Media monitoring app setup that takes one sitting
MentionAlert is a media monitoring app you configure once and then mostly forget. You tell it which names and phrases matter, decide where each one should be heard, and it keeps watching news sites, blogs, forums, Reddit, X, YouTube and review sites for you. Here is exactly what happens from the first keyword to the first weekly report.
Step 1. Add the keywords you care about
Start with a brand (a project in MentionAlert) and add tracked keywords to it. A keyword can be your company name, a product name, a competitor, a founder's name or any phrase you want to hear about, such as the name of a campaign or a known bug.
Each keyword gets its own boolean filters, so you decide what counts as a real mention before anything reaches your inbox.
- Include words that must appear next to the keyword, so a common product name only matches when it shows up with your industry terms.
- Exclude words that cause noise, such as a city, a sports team or a song that shares your name.
- Match an exact phrase when word order matters.
- Limit a keyword to the languages and countries you actually sell in.
- Restrict a keyword to certain sources when it only makes sense there, for instance a support phrase on forums and Reddit.
01Step 2. Choose the sources to watch
Every plan covers the same public sources. You switch them on or off per keyword, which keeps a press focused keyword away from social chatter and a community keyword away from newswire copies.
| Source group | What MentionAlert picks up |
|---|---|
| News sites and blogs | Articles, opinion pieces and blog posts that name your keyword |
| Posts and comments in public subreddits | |
| X (Twitter) | Public posts that mention your keyword |
| YouTube | Video titles, descriptions and public comments |
| Forums, Hacker News and Q&A sites | Threads, questions and answers on public boards |
| Bluesky | Public posts |
| Review sites | Public reviews that mention your brand or product |
Collection runs through official APIs and public feeds under each platform's terms. Private groups and pages that require a login stay out of scope, so nothing in your feed comes from a place your team could not open in a browser.
02Step 3. Route each keyword to the right people
Alert routing is set per keyword, not per account. That is the part most teams underestimate. A complaint phrase should wake up support, a competitor name belongs with product marketing, and press coverage goes to the comms lead.
- Instant email sends a message within minutes of a new mention being collected, with the snippet, source, sentiment and a link.
- Daily digest collects the day's mentions into one email at the hour you pick, for keywords that matter but rarely need a fast reply.
- Slack posts each mention into the channel you choose, on Team and higher plans.
- Webhook pushes each mention as JSON to your own endpoint, on Team and higher plans, so your CRM or ticketing tool can react.
- Microsoft Teams delivery and priority delivery are part of Enterprise.
On Agency, each client workspace has its own routing, so one client's mentions never land in another client's Slack channel.
03Step 4. Read the feed with sentiment and reach
Every collected mention lands in the mention feed of its brand. MentionAlert scores sentiment automatically on each one with an in-house model and labels it positive, neutral or negative. Reach is shown when the source provides it, such as points, likes or views, and left empty when it does not. You filter the feed by keyword, source, sentiment and date, and on Team and higher plans you export it to CSV.
04Step 5. Get the weekly report without building it
Starter sends a weekly email summary with mention volume, the sentiment split and the most discussed mentions. Team adds a weekly PDF report you can forward to leadership. Agency adds white-label PDF reports scheduled straight to each client, and Enterprise adds custom report templates. Read more about media monitoring reports.
05Step 6. Invite your team
Seats grow with the plan, from one on Starter to five on Team, fifteen on Agency and fifty on Enterprise. On Agency and Enterprise you set roles per workspace, which lets an account manager edit keywords for one client while a client contact only reads that client's mentions. Enterprise adds single sign on with SAML and an audit log, described on the media intelligence platform page.
Mentions arriving in the feed after your first keyword
| Source | Mention | Sentiment |
|---|---|---|
| News | NewsA trade publication quotes your founder in a market roundupPositive | Positive |
| Forum | ForumA member asks whether your product works with their setupNeutral | Neutral |
| Review site | Review siteA reviewer says support took two days to answerNegative | Negative |
| RedditA user recommends your product in a beginner threadPositive | Positive |
Illustrative sample, not your data.
What happens in the first hour after setup
The moment you save a keyword, MentionAlert starts its first collection pass across the sources you selected. The first mentions usually appear in the feed within minutes, each one already scored for sentiment.
During that first hour most teams do three things. They read the early mentions to see what the filters let through, add one or two exclude words to cut obvious noise, and send a test alert to Slack or a webhook to confirm the channel is right. From then on, new mentions trigger alerts on their own, the daily digest arrives at its set hour, and the first weekly report goes out at the end of the week.
01Why this media monitoring app stays quiet until it matters
An alert tool that pings for every weak match gets muted within a week. Per keyword filters and per keyword routing keep each person's channel limited to what they own. A support lead sees complaints, a PR lead sees coverage, and a founder can read one weekly email instead of all of it. If you want to compare approaches, see how MentionAlert works as a google alerts alternative or as a social media monitoring tool.
Adding a brand, a handful of keywords and one alert channel fits into a single short sitting. Most of the later work is tuning filters after you see the first mentions.
Yes. Filters apply to new mentions from the moment you save them. Mentions already collected stay in your feed and still count toward the monthly mention quota of your plan.
No. Routing is set per keyword, so one keyword can send instant email while another posts to a Slack channel and a third only appears in the daily digest.
Every mention MentionAlert collects for your keywords in the billing period counts once. Deleting a mention from the feed does not free quota, so tight filters are the best way to stay within your plan.