Media Monitoring in 2020 with Cathy Del Colle

- [Announcer] Welcome to On Top Of PR with Jason Mudd, presented by ReviewMaxer.

 

- Welcome everybody to another episode of On Top Of PR, I'm Jason Mudd, your host, and I'm joined today with Cathy from Burrelles. Cathy, welcome, we're so glad you're here. I'm glad to be here and I hope you are too.

 

- I am Jason, I appreciate the invite, and I look forward to our chat today.

 

- Yes, me too. So, first of all, I just wanna start off and say a big congratulations to you, when we first booked this, I think the news wasn't yet official, but you've recently received a significant promotion at Burrelles, tell us more about that please.

 

- Yes, just recently I was appointed President of Burrelles. I have enjoyed my few weeks in the reign, and we have started a rebranding effort last year. So we, I'm at a good spot, and we are often running and continuing our thrust to tell everybody in the PR and communications and really any industry that needs media monitoring that we're here and we're relevant in all that we do. 

 

- All right, well, great. Let's start off with, give me a three sentence summary of Burrelles, and then after that we'll talk about your rebrand. So tell me about Burrelles in just a few sentences.

 

- Sure, a colleague of mine, former colleague of mine referred to us as the 132 year old startup. We are a media monitoring company that provides curated content for print, and which includes daily and weekly newspapers, trade and consumer magazines, and we monitor online content, social and broadcast. We also have an outreach platform where we can, you can be subscribed to our database and, but the key that I mentioned is that it's curated content. We don't edit just our print content, but we edit our web content and our broadcast content as well. And something new to our suite of services is we now offer a podcast monitoring. So, here we are on a podcast,

 

- Yeah.

 

- So it's very relevant for our conversation, but also it's a terrific media stream that is up and coming. And, so we're on top of that, we now provide podcast monitoring.

 

- Perfect, that's very cool, very timely. Okay, and so, I know when we were at PRSA International Conference, ICON, you guys unveiled and, I believe it was an October in San Diego, your new brand. So tell us a little bit about not only the, the why behind the rebrand, but a little bit about the process and ultimately the outcomes that you guys are enjoying from it.

 

- Sure, When we go to those conferences, people come up to us and they say, well, "Burrelles is still the print company," we're still the company that provides print content, and, well, that's true, we do provide much more. So we decided last year to go back to our roots, call ourselves Burrelles once again, nice fresh new logo, and a new tagline that will make us go out with the announcement that we are not just providing print clips, but again, we monitor the internet, we're the first company that actually started to monitor the internet in 1980. We provide our clients with content that is relevant to them in all media streams. So, they provide us with the topics of interest that can change over time, and we capture that content and print and web and broadcast and podcasts, and provide that content to them.

 

- Excellent, excellent. And so, what has been the response to your rebrand so far?

 

- We really had a nice launch at PRSA last fall and, you know, we also gave ourselves a nice new color, make us pop so that we can be relevant, and it's been tremendous. We have a long list of clients who have been with us for a long time. Another thing where we stand out is you don't need to use a media monitoring company for a long time, it might just be for a month, two or three for a project, and that's something that we've always done, but people have been reminded about that as we are popping with that new color and staying relevant in conferences and different events that we attend. And so they say, "Oh, I forget about that badge, "I forgot, we didn't need something, "we only had a three month campaign, you're right, "I'm going to use Barrelles next time." So it's been very, very positive.

 

- Speaking of those colors, it looks like you're sporting those popping colors right now, so good for you.

 

- Yes.

 

- You get to write off a wardrobe make-over right, to always be wearing the colors of the company, so that's awesome.

 

- I wish.

 

- Cathy, I recently said great things about your organization, and specifically I believe, the quote I gave was that the folks at Burrelles, if they're not the nicest people in the industry, they certainly are very close to it. So, and I feel very strongly about that, and I think that's reflective in kind of the terms and conditions you're describing where, you know, "Hey, come to us, we'll do your clipping "for as little or as long as you might need it," or you're monitoring, I should say. And, I've always just found to be true that you guys are absolutely always looking out for what exactly we need at our agency. And for full disclosure, we are customers at our agency. But I've always just found it's whatever we need, at whatever level we need it, for as long or as short as we need it, you guys are there and you have our back, and you're always willing to explore in great detail, you know, it's kind of the process we go through of how might we accomplish X, Y and Z, and are we doing it the right way? How can we optimize what we're doing today to make it even better? So, thank you for that. And again, congratulations on your promotion there.

