Paul Vogelzang: Welcome to Capitol Communicator TV. I'm your host, Paul Vogelzang, and today, we're with Debbie Friez from BurrellesLuce. We're going to talk a little bit about measurement. Debbie, welcome to the show.
Debbie Friez: Thank you for having me.
Paul Vogelzang: Tell us a little bit about what BurrellesLuce is doing with regard to monitoring. It's such a big area. It can be so complicated too. And I'm sure you guys are doing some great things, so let us know a little bit about what's going on there, especially with regard to monitoring video.
Debbie Friez: Well, everybody thinks of BurrellesLuce as just being the print monitor, and we have been, and we are still the best for print monitoring in the business. But...
Paul Vogelzang: And that ain't going away.
Debbie Friez: That is not going away.
Paul Vogelzang: No one's going to do away with it.
Debbie Friez: But we have recently started monitoring video online. So from different news sites when they are doing streaming video, Youtube, all the great social media out there, helping clients know what's being said in the video realm on the web. It's becoming so important. Why are we doing this today, if it wasn't for video?
Paul Vogelzang: Right, absolutely. We are committed to the medium.
Debbie Friez: Exactly.
Paul Vogelzang: Well, the word "monitoring" is an interesting one to use, and I use it, I think, in the same way that you do, and that is, actually pay attention to the content, know what's being said out there. That's pretty labor intensive.
Debbie Friez: It is, and that's where BurrellesLuce comes in hand for the client. We help kind of narrow it down, the scope, because you can do a search on many free sites out there, on Google, for instance, and say, "I want to see everything on X company." And there's so much to go through. You don't know, is it really relevant or was someone saying, "I just walked by this store"? Right? What BurrellesLuce does is we have human editors reviewing the content so that it's the right content for our clients. We know that it's not just a little mere mention or a relevant mention.
Paul Vogelzang: You work with major accounts.
Debbie Friez: Mm-hmm.
Paul Vogelzang: When you're talking to these major accounts, how do you show them kind of what's out there? Do you just literally take a glimpse of what's on Youtube? Do you give them a sense as to just volume? How do you kind of portray the current status quo for them so that they then ultimately agree to some services from Burrelles?
Debbie Friez: I really think the key to that is helping them get a grasp around it, know what's being said so that they can address it. Because with monitoring, there's really- there's two realms to it. You want to know if you need to react to something, and also need to know that you had successes. If you have a great media campaign, you want to know that people are watching video about your different products, that you're getting the great reviews out there. And so we talk to the clients. First of all, we do a great consultation and say, "What are you looking to achieve? What's going to best showcase you to your executives?" So that we can narrow that round down, give them that information and then help them make some sense of it all.
Paul Vogelzang: Walk me through kind of a client relationship. So if I'm a client and I've experienced some video out there that could be good, bad or indifferent about me, what's the step that you take, in your capacity, to identify it, and what kind of timeframe, and then work with others to make sure to address that content, wherever it might be?
Debbie Friez: First of all, like I said, we set parameters. What is the client looking to get? So we set some key terms. We set the kind of things that they don't want to see. So we have that discussion about what they need to show to their executives. Our system is going through and searching for those key terms, first of all. And then a human editor is looking at it and saying, "Yes, this is relevant," or, "This isn't relevant to that client." And then we're delivering it electronically, and it's coming in pretty much all throughout the day.
Paul Vogelzang: Yeah, it's a real time, almost.
Debbie Friez: Yeah. I mean, there's a delay because we want to make sure that it's right.
Paul Vogelzang: Yeah, the human element involved.
Debbie Friez: Exactly.
Paul Vogelzang: Yeah. And that's got to be a real selling point, too, because a pure automated means of analyzing this stuff can skip over some things that might be really relevant to a client.
Debbie Friez: Exactly.
Paul Vogelzang: Well, what are some of the other things that you're doing that are going to be really important for our audience to know about?
Debbie Friez: Well, I think the next big step is, after you're monitoring what's being said about your clients or your company or your organization, is to take it to the next step and show that value. So we have a great media measurement program that, again, uses that human element. So we have human analysts going through and helping you make sense of it all. So it might be as simple as what are the audience figures? What's the media value? Are my key messages in there? But it could be taking another step. It could be looking at the tone and the sentiment, and what was my share of voice? Did I get more coverage than my competitors?
Paul Vogelzang: Mm-hmm. There are hundreds of these video sites out there. Are you pretty comfortable in monitoring them all? I mean, are you telling clients, "Look, we're going to catch this stuff"?
Debbie Friez: There's always going to be something that's going to fall through the cracks. But yes, I'm confident that we're going to catch the major ones out there. We've got a really good system in place. We've tested it for quite a while. It actually didn't come out as fast as I wanted it to. So yeah, I'm pretty confident that we're going to get what the client needs to see, and it's so viral, as you know. So something might get placed on a smaller site, but then it gets posted somewhere else or it gets- you know, it moves up. It's the whole LongTail [ph?] situation. So if for some reason we miss a site, we'll catch it on the next one.
Paul Vogelzang: Once I find out that a video's out there, what are some of the steps, what are some of the tactics that you might take in order to advise a client on what to do next?
Debbie Friez: Well, obviously, you need to respond as quickly as possible and get your message out, and there's several different tactics you can use. I know one of them that I've seen used quite a bit is companies have their own blog, and they will respond on that blog with all the information, because you can do a long story and give other information. You could add to video to it, if you want. A lot of times, there isn't time, so probably the quickest way is to get a blog posting up there, if you have one-- hopefully, you do-- and then add on to that blog posting, promote it with other social medias. So tweet the, "Hey, our response here"- and direct people back to traffic that's directing traffic back to your website that more hits your website. So that's helping you overall, even if it is a negative story. At least, it's helping to get it out. And you'll find that mainstream media are going to go there as well, and it's all going to come back up to the mainstream media, even though you've started in the social media in the Internet realm.
Paul Vogelzang: Right. Be fast. I think that's great...
Debbie Friez: I think be fast, be open and be honest.
Paul Vogelzang: Great, great. Excellent advice. Great. Where can we find you? Are you on Twitter? Are you on Facebook? Where can we find out more information about what's going on with Burrelles?
Debbie Friez: Well, yeah, I'm on all of those.
Paul Vogelzang: Yeah, good. You've got to be.
Debbie Friez: Obviously, the easiest place to find me is burrellesluce.com\freshideas is our blog. And there's some great information there. We've got our newsletters, our white papers there. Also BurrellesLuce is our Twitter handle, and you will find a link to my Twitter site, which is just Dfriez, and several of my colleagues and we have some great information being passed around about how we can help communicators and public relations. Also, I'm on LinkedIn. We have a LinkedIn group, BurrellesLuce. We have a Facebook fan page, BurrellesLuce again. So it's easily to find us, B-U-R-R-E-L-L-E-S-L-U-C-E.
Paul Vogelzang: Well, we will track you down and we'll measure that. So Debbie Friez, thanks very much for coming on Capitol Communicator. It's been a pleasure.
Debbie Friez: Thank you.