Before You Build: Set the Right Mindset

Define Your End Goal

Brand monitoring works best when you know what you want the data to do.

A strong brand search is flexible. It should support multiple questions after it's built, but it needs one clear purpose up front. That purpose will guide how you build, refine, and analyze your results.

This keeps your brand search intentional and focused.

Once your search is built and validated, prompt the AI Search Assistant to explore different questions within that same search, without rebuilding it.

Build and Improve Your Search with AI

Use the AI Search Assistant to create your initial brand search.

Review, Refine, and Save Your Search

Search building is iterative. This step is your quality check.

Preview your results and ask yourself:

• Are these mentions actually about my brand?
• Am I missing obvious coverage?
• Is there too much noise?

Then use AI, filters, or manually refine:

Once the results look good enough, save your search. Perfection comes later.

Analyze and Validate Insights

Once your search is saved, start analyzing what's coming in.

This is also a quality check step. If the results look off, return to Step 3 and refine.

Track & Monitor

Once your search is validated, decide how you want to stay informed.

• Smart Alerts for immediate notifications regarding shifts in your data
• Digest Reports for scheduled media scans
• Monitor Streams for ongoing, real-time visibility

Check out the playbook:

Optional Step: Use Mira Studio to Explore Your Data

Once your brand search is built and validated, open Mira Studio and enter in one of these prompts to quickly explore what's happening.

Brand Perception

Visibility and Coverage

Influencers and Impact

Questions, Issues, & Risks

Share Insights & Report

When you're ready to share insights with stakeholders:

Before You Build: Define Your Goal

Competitive benchmarking only works if you're comparing like for like.

Before creating competitor searches, get clear on the comparison you're making.

These decisions shape how you build your searches and structure your benchmark report.

Create One Search Per Competitor

To create a competitive benchmarking report, each brand needs its own search or tag.

This keeps data segmented, enables side-by-side comparison, and supports reliable reporting in Analyze.

Use the same search-building process in Explore from the Brand Monitoring Playbook. Just swap in competitor names, products, social handles, and related terms.

Validate Your Searches

Before jumping into dashboard creation, do a quick quality check. This is the most important step in competitive benchmarking.

Confirm that:

• Keywords and filters are consistent across searches
• There are no naming overlaps or false positives, e.g., Apple the company vs. Apple the fruit 🍎
• One search isn't significantly broader or narrower than the others

Small inconsistencies here can skew results later. Adjust and re-save as needed.

Once the results look good enough, save your search. Perfection comes later.

Build Your Benchmark Report in Analyze

Build your competitive benchmarking dashboard in Analyze.

Use it to:

• Compare brands side by side
• Track defined KPIs consistently
• Create repeatable weekly, monthly, or quarterly reports

Start with the Benchmarking template, then edit the dashboard to focus on the KPIs that are relevant to your comparison.

Monitor Competitive Shifts Over Time

Benchmarking isn't one-and-done. Once your dashboard is live, watch for notable changes such as:

• Sudden spikes in competitor coverage
• Sentiment shifts
• Emerging narratives or issues

To stay informed:

• Add competitors to Smart Alerts
• Schedule a Digest Report for regular competitive media scans
• Create Monitor Streams to view competitor coverage alongside your own

Share Competitive Insights

Share your report directly from Analyze.

Before You Build: Set Your Research Focus

Industry research starts with questions, not keywords.

Before creating your search, choose one or two questions you want this research to answer. You'll use these questions to guide your search building, results refinement, and data analysis.

You don't need to answer everything at once. Start with one or two questions that support your current research goals, whether that's planning, messaging, thought leadership, or staying informed.

Create an Industry Search

Open the AI Search Assistant and select Create Industry Search.

This gives you a strong starting point without manually building a complex query.

Once the results look good enough, save your search. Perfection comes later.

Refine for Industry Signal

Industry searches are broad by design. Refinement is how you separate the wheat from the chaff.

Focus on improving relevance:

Identify and filter to top industry or trade publications

Creating Author Lists to track key opinion leaders

Exclude consumer noise or unrelated contexts

The goal is a reliable industry view, not maximum volume.

Identify Trends and Talking Points

Once your search is ready, shift from collecting mentions to making sense of patterns.

Revisit the research questions you defined earlier and use them to guide your analysis or prompt AI-powered research.

