Clipping Services: Thorough Coverage, Fast Delivery, and Affordable - Pick All Three

By: Caesi A. Bevis, MBA, Futurist, CI Professional
Executive Director / Publisher "The Tiger's Eye" / Tiger Watch

When "buzz" about your company or product first appears on the Internet, tracking it can help you protect your company, address marketing issues, or provide feedback. Examples include:

• A company is spreading some innuendos about their direct competitors through online user groups.
• Disgruntled ex-employees have put up a hate-site (i.e. a "* sucks.com" site) against their former employer or have released confidential company information in a user group posting.
• You just released a new product and are curious what the general public is saying about it.
• You are curious what your competition is really up to.
• Someone tells you they found your logo endorsing someone else's product.

What is Web Clipping Software? Web clipping software "spiders" the Internet and delivers everything it finds based on a key word search on a regular basis, usually daily. The delivery can be in the form of links to clips sent to your email, or by logging onto the server via a User ID and password, and accessing the actual articles. Some web clippers will allow you to organize and save the clips that are found, and may even allow you to forward the clips onto others, with notes included. In the example in the first paragraph of a logo being misused (an actual case) the logo word was typed into the source code behind a website and the spider, this case Cyber Alert, picked it up. Some web clippers will only scour websites, while others will check user group postings as well.

History: Manual clipping services have been around since the late 1800's. In 1995, automated web-clipping services came onto the scene, promising to scour the Net with frequent delivery, thus providing a much better service than manual clipping services (albeit for a higher price). Manual clipping services usually deliver three to four weeks after publication (or later), and the recipient is left to put the clips into a scrapbook, or scan them all with an optical character reader (OCR). Finding an article in a scrapbook after the fact can take hours of searching, particularly if the retriever has to guess when the article came out.

Who is this of use to? 1) Companies: Automated web clipping offers the best of search engines, electronic news aggregators, and traditional web clipping. If a company must manage the reputation of its products or services by itself then web clipping is the way to go. The Internet has become a hotbed for rumours started by angry customers, dismissed employees and competitors. It is also a great way to track competition.

2) Entrepreneurs and Journalists: For anyone seeking a snapshot over real time, as a story is unfolding, or a suspected trend is developing, automated web clipping is the cutting edge way of collecting social data. The geographical region can be as narrow or as broad as needed.

3) Professors and Graduate Students: If you need to track current socio-economic data, and some archival information, automated web clipping is ideal. (If your research requires a focus on archival information, then services like EBSCO and other online libraries and databases, and well as Lexis-Nexis are more appropriate.)

4) Film Researchers: When you need current information, automated web clipping can help you track and find obscure great sources for film background information.

5) Public Relations, Lawyers, Physicians, and Publishers: Need multiple searches for a various clients or various topics? Web monitoring could be your answer. It's a great way to track current information on drugs, research, and statistics sites, and to search for possible class action law suit issues. You can look like the hero to your clients by tracking on information on your client's name, board members, products and services. Some web clipping services will grant partnership agreements, where you can earn an ongoing commission on clients brought on board. The best of web clipping services will offer volume discounts and offer to monitor clips for you, as well as produce trend reports for you or your clients.

How good is the coverage? The best automatic web clipping services will monitor and index over 5 million commercial, academic, and government Web sites, monitor and index over 63,000 Usenet News Groups, and 6200+ Web publications. As the Web grows, so does coverage. Coverage from the best companies is daily and offers "filtering" to assure greater relevance and less off-target citations. Additionally, the best services offer the customer the option of adding additional specific news sites to the existing media list. Coverage can also be fine-tuned to be geographical and/or by media groupings.

What sites aren't covered: Password protected, archival, and robot-blocked sites are not included. Automatic web clipping covers public accessible sites. Also, good services exclude non-relevant sites like classified ads, stock listings, and weather reports.

What about copyright issues? Presently, in both Canada and the US, Internet copyright issues are in the process of being defined. Generally, this is not an issue unless you are plagiarizing previously published work and publishing it as your own. When in doubt, if you want to re-publish an article you like, clear it with the publication or writer. Sharing clips internally within your company, i.e. not for profit, is generally not a problem.

What should I track? Perhaps you want to know whenever someone on your board of directors is mentioned in an article, or perhaps you want to track on a competitor's products or services (or your own). Some companies find it useful to track where their logos, trademarks, patents, and copyrighted material are showing up. The important thing is to clearly define what your goal is in tracking, and then to select the appropriate key words; the person setting up your account can do you do this.

How many clips do I get? Ideally, based on a well-defined key word search of about 25 words or less, plan for around 30-50 clips per day. Industry experts feel this number reflects a well-defined search, without being too scant or too overwhelming. Some days there may be nothing, other days more. It depends on your key words. If something happens that is newsworthy, this count may spike sharply upwards. Since some web clipping services charge a "per clip" fee, this is something to consider.

