Slice like a pro: Adding past clips to your Slice account

Cooked to perfection and just out of the Slice oven comes a new 'Add' clip feature for Slice subscribers. That's right Slicers, you can now add news clips from the last 30 days into your Slice tracking folders... delicious!

OK Slicers, here's how to sink your teeth into it...

Creating a new tracking folder and adding past clips


1. Enter all tracking folder details Step 1 - 4
2. Go to Step 5 'Test, Add, Save & Start'.
3. Click 'Test and Add'
4. Clips from the last 30 days that match your tracking criteria will be presented to you in a table.
5. Review these clips to ensure your search string and media scoping options are picking up the right type of articles you're looking for. If the list contains irrelevant articles, review your search string and media options to prevent irrelevant clips being delivered into your account.
6. To add any of these clips, simply tick the check box next to the clip details.
7. Add as many clips as you like and then click 'Save'.
8. These clips will be added towards you package clip count and may take up to 30 minutes to be delivered into your account.
Tip: ensure you have email alerts for this tracking folder enabled - you'll then receive a message when these new clips arrive in your account!


Adding clips to an existing tracking folder


1. Go the tracking folder you'd like to add clips to.
2. You'll notice Step 5 is now called 'Test, Add, Save & Start'.
3. Click 'Test & Add'
4. If there are clips from the last 30 days that match your search, you'll see a list of articles presented by date and media type, with details of publisher/broadcaster.
5. You can reorder your list by simply clicking the table headings. By default clips are sorted by date.
6. Clips previously delivered into your account will have grey text and the check box for it will already be ticked(see fourth clip listed above). You can not add clips already received by your tracking folder.
7. To add clips, simply tick the check box next to the clip details.
8. Add as many clips as you like and then click 'Save'.
9. These clips will be added towards you package clip count and may take up to 30 minutes to be delivered into your account.
Tip 1: Ensure you have email alerts for this tracking folder enabled - you'll then receive a message when these new clips arrive in your account!
Tip 2: If you are adding a clip that was missed, review your search string and media scoping options to prevent the miss happening again.

We hope you enjoy this new addition to our pantry of Slice DIY ingredients. Eat up!

Media monitoring

Slice like a pro: Using the 'test' function for a sneak peek

Slice subscribers have access to a fantastic 'test' function, that allows you to see brief summaries of the news for the past 30 days based, on a specific search.

This feature was originally designed as a guide to test how accurate your search string is for a given tracking folder. Doing a test before you save a tracking folder helps decrease the likelihood of irrelevant news being delivered to your tracking folder once it is saved and running in live environment.

But have you thought about using it simply as a research tool - a way to take a sneak peek at what happened in the last 30 days? 'Test' will allow you to do a quick and dirty search on your competitors, industry thought leaders, key spokespeople and past campaigns. What about doing a quick 'test' to see how the brands and potential business that you are trying to win have performed recently? Why not investigate industry issues, potential employers, evolving trends?

To do a 'test' simply:

• Login to slicemedia.com
• Go to My subscription > Tracking folders
• Select the 'Add new folder' folder button
• Enter in your search string, select your media scope
• Go to Step 5 and hit 'test' and you're on your way

The 'test' function gives you a brief window into the past, so you can be on track in the future.

Media monitoring

Slice like a pro: Top 6 tips to switching media monitoring providers

Over the past few years we've helped a number of subscribers switch their media monitoring to Slice, and learned a couple of things along the way. So if you're considering plugging in to a new media monitoring provider, here's a couple of tips to ensure you don't miss any coverage in the process!

1. Review your current contract and ask yourself why you are considering switching: do you have budget constraints, want greater flexibility, need increased coverage for minimal cost increase, desire more control over your monitoring? Do you need high-touch acccount management, or are you happy with a supported DIY approach? Who is the provider best placed to meet your needs?

2. Check when your contract ends - some providers lock you in for 24 months and it's easy to lose track of when it expires. What are the rollover terms? Beware that unlike Slice, some current providers have lengthy contracts that require many months notice before they can be cancelled. You'll need to plan your move.