 

- Thank you, and that's something that sets us apart as well, we, our average tenure at Burrelles is 15 years and we, prior to my role as president, I did oversee our client services department for a long time, and each of our account managers manages a list of clients, a portfolio of clients in areas where they remain. So, 15 years, it really should be 20 years, we should up that number at this point. But we have a long tenure with our Burrelles employees we're very grateful for, but they get to know our clients. If they're going to, they know the trends, they know if something's relevant for you now, maybe it's gonna be relevant for you next year, and they're gonna keep in touch with you to make sure that you only received the media that matters.

 

- Right, right, excellent. Well, let's get right into it and talk a little bit about media monitoring in 2020 and beyond. You know, I know there, as you mentioned there's kind of stereotypes of the old, you know, print clip being cut out and mailed to you in an envelope, and things like that. The world has changed in a big way, you know, regarding media monitoring. So, you know, what are some of the kind of either ways that companies are under utilizing their media monitoring partners or maybe even just, how do you say, popular misconceptions that are out there?

 

- Well, when I say that we monitor print content, that includes the image, that includes how it appeared in the publication, and that's still very relevant today. That's something where most of the clients that we work with today, that is top of mind to them, they wanna know where, you know, the print article includes the thumbnail, where on the page that article appeared, PR people of course are still working hard to get those placements. So in order to capture them, that's still content that is relevant. As we move forward, due to this extraordinary and terrible experience that we're all going through with COVID, we are, and have always been an extension of a company's PR team. Again, our client services team, they're very skilled, they've been here for a long time, they'd likely worked with companies that are our clients for 15 plus years. So you might need to realign how you're utilizing a monitoring company right now due to budgets and different things that are being rearranged in your PR calendar, and that's what we're here to help you with. How can we help you? Maybe it's more that you need to expand in broadcast, maybe we need to add some podcasts monitoring for you, maybe you need to do press release and you don't have a outreach program, we can help you with all of those monitoring aspects.

 

- Okay, excellent. So, give me some, kind of examples that might surprise our listeners as to, obviously, you know, you're with Burrelles, but just generally speaking, you know, how are smart companies and smart brands, and by the way, our target listener or our typical listener of On Top Of PR is somebody in a marketing department who is, you know, looking for greater efficiencies in their organization. And so, you know, if you're that chief marketing officer at a corporate marketing department or a marketing leader or just a marketing representative inside that corporate environment, you know, what are some interesting ways that media monitoring companies have been able to help these busy executives get the exact content they're looking for?

 

- Sure, and monitoring news about your company is probably top of mind for most of those people that are listening, and that's terrific. But it might also be that you need to be on top of your industry, your competitors. In addition to providing just the monitoring, we can also do some custom reporting for you, we can provide some analysis, we have that human capital where you still need, might need to look into story to see what is the tone of that article, that's something that a computer might not be able to tell you, or some algorithm might not be able to tell you. We still have a apartment that can do a terrific analysis for you, provide a daily report just upon your industry, if you're in retail, if you're a college or a university or entertainment company, a celebrity, we have some celebrities, they wanna know anytime they're in the news, they want every single mention and that's terrific. I'm not quite sure how they monitor all of that, but they need to know it and they need to be on top of it, and so here we are happy to help them with that. Some other topics that in the past few weeks that are coming up toO, are in relation to COVID-19, maybe you don't wanna monitor everything of course going on in the news, but as it relates to your industry, as it relates to different things that might be important for your employees and for your company, we can monitor just on a keyword basis, and again, we can do it short term, not necessarily long term.

 

- Cathy, what do you see as new and next in the media monitoring space?

 

- I haven't talked a lot about social and that is something that we are also, another medium that is very important for our clients. And we do have social media monitoring, many companies do. This is still something that companies are toying with, how do they determine what type of social metrics do they need to know about? So we have some experts in place that can work with teams, marketing teams, communications teams, PR teams to know how to set up that monitoring so that we can track items that are important moving forward. And along with that comes reporting, it could be custom, we also provide automated reports, and that are terrific to work with. So we have a lot of tools available in our tool belt.

 

- Okay, and recently your company launched a brand new portal or a SaaS technology, kind of a overhaul I would imagine. So can you kind of explain that to our listeners a little bit what those feet new features are, and ultimately more importantly, how they benefit from them?

 

- Sure, so it was quite an undertaking we took years ago to tell our customers that we're no longer going to mail them anything, everything is gonna be coming electronically. We're still monitoring the newspapers that they are providing the images, but we now send the articles in a daily email alert, and then they're posted to a portal where you can organize all of your media relations and media monitoring needs. So what we do is store the content in there for 13 months, and clients, again, we can help you set up automated reports, very easy functions to do so, they can be pushed to you, you know, weekly or monthly or quarterly, and set up just according to your needs. If you do need something more custom, we have a team behind that, that can set that up for you. And it's terrific.

