Subscribers can read the full review in this month’s VIP Magazine or click here for a short extract.

To learn more about how Newsdesk helps marketing, information professionals and corporate communications teams take advantage of media intelligence, just visit our website.

In this series of posts, we’ll be going through the multiple aspects of a successful media intelligence strategy, and offer concrete advice and insight for turning global news and social media into a powerful strategic asset.

Part 2 – Drive Informed Decision-Making with Company-Wide News Distribution

A 2011 study from the Sloan School of Management, MIT, entitled ‘Strength in Numbers: How Does Data-Driven Decision Making Affect Firm Performance‘, showed that companies that had adopted “data-driven decision making” achieved productivity gains of 5-6% in comparison to companies that remained focused on experience and intuition. Enough of a difference, according to the authors, to “separate winners from losers in most industries”.

It is clear, then, that timely access to key news sources is crucial. Of course, information professionals and corporate librarians have long provided this important function for businesses. But media consumption habits have changed dramatically over the last 15 years. Decision makers up and down the organization now expect the experience of the Web: Fast, hyperlinked, and on-demand.

Companies that extended the original librarian-focused news services to the rest of the organization often found themselves with ballooning costs – businesses were suddenly paying a premium for all-embracing publisher licenses when a timely link to a news website would have sufficed. At the other extreme, employees have been left to fend for themselves, with Google News the de facto service provider. But ultimately, as research by Outsell showed, consumer-focused search engines fail to serve business needs, with too much time wasted on sifting through irrelevant results.

Consequently, new media intelligence services have emerged, combining the immediacy of a Google type service with the imperatives of a business audience. Company-wide news distribution that is personalized to department and even down to individual employee level is increasingly the norm, with businesses now actively managing the consumption of news within the organization.

Here are three key features to look for in a successful media intelligence solution focused on company-wide news sharing:

• Flexible news distribution options. The ability to serve business news through a variety of channels will improve the user experience and its effectiveness. Ideally, information is provided to users directly within the work-flow at point of use. Make sure that your media intelligence service supports automated email alerts, hand-edited newsletters, RSS feeds, and potentially an API to directly integrate business news on the intranet.

• Powerful business-focused search filters. The ability to curate highly focused search results that can be individually tailored to specific audiences is absolutely paramount. The aim is for every single article to be relevant. To achieve this, you need powerful filtering options, including the ability to segment the media (e.g. regional vs national vs trade), select or block specific sources, emphasize particular keywords, and remove duplicate articles such as press releases.

• Worldwide media coverage with custom source additions. A successful solution must satisfy the diverse information needs within a company, stretching across industries, professions, countries and languages, from mainstream topics to highly individualized interests. In order to cater to special interests and new projects, you must be able to add new sources on request at relatively short notice, including private publisher licenses.

Turning mass media it into actionable media intelligence is a fascinating opportunity for companies chasing productivity gains and competitive advantage. At Moreover Technologies we have made it our mission to help companies succeed at this challenge, with the award-winning Newsdesk servicedesigned specifically for this purpose. 

If you’d like to learn more about Newsdesk and how Moreover helps corporate communications and information professionals achieve results, then contact us or visit our website for details.

Next post:
Part 3 – The Power of Consolidating Media Access Through a Single Enterprise News Hub

Previous post:
Part 1 – Encourage Employee Engagement and Corporate Identity by Sharing External Media

A Wider Screen to Show More Information. Newsdesk will now load in expanded mode to better reflect the majority of our visitors’ browsing resolutions. The shrink button will still be available.

Customize the Dashboard Your Way. Select the number of headlines to display in the dashboard widgets with the new drop-down menu. Combined with the new Group Dashboards, you can enjoy unprecedented control over multiple feeds and workspaces, whether sharing news with your team or your entire organization.

Faster Media Monitoring. We’ve reduced the turn-around time for new articles coming into the system by about 5 minutes, making Newsdesk’s media coverage even nearer to real time than before.

More Public Facebook Posts. We’ve made improvements to our Facebook coverage of publicly shared updates. Contact Client Services to find out more and if you would like us to look for specific keyword mentions on Facebook.

Updates to Yammer. We have updated our integration with Yammer, the corporate social networking service, to use their latest widget with many new features.

Improvements to the Interface. The feed dropdown menu no longer sticks around when you mouse away; thumbnail images are better aligned; user comments are presented in a nicer way; we are testing new styling for headlines in the search results

The Right Quotation Marks, Every Time. Now you can paste queries from Microsoft Word and Outlook without worrying about so-called “curly quotes” breaking your search. These quotation characters are now automatically converted to their plain text versions.

You can click here to read about past improvements.

Better Broadcast.

The TV broadcast coverage now includes ‘designated market area’ (DMA) data for local US TV channels. We are also showing keyword highlighting in broadcast transcripts for easier scanning, and have made improvements to the legibility of the transcript.

Power Search

Users adept at writing complex search queries can now use more advanced search engine parameters, for even more specialist and detailed search results. Contact your account manager to enable this new feature.

Refresh your dashboard

Update the articles in the feeds saved to your dashboard without having to refresh your browser.

Improved styling For Better Readability

The Dashboard and Saved Feeds list now sport sharper fonts and a cleaner layout, including thumbnail images, to make it easier to scan the latest headlines.