3. Give your current provider plenty of notice - we know of one provider that requires you give up to three months notice or you could be locked in for another year to 18 months! Create a calendar appointment to remind you when you should be contacting your current provider to cancel.

4. Send your monitoring terms ahead to your new provider at least two weeks before you intend on starting. This way you can refine your monitoring brief before you switch.

5. If possible, allow a week or two of overlap. That way you can notice any issues instantly and get them seen to without missing important coverage.

6. Ensure you start your monitoring service BEFORE you start you campaign. Most services work on forward looking basis and it can be difficult and/or costly pick up coverage after it's been published.

If you're considering switching and need more help, contact us - we're happy to help.

service[at]slicemedia.com
Australia: 1300 1 SLICE (75423)
NZ: 0800 1 SLICE (75423)

Media monitoring

Slice like a pro: How PRs use Slice for media monitoring

Wondering how you can use Slice to service the media monitoring requirements of your clients? Here's a couple of ideas from our subscribers we thought we'd share with you.

Folders for each client
Each of Slice's media monitoring packages gives you a number of tracking folders. Each tracking folder can be set up with a unique search string and media scope. So you can set up a tracking folder for each of your clients. Rememeber you can modify the tracking criteria or delete each folder at any time. You can also use the 'All Clips' function to download the contents of each folder as one pdf or a zip folder of individuals clips, for easy handling.

Create a package for each client
Given that Slice's packages start from $195 (ex gst) for upto 25 news clips over 90 days, many PRs simply subscribe to a monitoring package for each of their clients. This simplifies keeping track of monitoring costs for each client. Packages can be upgraded, downgraded, cancelled or re-activated at anytime.

Recommend Slice directly to clients
Because Slice is so cost effective and simple to use, some PRs simply refer their clients directly to Slice. This keeps the cost of monitoring transparent and minimised. And it allow clients to directly monitor the results of the PR effort, as they can have email alerts of new news items directly sent to them.

Offer 'free media monitoring'
Because Slice is such a low cost service, we even have some PRs who offer their clients free media monitoring!

Supplementing other media monitoring services with Slice
Slice has been engaged by some large PR agencies to monitor for their smaller, low end clients, while still using other media monitoring services for larger, higher end clients.

'Off-season' media monitoring
Large scale events will often have a monitoring budget during the event season, but cannot afford to keep monitoring after the event, even though they still have a need. These PRs will often use Slice to continue their monitoring effort 'off season'.

Hope this is some food for thought about how you can monitor the media for your clients!

Tracking the media, monitoring the message

Slice like a pro: Are you using internet monitoring yet?

A little while back we launched internet monitoring on Slice - a high quality, timely internet monitoring service scouring top Australian and New Zealand news websites and blogs, delivering content into a single unified source - your Slice account.

So have you enabled internet monitoring yet? Simply go to your tracking folder, and in Step 2 and select 'Internet Monitoring' and check the boxes.



And just a reminder about setting up your search strings... the Slice search string builder, does NOT work that same way as searching on Google or other search engines on the web.

For example, when you do a search in Google you'll often use quotation marks to search for a phrase, such as "Silver Bay Music Festival". However in Slice you do not need to use quotation marks for a single phrase, simply entering the phrase will work just fine.

If you wish to search for multiple phrases, you can use brackets and the common and/or/not commands to specify your results. For example:

(Silver Bay Music Festival) AND (Ginger Tree Choir)

For more information about building effective search strings in Slice, check out our 'Help' section onced you've logged into your account.

Tracking the media, monitoring the message

Slice like a pro: The new 'All Items' page

One of the major improvements we made to Slice in version 2 released a few weeks back, was the functionality of the 'All Items' page. Based on terrific subscriber feedback, the 'All Items' page has been redesigned to enable you to:

Download all your news clips since the last time you logged in or from a selected date range


Download all clips from a selected folder and download all clips of a media type (press, broadcast, internet)


Download your clips either as a single PDF or a zip file of individual clips


Go on, give it a whirl yourself. But remember some of the files generated for downloading can be quite large, so be kind to yourself and have a nice hot cuppa at the ready.

