News Aggregation Know-How from FreePint Topic Series: Beyond Aggregation
Jinfo Blog

By Andrew Grave

Abstract

The FreePint Topic Series: Beyond Aggregation launched this month and runs until the end of November. Series producer Andrew Grave takes a look at the articles and product reviews published to date. The articles include a market map covering news aggregators and more, and a case study of legal firm RPC and how they integrated enterprise RSS feeder Attensa with their own bespoke social intranet "Edge".  The reviews published to date are M-Adaptive, Meltwater Buzz, Meltwater News together with a mini review of NewsEdge.

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The FreePint Topic Series: Beyond Aggregation launched this month and runs until the end of November. Series producer Andrew Grave casts a glance at what we've published to date. This includes a market map of news aggregators and a case study from City law firm RPC describing how its Attensa-based solution helped its lawyers to be first to the market with commentary. We have also published product reviews on two media monitoring aggregators and a mini review of NewsEdge.

The Latest News Aggregation Providers

Claire Whayman’s Market Map: the Options in News Aggregation & Beyond provided a useful overview of the types of aggregator that exist in the market and their relative strengths. Aggregators included in the analysis included those with a background in content, those with a background in software, software-only solutions and solutions aimed at the media monitoring market.

The media monitoring segment represents the majority of recent news aggregation providers, Claire found. Two such products have been reviewed recently as part of the Series: 

• Anne Lonergan reviewed M-Adaptive, a relatively new media monitoring tool from M-Brain.  FreePint readers may know of the company through its acquisition of information & media monitoring company Esmerk last year. M-Adaptive was launched in November 2012 and currently has about 30 clients. Anne’s M-Adaptive review established that the product monitors both sources of media. The company understands the issues that those monitoring media face and states “volume, variety and velocity seriously challenge anyone without the proper tools”.
  
  M-Brain claims M-Adaptive offers greater accuracy over its peers in measuring sentiment. Anne’s review found some minor interface issues and she highlights a few other aspects to consider for potential purchasers. The company offers flexibility on pricing for two months whilst usage levels are established. This may make the product attractive for smaller organisations; Jan suggests Meltwater’s pricing may put its solutions beyond the reach of smaller companies.

• Jan Knight reviewed Meltwater News and Meltwater Buzz.
  
  Meltwater News focuses on monitoring news outlets and Meltwater Buzz, launched in 2009, on social media. Meltwater is the largest company providing media monitoring solutions and has a substantial user base of over 20,000 companies using the two products.
  
  Jan found that Meltwater News and Meltwater Buzz were great tools to monitor competitors, markets, companies, clients and executives. She found Meltwater Buzz can also help companies measure the performance of their own social media campaigns, attract more fans and followers to their social media pages and surface specific conversations that are relevant to a business at the time. Although most customers just take Meltwater News, Jan believes most users would need both products to ensure they are monitoring traditional and social media.

Jan also undertook a Mini Review of NewsEdge for us. Since the last review in March 2012, she found that the product had continued to develop. On the content front, the product's new partnership with ISI’s Emerging Markets Information Service has added over 3,400 hard-to-find titles with two-thirds of these coming from non-English sources. On the functionality front, the improvements include the addition of a quick search interface, a story preview pane, a word count in search filters, a new Newsletter Wizard to guide a user step-by-step through the process and RSS feed integration. This enables users to add their own preferred RSS feeds directly into NewsEdge.

Case Study of City Legal Firm RPC: Creating Value from News Aggregation

Whilst we’re familiar with aggregators combining social media and traditional media, law firm RPC went a step further. It became the first firm to generate RSS feeds from its CRM tool InterAction to be read by its aggregation tool Attensa.

Shimrit Janes’s comprehensive article News Aggregation Solution Gives City law Firm RPC a Competitive Edge also describes how the firm went beyond aggregation and sought to help answer the question “What do you expect people to be doing once the articles have arrived in the tool you’ve purchased?”

RPC decided that it needed a tool which would integrate with the way its Communities of Practice teams worked and into its social intranet, named Edge. It selected Attensa as its news aggregator. We will be reviewing Attensa as part of this series but before that you can also read our 2012 review, Attensa StreamServer - "Attention Management" for the Enterprise.

In the article Shimrit describes how her firm focuses on people and not technology. She reveals how RPC’s solution has enabled it to be first-to-market with commentary and analysis on issues of interest to the firm. She offers some great practical suggestions which users of all news aggregation tools should find really useful. Her final recommendation? To ensure that aggregated news is not just collected but is combined with your organisation’s knowledge to create value.

Upcoming Articles & Webinars

We’ve a great range of articles and reviews scheduled for the rest of the Series. We're also planning to bring you webinars on:

• Customised integrations of news content
• News awareness technology installations.

More information on our webinars will be available later this month.

For more details, read FreePint Series Keeps You On Top of the Changing Landscape in News Aggregation.

Editor's Note: Beyond Aggregation  

This article is part of the FreePint Topic Series: Beyond Aggregation, which runs from October to November 2013. Register your interest, and you'll get pre-notification of when registration opens for any webinars in this series, as well as a free copy of the FreePint Report: Buyer's Guide on News Content when we publish in November.

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