Monitor Industry Shifts & Events

Industry research is an ongoing endeavor. Set up monitoring to catch important changes:

• Use Smart Alerts to flag sudden spikes or shifts
• Schedule Digest Reports for regular industry scans
• Create Monitor Streams to keep industry coverage visible day to day

Check out the Monitoring Daily Media playbook:

Share and Apply Your Insights

Depending on your role, you may need to:

• Summarize trends for internal updates or leadership briefings
• Inform messaging, positioning, or thought leadership
• Support campaign planning or content strategy

Check out the Reporting & Sharing Insights playbook:

Identify and Map Your Risk Areas

Start by identifying the vulnerabilities where risk is most likely to emerge for your organization or industry.

Work across teams if possible (PR, Legal, HR, etc.) and consider:

• Reputational risks. Public backlash, boycotts, brand trust issues
• Executive and leadership risks. Misconduct, investigations, resignations
• Operational risks. Supply chain disruption, outages, safety incidents
• Legal and regulatory risks. Lawsuits, compliance issues, government scrutiny
• Industry-specific risks. Activism, regulation changes, emerging competitors
• Partner or influencer risks. Agencies, spokespeople, vendors, creators tied to your brand

For each risk area, identify the signals you'd expect to see if risk starts to escalate:

• Keywords or phrases
• Hashtags
• Executive or partner names
• Industry-specific terms

(Optional) Use AI as an Accelerator

Use the AI Search Assistant to speed this up:

After you review the initial output, prompt:

Create Your Risk Search in Explore

Create one broad risk monitoring search that includes your brand, executives, and related entities, coupled with risk-related keywords and phrases.

This search runs quietly in the background and acts as your early-warning system.

Once saved, this search becomes the foundation for alerts, Monitor streams, and your Crisis Management dashboard.

Set Up Your Risk Command Center

This is where preparation turns into readiness.

1. Set up Smart Alerts for spike detection, sentiment shift, top reach
2. Create a Monitor Stream for real-time scanning

To set up alerts and streams, check out the Monitoring Daily Media Playbook:

3. Create a Crisis Management Dashboard in Analyze

At this point, you've done everything you can to prepare.

Validate the Signal

Use your Monitor Stream and Crisis Dashboard to determine:

• Is this a real issue or noise?
• Is coverage accelerating?
• Who is driving the conversation?
• Which media channels are amplifying it?

Focus Your Monitoring on the Active Crisis

Once the crisis is confirmed, narrow your view.

You have two fast options. Both work and will just depend on your preferred workflow.

Option A: Apply a Custom Category to Your Risk Search

• Create a custom category for the crisis topic
• Apply and save it to your existing Risk Monitoring Search
• Use it to isolate crisis-specific coverage

Option B: Create an Active Crisis Search and Dashboard Tab

• Duplicate your Risk Monitoring Search
• Apply crisis keywords to create a focused crisis view
• Create an Active Crisis tab on your Risk dashboard

Monitor Continuously

During the crisis:

• Track sentiment and volume trends in your dashboard
• Track which outlets, journalists, or influencers are driving reach
• Monitor how narratives evolve over time

Your dashboard should reflect what's happening right now.

Review and Report

Finalize the Dashboard

• Summarize coverage volume and sentiment over time
• Identify peak moments and turning points
• Prepare context and narrative notes

Share findings with stakeholders.

Capture Learnings

Before closing the loop, document:

• What was the earliest signal that risk was escalating?
• Which channels and sources drove the most impact?
• Which alerts helped us act quickly, and which didn't?
• What keyword changes should become part of our standard risk setup?
• What should we add or adjust for future risk monitoring?

Prepare Your Campaign Inputs

Confirm Your Setup:

• Decide which media channels you need to track: news, social, broadcast, or a specific mix
• If the campaign includes social, confirm your social accounts are connected under Account. 🔗 Connecting your social accounts for listening
• If you are also reporting on owned social performance, connect your Owned Connections. Engage and Social Analytics users only. 🔗 Connect your owned social accounts

Gather What You'll Track:

• Core keywords, hashtags, and campaign-specific phrases
• Journalists, influencers, or partners involved
• A press release or announcement link (if available)

Build Your Campaign Search

Create one search per campaign if you are running multiple campaigns simultaneously.

Use the AI Search Assistant (recommended)

If you already have a press release or announcement, prompt the AI Search Assistant with something like:

Follow the prompts, then save the search.

Or build manually

• Use a keyword search for simple hashtag-led campaigns
• Use an advanced (Boolean) search for complex campaigns with multiple keywords, partners, or exclusions. Use the Campaign Monitoring Boolean Search guide to help with your build

Once saved, this search becomes the foundation for alerts, Monitor streams, and your Campaign Monitoring dashboard.

