The consumption of information by the audience has transformed radically. The podcasts have become one of the most powerful media platforms that impact opinions, conversations, and buying decisions. In comparison to the traditional news or social media, podcasts are long-form, conversational, and usually trusted by the audience. This renders them strong-yet-dangerous to brands. Organizations are increasingly considering podcast monitoring as an essential element of their media strategy in order to remain in charge of their reputation.
Monitoring of podcasts enables brands to hear, analyze and act on discussions taking place on audio platforms. When properly done, it assists organizations to manage the story in audio media as opposed to responding to the damage that has already been caused.
The Problem of Narrative Control in Audio Media
The audio content is quite different as compared to the text-based media. The length of podcast episodes can be as short as 20 minutes or as long as a few hours and brand mentions are frequently incorporated into the conversation in a natural way. Such mentions are not found in headlines, are not always tagged, and may be hard to find manually.
Brands that lack podcast tracking will miss important mentions, be it a product recommendation, misleading statement, or a PR problem. When an episode catches on, the story can go viral on other platforms such as blogs, social media, and even mainstream media. When a brand realizes it is too late, the discussion might have gone beyond its control.
This is the point where podcast monitoring is necessary.
The Real Work of Podcast Monitoring
Fundamentally, monitoring podcasts is the process of scanning thousands of podcast episodes to identify brand names, industry keywords, competitor names, and sentiment. The latest podcast monitoring tools are based on speech-to-text and natural language processing to transform audio into searchable information.
This allows brands to:
- Determine the location and discussion of them.
- Get the tone and the feeling of mentions.
- Identify emerging stories early enough before they get out of control.
- Determine the impact of particular podcast hosts and programs.
Podcast monitoring, when incorporated into more extensive media intelligence, seals a significant gap in the traditional media monitoring approaches.
Managing the Narrative by Early Detection
Awareness is the beginning of narrative control. One unverified assertion in a mainstream podcast can easily influence the minds of people. By having good podcast monitoring software, a brand will be able to identify possible problems in time and determine how to react.
To illustrate, when a podcast host provides outdated or misleading information on a product, early identification will enable the brand to:
- Send corrections to the host.
- Post explanatory information on owned platforms.
- Ready PR and customer support staff.
This is a much better proactive strategy than dealing with the crisis once the story has gone viral.
Enhancing PR and Brand Authority
Monitoring of podcasts is not only about risk, but also opportunity. Numerous podcast references are favorable, natural recommendations by trusted sources. Through podcast monitoring services, brands are able to recognize such moments and enhance them.
A podcast monitoring platform can provide PR teams with insights that can be used to:
- Establish contacts with podcast hosts.
- Reuse audio mentions in marketing.
- Establish brand credibility by third-party voices.
Podcasts can be a quantifiable and viable PR channel when combined with other media monitoring solutions instead of an invisible one.
The Podcasts as a part of a Unified Media Intelligence Strategy
There is no such thing as audio media. The discussions in the podcasts tend to provoke the discussions in the social platforms, blogs, and news websites. In order to have a real control of the narrative, brands must have a single perspective of media coverage.
This is where sophisticated media intelligence platforms are involved. Through podcast monitoring and the use of other tools such as twitter monitoring, brands are able to monitor how the stories are transferred to social and other platforms. As an illustration, a provocative podcast clip can result in discussions on Twitter in a few hours. The presence of this entire lifecycle enables brands to react in a uniform manner across channels.
The media watcher platform is one of the tools that can be used to centralize these insights, meaning that the podcast mentions will be analyzed together with the digital, social, and traditional media data.
Competitive and Industry Insights
Competitive intelligence is also useful in podcast monitoring. Through monitoring the discussion of competitors on podcasts, brands can discover:
- Market perception gaps
- Customer pain points
- Emerging industry trends
These lessons can assist brands to create their own messages in a better way. Rather than making assumptions about what the market is interested in, organizations are able to match their story to actual, continuous discussions in the audio space.
Selecting the appropriate Podcast Monitoring Solution
Solutions do not provide the same level of insight. The best podcast monitoring systems must not only be limited to simple keyword alerts but also offer contextual analysis, sentiment detection, and connect with other more comprehensive media monitoring systems.
It is not only to listen but to hear, to understand and to do. The strategic benefit of investing in the correct podcast monitoring platform is that the brand will remain informed, nimble, and narrative-based.
Final Thoughts
The podcasts are not a niche anymore, it is a strong force that influences the opinion of people. Brands that do not pay attention to audio media are likely to lose the control of their story. Listening smartly, responding strategically, and steering conversations to their advantage is the power of podcast monitoring that enables organizations to listen intelligently.
With podcast tracking and media intelligence, twitter monitoring, and all-encompassing applications such as Media Watcher, brands can finally incorporate audio media into their narrative control approach and make an otherwise neglected medium a source of clarity, authority, and competitive advantage.