Rolling Out Shared Dashboards and User Comments

We recently announced “Shared Dashboards”, allowing administrators to customize a common Dashboard, and “User Comments”, enabling users to add comments to news articles. Tomorrow’s update will introduce these new features to all customers.

In this series of posts, we’ll be going through the multiple aspects of a successful media intelligence strategy, and offer concrete advice and insight for turning global news and social media into a powerful strategic asset.

Part 1 – Encourage employee engagement and corporate identity by sharing external media

News forms opinions, and everyone is exposed to it. External commentary about a company can inform employee perceptions, in part precisely because it is external – an independent voice as opposed to perceived corporate spin.

Organizations may take a laissez-faire approach and let events play out, or they may choose to engage proactively and use external media perspectives to positively reinforce internal communications objectives.

For example, an effective media intelligence solution can ensure that upbeat articles about the company or sector are consistently shared across the organization, helping to buoy morale amongst staff, while a negative story can be assuaged by internal commentary explaining the situation.

Sharing targeted media coverage is a way to showcase any area that the company is involved in, from the success of a marketing campaign to the impact of a corporate social responsibility initiative, invigorating team spirit and a sense of pride.

Ultimately, external media perspectives hold up a mirror to the company. In a world where information is free, instant, and shared, honesty and openness become quintessential qualities of successful media intelligence campaign.

Here are three key features to look for in a successful media intelligence solution:

• Establish media distribution channels across a company. This gives corporate communications teams access to employees’ media consumption and a measure of influence over it. Delivering news through the intranet using RSS feeds and making it part of an employee’s day-to-day workflow is a typical aspect of such an approach. It offers an unintrusive “FYI” user experience and removes the issues around ad-hoc company emails such as whether to send and who to include.

• Full editorial control over RSS feeds. You need the option to manually add and remove individual stories from RSS feeds without having to go through an IT department, for example to remove an unwanted story. It must be easy to edit the search terms of feeds so you can cater for evolving topics and sudden events. You might also want full editorial control so you only publish articles that have been handpicked from a wider set of results.

• The ability to add the company’s view to news events. As a corporate communications team you should be able to add commentary to news articles, for example to explain the company position or to flag the importance of a particular article. A media intelligence tool should make this a quick and easy process.

Today’s media intelligence services such as Moreover’s Newsdesk service offer a great opportunity to turn mass media into a powerful instrument for achieving key corporate communications goals.

If you’d like to learn more about how the award-winning Newsdesk service helps corporate communications and information professionals achieve results, then contact us or visit our website for details.

Next post: Part 2 - Drive Informed Decision-Making with Company-Wide News Distribution

• User Comments in Newsletters. Share comments from users in your email Alerts and Newsletters, and add the company’s view to news events. It’s easy to edit the styling to match your template.

• Improved Dashboards. Share feeds between Group Dashboards and My Dashboard and collaborate on charts saved to a Group Dashboard.

• Better Broadcast. Video thumbnails now make scanning Broadcast search results easier. Click on a search result to go to the relevant portion of the media clip. Click on a section of the transcript to jump to that part of the clip.

This first-of-its-kind agreement introduces a new model for aggregated use of news content published on the web, ensuring reliable, rights-cleared news content for customers, while licensing the intellectual property rights of hundreds of publishers. In addition, the NewsRight partnership opens the door to new, previously unavailable media metrics directly from publishers.

We are genuinely excited about the NewsRight deal – it represents a significant step forward in aligning the interests of publishers and the users of the content, as the publishing industry continues to evolve.

We’ll be sharing more details in the weeks ahead.

If you have any questions in the meantime, please reach out to your account manager who will be happy to assist you or if you are not a client contact salesinfo@moreover.com for more details.

You can read the press release here:  NewsRight & Moreover Technologies Announce Content and Data Analytics Licensing Agreement

Let us know what YOU think about this groundbreaking agreement!

Better Sharing with Group Dashboards.

Pre-configure and share dashboard views with the company or particular user groups, and share all the most relevant news across the company.

Add Insight to Media Coverage.

You can now add your own commentary to news articles, allowing you to give the company’s view on events and encourage employee participation.

The new comments feature can also be used to facilitate closer collaboration within teams working on media monitoring projects.

Article URLs Now in Analytics Data Export.

Newdesk’s Analytics Data Download feature now includes article URLs for even more detailed offline media analysis.

These latest enhancements will be available from next Tuesday with Newsdesk Corporate and Newsdesk Enterprise editions, at no additional cost.

To take advantage of the new features or if you have any questions, just contact your Client Services Representative.

Read the full article at

Thomson Reuters pushes trading into social media
Financial Times – Philip Stafford – Mar 7 at 5:08 GMT

(FT login required)

• General overview
• Creating searches
• Analytics
• Redistribution of content (XML feeds, email alerts, and newsletters)

We are continually adding new features and improving existing ones, so even if you’re an old pro, there may be a thing or two yet to learn.

Representatives are available from 8:30am GMT – 1:00am GMT (3:30am EST – 8:00pm EST), so we can accommodate a wide variety of schedules and time zones.

See our Newsdesk training page for more information.