Pre-Launch Noise Check

Before launch, do a quick scan to catch obvious noise (e.g., common slang, gift guide, unrelated product names).

If you find unrelated content, add exclusions or tighten the query.

For example, if your query looks like this:

#justdoit is a common Nike hashtag, so you might adjust the query to look like this:

Using the NEAR and/or the NOT operator will tighten your results, reducing irrelevant noise. Small fixes here prevent inaccurate reporting later.

Create Your Live Tools

This is your campaign command center. Complete this last setup step, and you're ready for the launch!

1. Set up Smart Alerts for spike detection and sentiment shift
2. Create a Monitor Stream for quick scanning

Check out the Monitoring Daily Media Playbook:

3. Create a Campaign Dashboard in Analyze

Need to customize the dashboard to your campaign KPIs? See the step-by-step guide here: Analyze: Editing Your Unified Dashboard

Monitor and Iterate

• Trust alerts to tell you when to investigate
• Open the Campaign Dashboard in Analyze to understand what's driving changes. E.g., Get an alert for a Spike? Use the dashboard to identify whether the spike is real (earned coverage) or noise (bot activity, unrelated keyword or hashtag pickup)
• Use the Monitor Stream to scan coverage as it comes in

When needed, make targeted edits in your Explore search:

• Too much noise? Add exclusions
• Missing coverage? Add keyword variants

Common alert triage:

• Mentions Spike Detected. Check top articles, sources, and authors, determine if this is a campaign lift or emerging risk, escalate if high-impact
• Influencer Pickup. Validate reach and engagement, log in your campaign notes
• Sentiment Shift Detected. Identify sources or authors, assess impact, prepare response

Finalize and Share Results

Capture Learnings

• What messages, themes, or assets drove the strongest pickup?
• Where did coverage and engagement peak?
• What noise or gaps did we catch mid-campaign?
• Which alerts and dashboard widgets were most useful?
• What should we reuse or adjust for the next launch?

Finalize the Dashboard

• Adjust the date range to the campaign start and end date
• Remove or add widgets that highlight outcomes tied to campaign goals
• Prepare context and narrative notes

Share results

• Share a live dashboard link, export PDF or PowerPoint, or Add to Google Slides

Before You Begin: Set Your Direction

Start with the outcome, not the database.

Knowing what you want to accomplish makes every decision that follows easier, from who you pitch to how you measure success.

Your media relations strategy sets your ongoing direction. Your campaign plan applies that strategy to the specific story you're pitching. You need both to create an effective campaign.

Define Your Strategy

Your strategy should answer: What role should earned media play in helping your organization achieve its goals?

You don't need a 30-page strategy to get started. Use the Media Relations Strategy Worksheet to create a quick strategy snapshot.

Turn Strategy Into a Campaign Plan

Get clear on these four things before you start searching for journalists or drafting your pitch:

• Goal. What are you trying to achieve?
• Audience. Who are you trying to influence?
• Story. What do you want them to know, and why now?
• Success. What would a good result look like?

Prepare Meltwater for Outreach

Before you can message a journalist from the Meltwater platform, you will need to set up your email with Media Relations. Choose the sending method that fits how you plan to pitch:

Find the Right Journalists

Find contacts who have a reason to care about your story.

Start With Your Story

Use your campaign plan to guide your search:

Then use Media Relations Search to discover relevant journalists and outlets.

Check the Fit

Before adding a journalist, check them for story-fit:

If you can't easily explain why you're pitching them, keep looking.

Build Your Targeted Media List

Turn your strongest-fit contacts into a campaign-ready list.

Create Your Media List

Add the journalists you've vetted to a media list organized around the story you're pitching.

Bring Existing Contacts into Meltwater

Already have trusted contacts in a spreadsheet or another system? Import them into Meltwater so established relationships can live alongside newly discovered contacts.

When imported contacts are matched to Meltwater's media database, you can also keep those relationships current with Contact Update Alerts, which notify you when journalists change roles, outlets, or contact details. This means less manual list maintenance and fewer outdated contacts when it's time to pitch.

Pitch with Purpose

Make it easy for the journalist to understand why they're receiving your pitch.

Think like a Partner

Put yourself in the shoes of the journalist receiving the pitch: Why am I receiving this? Why this story? Why now?

Learn from industry expert Nicolette Addesa on how to approach journalists as partners, tailor your pitch to what matters to them, and build stronger media relationships.

Build and Send Your Outreach

Use your research to personalize the pitch, keep the story clear and concise, and make the next step easy for the journalist.

(Optional) Manage Replies in Meltwater

If you sent your outreach via Integrated Email, manage threaded journalist replies alongside your outreach activity.