And if there are any other improvements you'd like to see, drop us a line.

Tracking the media, monitoring the message

Slice like a pro: Brackets for more than just smilie faces

:-) happy ;-) winking happy ;-)) with a double chin

Admit it. You've sent a smilie face to a a friend or two. But did you know brackets can bring you infinite joy when you're building your search strings? They're the crowdpleasers of the keyboard. Here's why...

1. Precedence
In Slice our search engine reads search strings from left to right, so to be sure of your search intent, use brackets. Brackets will group together your ideas and direct the search engine correctly. For example, say you want articles relating to computers in teaching or education. If you created this search string without brackets...

computers and teaching or education

... the search engine will process this string from left to right, with the "AND" request first, making the string read as "(Computers and Teaching) or Education" - which is a disaster! This string would give you all articles with the words "computers" AND "teaching", and then another bunch of articles which simply contain the word "education". This was not the intent of your orginial search!

But if you use brackets to clearly define your search as all articles containing the words "computers" AND either the words "teaching" OR "education" you would have a search string that looks like this:

computers AND (teaching OR education)
This will find articles containing the word "computers", and either "teaching" or "education".

The search string qualifer in Slice will help you with this too.


2. Clarity
Brackets work as a great visual aid when constucting complex strings. Here's an example of using brackets to break the search up into sections, for example:

computers AND (teaching OR education) NOT (higher OR secondary)
This will give news items containing the words "computers" and either "teaching" or "education", but will not give you the article is if the words "higher" or "secondary" are also in the article.

3. Variations
They're also helpful to group together variations of spellings which could be reported in various ways by the media. Here's an example if you were wanting to track stories about Dr Mike Whyte:

(Dr OR doctor) AND (Mike OR Michael) AND (Whyte OR White)

4. Combining searchesYou can also use brackets to bind together a series of searches to avoid having to develop separate tracking folders. For example if you wanted to track Dr Mike Whyte and Professor Jim McNamara here's what the string could look like:

((Dr OR doctor) AND (Mike OR Michael) AND (Whyte OR White)) AND ((Prof* OR Prf) AND (Jim OR James) AND (MacNamara OR McNamara))


We hope these tips have made you feel ;-)))))))

Tracking the media, monitoring the message

Doh! We couldn't help ourselves...

/.-( emo |:) unibrow @:^) elvis

Slice like a pro: Using the *asterisk*

Asterisk (Asterix) is more than a wacky French comic character... he's actually a very clever little minx when it comes to building great search strings.

In boolean speak, using an asterisk (sometimes also called a 'wildcard') at the end of a word will ensure you track all variations of how a word ends.

For example, placing an asterisk at the end of the word 'school*', will ensure you receive all news clips containing the words 'school', 'schools', 'schooling', 'schoolies' and 'schooled'.

Ski* will deliver news clips that have the words 'skiers', 'skis', 'skiing', or any other word starting with 'ski' present in the clip.

Reincarnat* will give you 'reincarnate', 'reincarnation', 'reincarnated' and 'reincarnates'.

Paint* will ensure you receive 'paints', 'painted' and 'painting'.

Helen* will return all articles with the word 'Helen', or 'Helens'.

An example of how a search string might include an asterix is:

environment* AND carbon AND (credit* OR trad*)

For more help information, check out the 'Help' link on your toolbar when you login to Slice. You can also download a pdf help file to have as a handy reference when building your search strings.

For other tips on building search strings, check out 'Slice like a pro' category on our blog here.

Tracking the media, monitoring the message

Slice like a pro: Monitoring for web addresses

We've had a few enquiries from Slice subscribers are wanting to track web addresses in the media. So here's a few tips for setting up search strings to do just that!

Web addresses can be presented in many different ways across different media. Sometimes it will have 'http://' or 'www.' or .au present in the article. But sometime it won't. Radio and TV announcers are especially likely to leave off the '.au' component of a web address.

So, given that you need to set up your search strings on the exact words you wish to track, we suggest that you only enter in the middle sections of the web address.

