of Alpha Clips, when compared to legacy news monitoring services, averages less than $60 dollars more per month. So what does $60/month mean to the average PR professional?

If you earn the average salary of $60,000/year, that equates to just under $30/hour. And if you spend a conservative 30 minutes per day reviewing your media monitoring report, this means you spend 10.5 hours per month looking at your monitoring reports. These 10.5 hours cost your organization roughly $315 in time and this does not include how valuable that time is should you have been able to work on more mission critical tasks.

So, if using our Alpha Clips can save you a conservative 7.875 hours per month (75%), you would be spending only $78.75/month to review your media coverage. Now given the average monthly cost for Alpha Clips only adds $60 to your monthly fees, would you pay $60/month to earn $315? Or in financial terms, we are offering what is almost a 500% return on your investment.

Beyond Time and Money

Above we made some very conservative estimates regarding the time and money one can save when migrating their news monitoring to Alpha Clips. But, there’s more to Alpha Clips than just the time and money benefit, there’s also the fact that Alpha Clips works how our clients want news monitoring to work. Mobile or desktop, Mac or PC, iOS or Android, on the train or in your home, the Alpha Clips platform gives you the same experience. We know that beyond the questions of time and money comes the real question, “How simple and convenient is it?” In our research we’ve seen no other service deliver what Alpha Clips can. The only question we have is, “When would you like a demonstration?”