Measure the Impact

Move beyond "Did they open it?" Use your results to answer:

Did They Engage?

Use outreach metrics to understand how journalists responded to the pitch.

Did the Story Earn Coverage?

Review likely pickups and confirm coverage connected to your outreach.

Did it Support the Goal?

Now, go back to the campaign plan you created at the beginning to compare the results with the outcome you defined before the campaign:

• Did priority outlets cover your story?
• Were your key messages accurately portrayed?
• Did you reach the intended audience?
• Did the story gain attention beyond the contacts we pitched?
• What evidence shows progress towards your original goal?

Learn and Improve

Use the results from this campaign to make the next one better.

What worked?

• Which journalists and outlets engaged and/or covered the story?
• Which pitch angles or messages appeared to resonate?

What didn't?

Look for friction. Where did relevance, targeting, messaging, or timing fall short?

What will you change next time?

Choose two or three actions for the next campaign.

Plan Your Monitoring Strategy

Before writing prompts, get clear on what you want to learn.

Start with questions someone might ask an AI:

• Is [your brand] good/ethical/sustainable?
• Best alternatives to [your brand]
• Top [industry category] tools
• Is [your competitor] better than [your brand]?

If it sounds like something someone would type into ChatGPT or Perplexity, you're on the right track.

If your prompts don't map to real decision moments, they won't give meaningful insight.

Need Help Getting Started?

If you're stuck, you can use your preferred AI assistant to generate ideas:

Use this as a starting point, then refine the prompts before adding them to GenAI Lens.

Create Your Prompts

In GenAI Lens, you'll start by creating one prompt, then expand from there.

After clicking on Create a Prompt, you'll see the 3-step workflow:

You can either choose from the available templates or create your own custom prompt based on your questions defined in Step 1. Templates can help you get started faster, but they should still be reviewed and refined to match your goals.

✍️ Start with one strong prompt

Choose from a template or one of your questions from Step 1 and turn it into one of these:

• A branded prompt (mentions your brand)
  • What do people think of Spotify?
  • How does Spotify compare to Apple Music?
• An unbranded prompt (mentions your category/industry but not you specifically)
  • What are the best music streaming platforms?

Branded prompts help you understand direct perception. Unbranded prompts help you understand market positioning.

⚙️ Customize Your Prompt

Before moving on:

• Preview the prompt
• Review and refine the wording
• Set a Target Country (if relevant)

🏷️ Organize as You Go

During prompt creation, assign:

• Topic Folders → broad grouping (e.g., brand, campaign, region)
• Labels → flexible segmentation (product, risk, executive)

Setting structure early saves you from clutter chaos later. You can always edit topic folders and labels later in the Settings tab, so start organizing now and refine as you go.

🔁 Expand with Variations

Add variations to help you see the full picture:

• 1-2 additional branded and unbranded prompts
• At least one negative/inverse version of a prompt (this can be branded or unbranded)
  • What are the worst music streaming platforms?
• Duplicate a prompt and add a Target Country (if relevant)
  • Translate or localize your prompt to match your target country

Adding prompt variations helps you identify consistent themes in how AI responds.

Set Up Your Brand

Tailor your analysis to how your brand compares against key competitors.

Stay Organized as You Scale

As your LLM monitoring scales, structure becomes critical to staying organized.

Keep It Structured and Efficient

• Use Topic Folders for hierarchy
• Use Labels for flexible analysis
• Duplicate prompts to test variations or target countries
• Use bulk actions to clean up quickly
• Standardize naming (small detail, big impact)

A messy setup leads to misleading or inconsistent insights.

🌱 Growing Your Community

Find and activate the right influencers.

Use this playbook to discover, vet, and activate creators who align with your brand and goals.

🤝 Managing Your Network

Organize, collaborate, and run campaigns.

This playbook helps you manage campaigns, communicate with influencers, and keep relationships organized in one place.

📊 Measuring Campaign Performance

Understand results and refine your strategy.

Use this playbook to analyze performance, share results, and turn campaign data into smarter decisions.

💸 Pay Your Community

Manage creator payments from campaign to payout.

Use this playbook to choose your KlearPay provider, collect creator payment details, send payouts, track payment status, and manage affiliate commissions, all from within Klear.

Reporting Path 1: Shareable Dashboards in Explore

Fast, snapshot-style reporting.

Shareable Dashboards in Explore turn the insights you're already viewing into presentation-ready reports.

Think of it as capturing the story at a specific moment in time.

