Universal Information Services

Think of it this way: You wouldn’t read half of a murder mystery and then put down the book, would you? Of course not! You want to know whodunit and what all the information you’ve been collecting throughout the first half of the book means.

Measurement works very similarly. Universal Information Services collects information on your media coverage by monitoring the different media outlets. But if you stop at the monitoring, you never find out what all that collected data means to your media efforts. There’s so much good information that would go to waste if you just quit halfway through the process.

But before you can measure anything, you have to ask yourself this key question … where is the conversation your client wants measured taking place?

Perhaps a campaign will shift focus as it develops. Let’s say that leading up to the campaign, you are using paid media coverage to promote your event. Then, after the event, you are wanting to check a hybrid of sources: You’re wanting the hyper-local search that includes state newspapers and broadcast outlets.

On the other hand, if you’re a hospital in a competitive market and you’re looking at what people are saying about other hospitals opening up for elective surgeries, you may want to monitor media coverage of those other hospitals to see how those organizations are putting their messages out and how they are being received. You can take what works, personalize it and put it out there, or you can avoid what doesn’t work and create your own very different messages.

Consider this: If you have no active social media presence, you may have minimal interest in monitoring for mentions on Twitter and Facebook. Instead, you decide your focus will be monitoring print and broadcast media outlets.

There are more scenarios than we can mention here, but you get the idea. At Universal, we can apply our media measurement tools and insight analysis to measure for impact, sentiment, focus, key messages and more. Our analysis service lets our clients better understand what their media results mean, creating greater effectiveness.

We offer a mixed methods approach, so those who prefer quantitative data have hard numbers in the report and those who want to know what those numbers mean will see narrative or qualitative data included as well. 

Solid measurement should allow you to:

1. Understand whether you’re making progress toward your initiatives
2. See the scope of the public’s awareness of your issues/campaigns/efforts
3. AND highlight your returns on time invested

Need help finding the rest of YOUR story?

Contact Universal at 402-342-4178 or email analysis@universal-info.com to discuss any ideas you have around your media measurement methods.