 

- Okay, excellent. And where do you think the industry is heading? I'm sure there's changes that you guys are anticipating or preparing for or even leading the industry in, what does that look like? You know, what does media monitoring look like in the year 2030?

 

- Well, we've all adapted to monitoring more than just print, because it is, again, the socialist is up and coming, we're gonna know a lot more about social monitoring broadcast. Look how we're all watching more broadcast content and listening to the radio is even increasing. And also again, podcasts, I think all of those areas are going to be extended into the future. Print is still not going away, print is still very much relevant. So we are have always, that has always been a staple in our business and we will continue to provide that content. Another way where we're also helpful and this might come about as we move into the future too, is paywalls, we get behind the paywalls, we have agreements with publishers where, if we had a paywall, and you're a customer of ours, you can see that behind the paywall content. So you don't have to go in and get subscriptions to all of those, we can provide you with that content as well, that's very helpful in monitoring all of the media again, that matters.

 

- Yeah, absolutely. I was just gonna ask you about that, so I appreciate you bringing that up then. So it seems like you guys have really solved through partnerships with news outlets and maybe there are holding companies also with the ability to work through paywalls. Just, I guess, just kinda talk to us a little bit about that, how much of that is a competitive advantage for your organization? And, you know, just kind of help our listeners and our viewers kind of appreciate exactly, you know, what that capability means for them.

 

- Sure, and it is something that gets forgotten about, but it's not just the top media, there are a lot of paywalls out there. And we did years ago, copyright is something that is very important to us, so years ago we started a program where we work with publishers and we have an agreement with them to be able to utilize and get behind those paywalls, and provide clients with the full text of those articles, and that's very important. So again, everybody that is monitoring the news that matters to them, can see that content, they don't have to stop, just see a snippet, they can see the entire article right in our platform. So it's very easy to view it there, to also provide that content in a report and then do some further analysis on it as well.

 

- Gotcha, yeah. So, Cathy, I've been in this business for about 25 years now, and as I think back in my mind, I've always wondered, you know, when you're reading all these newspapers across America, like, what does that look like? Like, I mean, you know, I just, I think of like something like from the matrix or where there's this huge warehouse with all these people sitting at desks, just kind of reading newspapers, you know, and I'm, and I'm joking here, but you know, like speed readers or something like that, you know, or whatever, but how does it, how does that look today? Are these people just, uh, working from home and reading their community paper, and you've recruited them? I have no idea what this looks like.

 

- It no longer looks like that, we no longer have a center desk with a room full of people that are monitoring the newspaper, with a little rubber finger to turn the page. It's, now we get the publication sent to us electronically.

 

- Okay.

 

- We capture the content based on an algorithm that is proprietary, and then that content is presented to our editors, and the editors make sure that that story is gonna mention Jason Mudd before we send it over, because he doesn't want any content that doesn't mention his name. So we capture that, it goes through our production system and posts right to the portal. And so it's funny that you mentioned at home, because right now for the first time in our existence, we do have production people working from home, because of the COVID situation. So, that's kind of a big deal for us, people don't have to come into the office, they're able to abide by the laws in their local state. But we do have three offices around the country where people go prior to COVID, do go to the office to do that work. Our service has been uninterrupted during this time, because we were able to take that and allow work from home to happen for most all of our employees, so something we're very proud about. Not many companies, most companies had to adapt to that, but when you have something that's so, that has invested in that human capital and able to keep that going, we were able to do that in pretty short order, so kudos to our team.

 

- So, categorically, you know, it sounds like it's moved more and more digital, you know, less and less human initiation of the initial content but then always kind of reviewed by a human readers, is that accurate?

 

- Correct, that's correct, yeah.

 

- And our web content is also edited, the broadcast is edited as well. We do offer some products that are unedited, you know, people say it's kinda like a Google Search, but it's still better than a Google Search because we have that proprietary algorithm in the background in order to capture the for you, So, we do have a host of options available.

 

- When do you think your technology and just the whole digital environment will evolve to a point where the human editors would not be necessary?

 

- Oh, I don't know, considering we haven't adapted, again, we have options where you don't need that human editor, but then you're gonna get a lot more than perhaps you want, and it might put a little more work on the team that's receiving the content to go through and filter through. That's why I say we're an extension of a PR team when we have those editors in place and we're providing the content that's relevant in the first place. So, you know, we have gone into too many offices around the country for our clients and we have, you know, worked with them to make sure that they're getting the content that they need. So we work closely with them, so I don't see that in the next 10 years, to be honest.

 

- Okay.

 

- I still think, you know, that's something where we haven't found technology for the computer to take over and provide that human opinion, right?

 

- Right.

