Universal Information Services

Making PR Tools Better

Public relations professionals and corporate communicators often ask us, “How can I better engage with influencers and monitor our media efforts?” From the side of the industry that provides the tools for such work, we ask the same question, but in terms of “How can we make news monitoring better for the user?” Alpha Clips 3.0 is one way!

This is what drives us to create iterative developments on already good processes, further improving our service for subscribers. This month, we will be releasing a new version of Alpha Clips, the first media monitoring tool to use artificial intelligence to summarize, cluster, and condense newspaper articles, web stories, and now social media mentions … and it’s a pretty big deal.

Who is Universal Information Services?

As you read this post you may be saying, “Hey! Who is Universal Information Services?” Over the years, we’ve become best known as the media monitoring and measurement vendor that PR pros turn to when they need better coverage, better support, and less noise than their current vendor. The reason for this is twofold.

• First, professionals in the PR, marketing, and corporate communications world still only have 24 hours in the day. Yet, their responsibilities have grown to include social media engagement, media relations across more media types, and harnessing the influence of micro-influencers. Basically, the users of our tools have been asked to do more, with the same amount of time and budget. This is our primary focus when enhancing our tools. We never develop a tool simply because we can; we develop enhancements and tools because our users ask for them and need them to improve the work they can do.
• Second, the reason you may not know my company is because we don’t serve the masses with a one-size-fits-all solution. The SaaS (software-as-a-service) vendors create a common tool for all their users, limiting the ability to customize solutions to users’ needs. Because we’ve created all our tools around comprehensive coverage of all media types (print, broadcast, web, and social), we can mix and match the services for a more unique experience for each client. Additionally, our business model includes a high level of service and ongoing support, so our clients have additional help available to them to better structure searches, better use the tools, and ultimately be more efficient.

Media Monitoring Innovation

This month, we announced several key enhancements to our Alpha Clips news monitoring tools. Alpha Clips is the world’s first media monitoring tool enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI) to make monitoring the news quicker and easier for our clients. Current subscribers have already been informed of these new features, but we wanted to share them publicly because they are revolutionary for the media monitoring industry. And honestly, when we announce enhancements, we tend to get new clients who find that our approach fits their needs better than any other service.

1. Social media integration: Among the biggest enhancements is the expansion and integration of social media. We have expanded our social media reach to include more networks, more mentions, and more metrics. Not only does this integration extend our lead with AI-based news monitoring reports, but it also increases the depth of analysis we can perform for our media measurement clients.

2. Our artificial intelligence is now “weighting” your results, floating the more important stories to the top of your daily report. With a functional cap of 100 stories per day on your emailed report, we wanted to make sure you’re seeing the most prominent and important stories first. We recognize, though, that comprehensive coverage is imperative to many of our clients, so all results, regardless of number per day, will be loaded to your portal archive and available through our free mobile application. Now you can see the biggest news but drill down on the minor mentions to see what might impact your efforts.

3. FOLDERS! Yes, we have added a folder structure, much like our SmartView Portal, so you can save and move key results into folders that are meaningful to you and your team. From the folders, you can perform the same functions of selecting, sharing and filtering further, if needed.

4. Finally, this round of Alpha Clips enhancements shows a new filter function. Before you could filter by date and keyword. Alpha Clips 3.0 adds the ability to filter by state and media type. This will give our A/E/C clients the added ability to filter Prospective Projects and Bid Notices to regions of interest to their business development representatives. This will also allow all clients greater granularity in showing specific content to their team or clients.

We are quite excited to share these enhancements with our clients but are just as eager to discuss how they can help prospective clients. Please feel free to share this post with your colleagues and let us know if you have any questions. As mentioned earlier, service and support are what bring us our clients. Our history of innovation is just part of how we take care of these clients once we have them.

—Todd Murphy, CEO