The media is at a turning point. The volume of communication is greater, and the pace is faster than ever before. It is no longer enough to watch the evening news or read the newspaper in the morning if a Finnish company wishes to monitor their own visibility or that of their industry in the media. Monitoring and reacting must be in real time around the clock. The success of business operations, successful deployment of a communication strategy and even minimising crises depend on the organisation’s ability to quick, comprehensive, automatic and high-quality media monitoring.
The media monitoring tools are lagging behind these needs. In many organisations, media monitoring has still in the 2010s meant reading printed newspapers, browsing websites manually and printing articles and filing them in a folder. Conveying the overall view of media coverage – if it has been understood in the first place – and reporting the success of communication within an organisation have been carried out manually on paper and by using PowerPoint.
In many organisations, media monitoring has still in the 2010s meant reading printed newspapers, browsing websites manually and printing articles and filing them in a folder.
STT is a news agency that creates, refines and transmits reliable information 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Reliability is the basis for all operation. STT’s customers comprise all Finns as STT’s materials in the form of text or images reach all of the most important Finnish media.
The existing technical solutions, including STT’s own solutions, have been considered heavy systems that are difficult to use and that provide minimum performance and cryptic reports by email. During user interviews, the following problems were identified related to STT’s old media monitoring tool:
- The systems were laborious to maintain and thus, STT’s experts did not have to time engage in a dialogue with customers
- Media hits were of poor quality and the results were irrelevant
- The deployment of tools was slow and expensive and their usability was poor
- Tools were one-sided and they did not enable a dialogue
- There was no overall view of the media
- The development philosophy of IT systems was outdated