 

- Is this the true keyword? Because Jason Mudd might not only be looking for Jason Mudd, he might be looking for Jason Mudd in connection with PRSA. So we need to make sure that PRSA is mentioned at the very bottom of the article while Jason might be at the top, that the two align and that article is good for you.

 

- Well, as much as I hate to say it, there's another Jason Mudd in Louisville who's an entrepreneur, and he makes them headlines occasionally, and then I think there's a Jason Mudd in Kansas City who appears to be a very good attorney, and there's another Jason Mudd who seems to be a very good physician or surgeon or something like that. And, you know, I'm just a busy guy, I have a lot of careers and a lot of things I'm into Cathy, so you know

 

- You're good to go.

 

- I do like to have my clip reports separated, you know, between my different locations and professions and accomplishments.

 

- There you go. Well if with a little assistance from you, we'll make sure that we provide just the articles that mentioned that Jason Mudd that you're interested in reading about.

 

- Yeah, The Jason Mudd. Yeah.

 

- The Jason, absolutely.

 

- That's right, of course. So Cathy, one thing I've always told clients is, you're never going to capture more clips than you've actually earned, but you will always capture fewer clips than that are out there. Now, of course, we all want to get to 100, right? 100%, but it's just reality, right? There's gonna be mentions that are missed, there's gonna be mentioned in, you know, publications that aren't monitored either because they're, you know, very small and micro, whether that's very, you know, micro-community or hyper-local as we call them, or, you know, it's a very niche industry, you know, email newsletter that you've got to pay thousands of dollars to be an exclusive member to receive kind of thing. So, talk to me about that a little bit. You know, how do those conversations happen and how do you figure out what you do monitor what you don't, and how might, you know, an organization be able to ask a company like yours or other companies in the same space, you know, to provide such high level of customization.

 

- Sure, so the first thing that I would ask you, Jason, The Jason Mudd, I would ask for a copy of your distribution list, what content is relevant for you, and I would compare that against our list

 

- Right, okay.

 

- To make sure we're capturing that.

 

- Yeah.

 

- And, we do admit that, you know, we make an error from time to time, It's not a perfect science,

 

- Sure.

 

- Especially with the web, we have crawlers that go on the web and capture content, but of course the page is updated frequently, so we might not capture that article, or it might be updated right after we've captured content for you or that story might've appeared after our crawlers went through.

 

- Okay.

 

- So we wanna try to understand your lists, understand what's important to you, because you mentioned some industry titles that we might not be able to get a copy of, because we're not in that specific industry. So we of course try to align that, if things that we've added for you previously are not capturing a high clip ratio or an accurate clip ratio, it might be something when it comes up for renewal that we can no longer monitor moving forward. So if it doesn't make sense for us to keep it on our lists longterm, you know, we do adjust that, we add things all the time, and then we delete them when they're no longer relevant either.

 

- Okay, excellent.

 

- Yep.

 

- So, man, you've answered a lot of my questions, let me turn it over to you, is there anything you wanted to make sure we covered or shared with our viewers and our listeners today?

 

- Well of course, I would recommend we do have opportunities for free trials. So if you are wondering, "Is Burrelles a match for our company?" I would say absolutely, give us a try, we also during, actually prior to this time, we're using our own service to provide a product where we send out a copy of the top news on the, pardon me, the news from the top 25 newspapers into one concise email comes, into your inbox in the morning so that you know what's being said across the country. If you're in New York and you wanna know what's being said, you know, in the south and out west, it's a terrific resource that we offer for free, so that's another way that might be a resource for you to stay on top of what's being said in the news. There is a small charge if you want to have live links to those articles. But there are options there, and I would say, give us a call, give us a try, contact me, we'd be happy to set you up with something so that we can win your business.

 

- Excellent, excellent. So, to that end, Cathy, how do our viewers and listeners best get ahold of you or how should they best take advantage of the free trial that you're offering them?

 

- Sure, I had sent you that information, I don't know if you have a place to post that here or not, Jason. But Burrelles.com, we have, that's all advertised right there on our main page, we have a chatline where you can make a request, we have a phone number you can call, we have an email general email that you can call. First initial on my last name at Burrelles.com is also a way to reach me, and I welcome connecting with you and answering any questions that I can help with.

 

- Perfect, perfect.

 

- Well, hey, this has been a great conversation. I've enjoyed having you on On Top of PR, I'm glad you're here and thanks for participating. And, if I can ever do anything for you and your team, certainly let me know. And, I know our viewers and listeners appreciate your contributions today and sharing some of your thought leadership and on media monitoring, and it's gonna be exciting to see what the future holds.

 

- Absolutely Jason. Thank you very much, thank you for having me today.

 

- [Announcer] This has been On Top Of PR with Jason Mudd, presented by ReviewMaxer.