Where is the software? The software is mainframe type software that sits on a server outside of your company. You access the information either via email or by logging on to the host website.

How does this differ from like doing an online library search? Online libraries and pay per view searches, like Lexis-Nexis, are great for historical data. However, they don't pick up user group postings or source code information (like an imbedded logo that is yours endorsing someone else's product), and don't usually pick up hot off the wire postings.

Costs: Over the last few years, prices have come down, with quality and efficiency of the service going up. Some services are now offering clip-monitoring services for companies that just don't have time to baby-sit the daily clip delivery. Companies find that allocating staff or temps to find news articles on the Net costs a lot more than subscribing to a clip service. Although pricing varies for an automated web clipping service, costs generally run from as little as CDN $2,844/year (CDN $237/month) for basic service to over CDN $125,000/year for high end tracking, where the results are analyzed by market professionals.

One important way to hold costs down is to order a service that is flat-fee, rather than having a "per clip" charge. That way if news spikes about your company, or an employee, your budget won't be hit hard while you are staving off the spread of misinformation, rumours, or outright bad press.

Limited Web Clipping companies: A limited web clipping service is offered for use with Palm Pilots. It requires users to download software from each site they want to get information from, and they can only access this information on their Palm Pilots. At present Palm owners have a choice of from 31 sites, including Travelocity, Ticketmaster, USA Today.

Public search engines are now offering limited search possibilities that have to be manually put in on a daily basis by a consumer. This service does not offer any filtering, which can add up to countless hours of wasted time before hitting a citation that is useful.

Who are the leading web clipping companies?

Tiger Tracker of Tiger Watch, Luce Online, and Durrants of the UK. All powered by CyberAlert.

Features: Coverage: 5 million+ commercial, academic, and government websites, 6,200+ web publications, 66,000+ message boards and Usenet new groups. Delivery is daily, 365 days a year, to your email or access by user ID and password on their server. Clips are triple-filtered to assure greater relevance to your target topic. New special sites can be added to meet your specific needs. Clips (international web publications, academic and commercial websites, Usenet user groups) can be filed in files you set up on the host site, and can be archived and sent to others with notes. Tiger Tracker is available for a flat fee, or the option of per-clip fee. It offers an a la carte menu of coverage (Canadian only, US only, European, Pan Pacific, Latin American, global or custom), as well as coverage for Usenet and message boards. Data mining, clip analysis, tracking reports, and volume discounts available. Search terms can be changed upon request, after the initial adjustments, for a small fee. First version of software launched in 1997. Monthly contracts are available. Tiger Tracker has Canadian and US Customer service support. Service for multiple users accessing the same search is available.

Tiger Watch specializes in business and social intelligence and also offers services include tracking socio-economic, poli-sci global and North American trends impacting businesses, products and services and "Quick Search" ™. for businesses and individuals needing fast turnaround on research.

Ewatch / PR Newswire

Features: Daily delivery. Coverage: 4,700 websites and newspapers, 66,000 Usenet user groups monitored daily (referred to as "electronic mailing lists" on their website). For extra fees of around US $4,000/year per each media grouping, you can increase coverage, e.g. adding access to 5 financial message boards. Web Watch monitors changes in customer specified websites, not including publications, e-zines or search engines. PR Newswire stats for number of customers are given on their site, but no statistics are available for the number of customers using Ewatch. Annual contract. Launched Internet monitoring in 1995.

Webclipping.com

Features: Daily delivery to their online site. Coverage: 2,000 web publications, 63,000 Usenet usegroups, 5,226 newspapers, 14,907 magazines, 1,000 radio and TV sites totaling 1.5 billion web pages, 90 real time streaming newswires. There is no "per clip" fee. Claims to have Boolean search string technology and filtering. Founded in 1998.

Cyveillance / NetSapien

Features: Caters to Fortune 50 companies. Fees are in the range of US $80,000/year. Underwent a management restructuring in 2001. Founded in 1997, the company offers competitive intelligence services and features their automated web clipping software as a thrown-in tool.

About the Author: Caesi A. Bevis, MBA, Futurist, CI Professional has over 16 years experience in competitive/ business and social intelligence as a researcher, analyst, writer, and public speaker both in Canada and the US. She is available for public speaking engagements. She is the former Chapter Coordinator of the British Columbia chapter of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) and the current President of the Canadian Business Intelligence Association (CBIA), based in Vancouver. She can be reached at: editor@tigerseye.ca.

The CBIA is a membership based organisation which offers monthly public speakers on CI topics, and it is also the host organisation for the Pacific Rim Business Intelligence Group (PRBIG), which is an alliance of CI associations around the Pacific Rim: US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, China, and Taiwan. CBIA can be reached at: http://www.cbia.ca and PRBIG at http://www.prbig.com.