For example to monitor "www.slicemedia.com.au", you need to write the search term "slicemedia.com" and this will pick it up if it's written as www.slicemedia.com.au or slicemedia.com.au or dub-dub-dub dot slicemedia.com.au as the term "slicemedia.com" is constant throughout.

If you have any queries about this, give our Slice gurus a call for some sage, webby advice.

Tracking the media, monitoring the message

Slice like a pro: Underscores (and the city)

OK Slicers hold on to your cosmopolitans... you're about to make friends with "_" (the underscore).

You will know from using our search string builder, that to build a search string you need to use the 'boolean' commands 'AND', 'NOT' or 'OR'. These commands sit in between the words or phrases we want to track - for example 'Sarah Jessica Parker' AND 'shoes' - this gives us all news items containing both the phrase 'Sarah Jessica Parker' and the word 'shoes' in the same article.

But what happens when the word 'and' is also in the phrase you want to track - like 'Sex and the City' for example?

When creating your search string that contains the word 'and' in a phrase, you need to use an underscore. The underscore should always be included before the "_and" so we can pick it up as a word and not a command. Here's some examples:

Search string #1 - no underscore: Sex and the City
This search string will be read by the search engine as Sex AND the city - so ALL items that contain the word 'sex' and the phrase 'the city' will be delivered, when really you only wanted articles relating to the 'Sex and the City' TV show.

Search string #2 - using the underscore: Sex _and the City
This search term will only return articles with the exact phrase "Sex and the City". Finally, Manolo Blahnik heaven.

Remember, if you come a cropper in the search string stakes, call us and one of the posse will help get your search strings looking as good as Charlotte in vintage Chanel.

Tracking the media, monitoring the message

Slice like a pro: Retrieving your invoices

OK you're in Addis Ababa and suddenly your CFO calls you, desperately needing your Slice invoices. Quelle horreur! You fire up your manually generated $150 laptop with a satellite internet connection and ...

1. Log in to www.slicemedia.com
2. Go to 'Admin'
3. Click on 'My Payments'
4. Voila! There are all your invoices in all their delicious preciousness, waiting for you to access. Simply click on the green invoice number to open the invoice.

The number crunchers are happy, Slice keeps on Slicing and you can get back to your tej and doro wat chicken. Life is good.

Media monitoring

Slice like a pro: getting help

As a Slicer you may have already come across our handy 'help' page on our website, but did you know you can also download the 'help' page as a PDF? The link for this is at the top of the 'Help' page, once you've logged in.

So if you're looking for a little extra gusto when it comes to putting your search strings together, having the boolean examples printed next to you can be a gem. Infact, a little insider tip - we use the help doc all the time to keep us on track too!

Tracking the media, monitoring the message

Don't leave it too late to start tracking!

While many Slice subscribers have got themselves on track with their monitoring for 2008, we've found some people out there have left their run a little late, and consequently missed some of their coverage. So here's our top 5 tips so you can Slice like pro, and not miss a clip!

1. Sign up early - don't leave it until 5pm on a Friday afternoon to get your tracking happening for the weekend, or the beginning of the following week. You'll need time to set up your search strings and test the results. Subscribe and set up your tracking folders at least a few business days before you start expecting coverage.

2. Contact us for advice - we deal with setting up tracking folders and writing search strings every day. We're here to help and share our expertise. You're not alone!

3. Download the help document - once you're a Slice subscriber and you've logged in, make sure you download and read the help document provided. It has lots of examples about how to get the most out of your search strings.

4. Understand the media cycle - we start receiving digital feeds of some newspapers from 11pm the day before they are published. This means we start delivering content into Slice accounts very early in the morning. If you don't set up your tracking folder until 10am that morning, you've already missed the newspaper coverage for that day. Make sure you have your tracking folders sorted before you leave for the day, so that your newspaper clips will be waiting for you when you arrive the next morning.

5. Read our blog - we have a 'Slice like a pro' category on our blog, which includes useful tips for our subscribers about using the site and setting up search strings.

If you have any other tips, please leave a comment below. Happy Slicing!

Tracking the media, monitoring the message

Slice like a pro: Using display filters

So you’ve got a bunch of news items in your tracking folder. Want to see only your radio items in that tracking folder? Or only your TV items? Or only your press items? Never fear. The Slice filter is here!

