Coverage is quite essential when it comes to all kinds of media monitoring. It is difficult to track what is said about a brand or to measure the effect of a campaign if you do not have the correct data supplied.
However, it is somewhat difficult to know if the sources you, as a media monitoring company, bring to your clients are enough or sometimes even active. It would be much easier to compare different data suppliers and their advantages, as well as a help for the media monitoring companies that are self-supplied, if there was a standard in how to measure coverage.
A first step to getting closer to a standard could be that everyone is transparent and publishes their numbers, whether it is blogs, news, message boards, podcasts etc. Then we can start to adjust and eventually there might be an accepted way to measure coverage among data suppliers and media monitoring companies.
For us, dealing with blog data, there will always be more blogs out there to monitor and there is a constant struggle in finding them. We are continuously adding new methods to increase the coverage but others’ numbers would definitely spur us even more, and most likely other data suppliers in this industry, to do better.
We have made the numbers for our data public, regardless of how the numbers measure to others, and it would be great to see others do the same. When it comes to blogs, we have chosen the term “active blogs” to separate the data that matters from giant empty numbers. An “active blog” for us is a blog with a post during the last 6 months.
Every new active blog that we add to our monitoring is important. Even though we are talking about them in bulk, every single source is a reason for transparency, whether it is the 3 new blogs that we add every day in average in Telugu (Indian language spoken mainly in Andhra Pradesh) or the entire volume of 8 million active blogs.
Naturally, the quality of the data you supply is also important. However, that is a more difficult task to measure when it comes to these volumes of data, divided over different markets etc. Please share if you have any ideas here, otherwise we can start to agree on how to show the numbers first and then get down to the tough business of quality 🙂
Please let us know what you think or if you prefer to see blog coverage presented in any other way. We can of course also supply you with other specific numbers from our blog data if you like.