Use Shareable Dashboards when you need:

• A quick summary of coverage
• Slides for leadership updates
• A one-time report you can share or download

Reporting Path 2: Custom Dashboards (Analyze)

Flexible dashboards tailored to your reporting needs.

If a snapshot isn't enough, Analyze offers more control.

They require a bit more setup, but give you far more control over how the story is told and how often it updates.

Use Analyze when you need:

• Reporting on defined KPIs
• Custom layouts, widgets, and filters
• Reports tailored to different audiences
• A shareable link that stays up to date

This is the best option when reporting is ongoing, not one-and-done.

When you need to pull a report from your Analyze dashboard, click on Share and choose from the available options.

Set Up Monitor Streams

Monitor Streams give you a live view of coverage as it comes in.

Use Monitor Streams to:

• Check coverage throughout the day
• Track multiple topics in one place
• Quickly scan what's new

Create Smart Alerts

Smart Alerts notify you when activity changes or spikes, so you don't have to watch coverage waiting for something to happen.

Use Smart Alerts to catch:

• Spikes in coverage
• Sentiment shifts
• High-impact mentions

These keep you informed when something notable happens, so you don't have to monitor your coverage manually.

Schedule Digest Reports

Digest Reports send a summary of coverage on a schedule you choose. These reports can be sent as infrequently as once per week or as often as twice per day.

Choose Your Audit Window and Purpose

Before opening Explore, decide:

• What period are you auditing? Last quarter, last year, or a specific timeframe?
• Why are you running this audit? Strategy reset, leadership review, performance check, or planning?
• What should this audit inform? Messaging, media strategy, resourcing, or priorities for the next cycle?

Write this down. It keeps the audit focused and prevents scope creep.

Prepare Your Audit Window

Start with what you already have.

• Open your existing Brand Monitoring search in Explore or dashboard in Analyze
• Set the date range to match your audit window
• Scan results to confirm coverage looks complete and relevant

If you need to refine the results, refer to the Review, Refine, and Save Your Search section of the Brand Monitoring Playbook.

Now that your results are aligned, let's evaluate your PR activity during the audit period.

Run the Audit Read in Brand Analytics

Open your brand monitoring search in Explore or dashboard in Analyze, then set the date range to your audit window.

The goal here is to understand the baseline story of your PR performance during the audit period.

Scan the tabs to get a fast read on the data:

• Volume. When did coverage peak or drop? What moments drove visibility?
• Narrative. What themes, topics, and entities dominated the conversations?
• Sentiment. How was your brand perceived over time? Where did sentiment shift?
• Engagement. Which stories or messages actually resonated?
• Media Contacts. Which journalists drove coverage? Note: This feature requires Media Relations access

Use Mira Studio to Draft Key Findings

Once you've reviewed the Brand Analytics tabs, use Mira Studio to help summarize patterns and draft initial findings.

Start the prompt using your audit window and existing search. For example:

Then add one of these prompts:

• What drove coverage volume during this period?
• Which narratives or themes were most strongly associated with our brand?
• What influenced sentiment shifts?
• Which media outlets or journalists drove the most reach, and through what types of stories?

Treat the AI output as a draft. Refine with context you know from the business.

(Optional) Add Competitive, Industry, and Risk Context

Use this step to put your brand's performance in perspective. You may not need all three lenses. Add only what supports your audit goals.

Create Clear Recommendations

Summarize your findings:

• What approaches consistently drove credible coverage?
• Where did performance lag or fail to land as expected?
• How did narratives, sentiment, or visibility shift over time?
• What strategic shifts should guide PR efforts in the next cycle?

Focus on direction here, not description.

Share Findings from the Audit

Create a dashboard in Analyze (or use your existing Brand dashboard) to compile key visualizations that help tell your story.

• Refer to the Custom Dashboards section in the Reporting & Sharing Insights Playbook for creating an Analyze Dashboard using the Brand template
• Or create your own custom dashboard from scratch using insights from our widget catalog

When ready, share your findings with stakeholders.

🛠 Set Up & Govern Explore+ for Scale

Lay the foundation for a scalable Explore+ environment.

This playbook walks through defining user access boundaries, connecting the right social data sources, and establishing governance habits that keep your workspace organized as teams and use cases grow.

🧱 Build & Manage Explore+ Assets

Design searches and structure data intentionally.

Learn how to organize folders, create Custom Fields, and build Standard and Organized Searches so your Private Index stays clean and scalable.

📊 Turn Explore+ Data into Trusted Insights

Move from signals to insights.

This playbook shows how to detect trends, validate data, and communicate insights using Discovery, Analytics, and Dashboards.