After you’ve selected which tracking folder you want to view, use the ‘Filter’ drop down box to choose which items you want to show – all items, tv items, radio items or press items.

The ‘Folder’ heading tells you how many items you have in total in your tracking folder.

The ‘View’ heading tells you how many news items are in your current view – in the example above, there are 6 radio items being displayed for the tracking folder ‘Web 2.0’, which has an overall total of 190 items. Simple!

Tracking the media, monitoring the message

Slice like a pro: The 'within' command

From time to time we get asked for tips to improve search string relevance. If you're a confident search string builder and are using the 'free text' box, you may like to add the 'within' command to your media slicing arsenal.

The within command works like AND but allows you to stipulate the distance between related keywords. Generally, the closer the proximity of words, the more likely the keywords are to be related to one another. Hence the more likely the relevancy of the news item to your search intent.

The within command looks like this w/x where x is a number between 1 to 100. So the string you might build would look like this:

school W/5 policy

This search would yield news items where the word school appears within five words of policy.

The within operand also works well with lists of terms. It can be an alternative to writing lots of separate strings. Here's a few examples:

Gold Coast W/10 (tourism OR visitors OR backpackers)

Tourism W/20 (Gold Coast OR Noosa OR Whitsunday OR Cairns)

If you're a real power user, something this could work for you:

(food W/5 (packaging OR label* OR advertising)) AND (consumer* W/5 (protect* OR information OR warning))


Get to it Slicers.

Tracking the media, monitoring the message

Manage your folders

Here’s a few tips to keep your tracking folders nice and tidy for Spring.

On your tracking folder summary page you will notice three buttons next to your tracking folders – ‘Deactivate/Activate’, ‘Delete’ and ‘Edit’.

Deactivate/Activate: When you save a tracking folder it will automatically be in the ‘active’ state unless you manually choose to deactivate it. This means it will continue to track for media until you tell it to stop. The ‘deactivate’ function stops a folder from prospecting news items without deleting the folder. So you can keep your folders after the media issue or event has finished, and then reactivate it if want to track the issue or event again in the future.

You are permitted to have as many deactivated folders, as active folders, as defined by your package. However you must always have at least one active folder.

Delete: Deleting a tracking folder removes the folder from your subscription and it cannot be retrieved. You can however, always recreate the folder if you choose.

When you deactivate or delete a tracking folder, the news items contained within that folder are still accessible via the ‘Search’ feature until the copyright of the those items expires (45 days or 90 days for government subscribers).

Edit: The edit feature allows you change your tracking folder criteria, such as the search string, scope of coverage and folder name.

Track the media, monitor the message

Improve your search

I was recently contacted by a subscriber who had a long complicated search string and she wanted some tips on improving it. The string looked something like this:

(Acme AND (camping OR adventure OR yacht)) OR Acme Outboards OR (ABC AND camping) and Acme World Yacht Race

To improve her search, we gave her the following advice:

Keep it simple: one idea per tracking folder: If you have enough tracking folders, set up a folder for each idea you searching for – try to avoid combining keywords or issues in the same string, unless you feel very confident about creating boolean strings. In this case, she could have set up four tracking folders, one for each of the ideas she was tracking:

Acme AND (camping OR adventure OR yacht)
Acme Outboards
ABC AND camping
Acme World Yacht Race

Stick with the search string builder: if you’re unsure about how to build boolean strings, it’s best to stick with the search string builder. The search string builder was specifically designed to help people who had never built search strings. The search string builder will also ask you qualifying questions to ensure Slice knows exactly what you want to track.

Use brackets: If you do feel confident about using the free text box, build each of your ideas separately first, bracket each idea, then combine them. The original string would then look like this:

(Acme AND (camping OR adventure OR outdoor)) OR (Acme Outdoors) OR
(ABC AND camping) OR (Acme World Yacht Race)

Download the help document: after you have logged in to the site, a comprehensive help document about setting up your search strings is available for you to read on screen, or download as a pdf. This is handy to have by your side when setting up your strings.