If you are in the business of handling a consumer, or high level B2B PR campaign there are many pan-European clipping agencies across located throughout Europe that will take your money and, on the whole, do a good job in finding the PR placed in the printed media.

But, and this is a big BUT, they all fail dismally when it comes to monitoring any press in highly specialised markets, "Engineering" - especially automation and space technology - in our particular case.

Now, we should not be too harsh on these clipping agencies because if you look at the business case for monitoring the Engineering press the numbers just don’t stake up! There are insufficient businesses within the engineering sector that could afford a pan-European press clipping service. Put simply, the cost of subscribing to all of the appropriate media and paying for native language readers to scan those same media would cost more than the revenue generated by the service

When it comes to identifying news content of the world’s biggest magazine, the WWW, the situation is even worse!

The “lazy” PR agency often relies on some form of “wired” news distribution service, which is suitable for high level business and IT announcements but fail the trade media.

The story may get picked up by the main web search engines but very rarely appears in the specialist media websites as a direct result of this type of distribution. To get stories onto the specialist media web sites you need to have a relationship with the editor and send the story personally, while making sure that it is relevant to readers of that specialist media web site.

Now, let’s assume you have followed this sound advice and the editor places the story on the website. Will Google or Yahoo find that story when conducting a web search – probably not! Most specialist media web sites are not identified as “official” news sources by Google and Yahoo, and as such the chances are that the precious story placed will have fallen off the bottom of the website when and if it is indexed.

So what is the solution?

Subscribe to the magazines and scan known websites regularly - not perfect but what in this life is?