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.