With so much TV and radio out there, I’ve always imagined tracking what is said about your brand must be an expensive task. Unless you have voice recognition software monitoring every channel, the only other way to get real time information on who’s saying what, about your brand, is to hire people to monitor every channel. Expensive!

That is, until Critical Mention came along. In a nut-shell, according to the Fast Company article I pulled this from:

There is a dizzying amount of TV and radio out there. If you’re a brand manager–or, especially at this time of year, a campaign manager–and you want to keep track of what’s said about you, where do you turn? Critical Mention’s latest platform ingests and digitizes over 27 hours of content every 60 seconds (more than YouTube handles in the same span of time). Its clients can search eight million video clips and 10 terabytes of indexed TV data. If a guest on a Fox affiliate in L.A. talks trash about one of Critical’s clients, that client will receive an alert and can view the clip online within seconds of airing. Critical’s indexing tentacles now reach into Canada, Europe, and even the Middle East.

Two things struck me reading this:

1. How amazing the technology must be to convert audio to text, so quickly, and then search, process and deliver to clients. Wow!
2. And, how text, I assume, is the best option for search. If it wasn’t then why convert it to start with?

I can appreciate why it’s better, as you can get content and context far faster than watching minutes and minutes of audio and video chunks. I guess one day we’ll do video and audio more efficiently, but for now with regard to search, I guess text rules! OK : )