Monitoring online resources
There are currently two types of approach to monitoring online resources – by-hand and automatic.
The first approach does not differ from the traditional monitoring of print media – day-by-day monitoring specialists track the resources according their media lists, searching for mentions of the keywords specified by their client. Then they form a report including fragments or full copies of the articles with mentions and send these reports to the client. These operations are performed daily (otherwise monitoring is not effective). The more is the number of resources for monitoring the bigger is the number of employees engaged for this work. The obvious disadvantage of this method is its low cost-effectiveness, depending on the number of websites and the number of keywords in the list.
The second approach is based on automatic systems that provide the whole process of monitoring, statistics of mentions and forming a report. The obvious advantage of this system is a significant reduction of expenses for the staff due to transfer to automatic monitoring system.
Online monitoring systems
Today there is a well-developed market of monitoring systems for the Internet resources is the West. More than ten companies offer these services to their customers. The leaders of the segment are as follows: CyberScan, eNow, eWatch, WebClipping.Com, MarketingBase, Extrapola. However they use by-hand monitoring too. In some systems they employ operators who check reports before sending them to their clients so as to pick up articles that were included into the reports by accident. For example, in Italian company Extrapola such employees are called Human Filters (their total number exceeds 50) while eNow takes extra fees for additional human resources engaged in monitoring services.
In addition to pay monitoring services there are also free monitoring services in the Internet, i.e. Google.com portal offers to subscribe for its fee-free reports on the results of its keyword-based search of new documents. Subscribers receive reports formatted as regular Yandex pages with the name of the website, the title of the document and its full URL. This service provides you with documents that were indexed by Yandex search engine and placed into its database. So you can never be sure that the obtained information is relevant, as far as its date is concerned. However this is really an easy-to-use tool providing any regular customer with the information that has recently appeared in the Internet on the topics of his concern.
Among the whole range of mass media monitoring services a special niche is occupied by WebScan N&P, a system of automated monitoring of Internet resources. Its key specifics are as follows: it totally gives up by-hand monitoring practices, it makes it easier to add new resources for each customer and it makes it possible to collect automatically various statistical data.
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