With the availability of media monitoring tools, it is now quite easy to receive a constant stream of information about topics you wish to monitor, be it your brand, competitive coverage, or industry issues. Many of these tools are so good at finding all the stuff that’s even remotely related to your interest that the amount of content you receive can quickly become overwhelming.

Thanks to digital searching, finding content has become really easy. But things become a little more complicated when we begin to ask what we should do with what we’ve found. Information is not the same as insight.

There is a key distinction between monitoring and measurement. Monitoring gives you all the “what”, but then leaves you asking “so what?” With monitoring, we can now see every bad thing that someone says about us, but as many have begun to learn, we can’t respond to everything. Without knowing which negative (or positive) media matters and which does not, it is possible to cry wolf once too often for management to tolerate. The folks who are monitoring media know that there is really important knowledge to be gained from listening to conversations about our brands, and know that there are insights in that content somewhere that should be integrated into strategy. But monitoring alone won’t separate the wheat from the chaff. To find the important point in a haystack of content, we need to go beyond monitoring, and engage in real measurement.