Universal Information Services

Innovation and development have always been a primary driver for Universal Information Services. Delivering service enhancements helps our clients and ensures that our services continually add value to their work. Our Alpha Clips service, which uses artificial intelligence to summarize content and compress the time needed to digest your found news results, is our most cutting-edge tool for PR professionals and the AEC industry finding sales leads. We do have plans for additional development this year, but we’re pleased to be able to deliver the new version now, Alpha Clips 2.5.0 to provide those working from home with the fastest and easiest monitoring tools.

The Alpha Clips news monitoring service focuses on the origins of news stories that are commonly shared online, delivering them in a format that is more quickly read. Alpha Clips combines published news articles with the online story equivalents and social media amplification, in a platform designed to streamline news monitoring and allow communications professionals to quickly consume key information. Faster access to clusters of earned media exposure lets PR professionals and communicators quickly review the news and adjust desired outcomes.

The Alpha Clips platform uses the conventions and formatting of journalism to shorten the length of a news story by intelligently summarizing an article. Summarized Alpha Clips are enriched with click-through access to the original, full-text content and images from the publisher. More specifically, our artificial intelligence trains the system to extract key elements of a story based on your specific needs.  For instance, the system understands your targeted interests and weighs that understanding against the importance of a headline, lead paragraph, and subsequent sentences.

With the launch of version 2.5.0, we’ve added some great new tools and technology to further help our clients. These improvements include:

• 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 on a global scale. 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 create, 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. Foldering is a great tool for sales teams or internal communication teams that work on separate messages or topics.
  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.

Several of these enhancement ideas came from our clients who use the Alpha Clips platform, so they were created for the users by the users. Given that many of us are working from home right now, we felt that providing some great new features might put a smile on the faces of our clients. We hope you enjoy these features and are happy to discuss them with anyone, client or not.

Stay well!