Universal Document Converter and Optimizing Press Clipping

PR agents and the marketing departments of companies use many various instruments in their work. One of these is clipping online mass media. This term implies the collection and analysis of incoming materials from the electronic press. Essentially, what is meant is the constant monitoring of popular publications and the presentation and analysis of needed information for the client or management. Press Clipping the Old-Fashioned Way Clipping online mass media is a laborious task. If it were not so important (clipping results are used for correcting the PR and business strategies of companies), many would probably refuse to do it. For one thing, it entails daily physical monitoring of all analyzed projects – manually, i.e. only a person is able to fulfill a quality selection of needed materials. Secondly, selected articles need to be processed. They all need to be in a single format that preserves the original appearance while at the same time insures they will be able to be viewed and printed on the client’s computer. Usually, processing such articles is done in two stages. First they are printed on an office printer. Then the printed articles are scanned into PDF format and sent to the client or management department. Unfortunately, such a method has a number of serious disadvantages. For one thing, the resulting copies of publications suffer greatly in terms of quality. After all, in the vast majority of cases, ordinary office equipment is used. Such equipment is optimal for printing and scanning ordinary text documents, but is insufficient for quality work with images. Not to mention the fact that the articles are often printed on ordinary black and white laser printers. And that is why ready-to-send PDF files completely lack color formatting. As a result, clients are dissatisfied with the poor quality of the documents. Secondly, the abovementioned method requires a lot of manual work. After all, web pages from various mass media sites differ greatly in their design. And very few of them, when printed, fit on one sheet of standard A4 format paper. Therefore, an optimal way must be found for each individual article in order to fit it on paper. Unfortunately, this is not always successful… Scanning printed articles is even more time-consuming. One must carefully position each document, start the scanning process and wait for it to complete. After this, you need to load the scanner with the following sheet, and so forth… The task is even more complicated if the printed material cannot fit the width of the page. In this case, the right side of the document will not be printed. Of course, it is possible to print articles on A3 format paper, but printers and scanners for this format are very expensive. As a result, press clipping done the traditional way takes a lot of time, while the productivity of the specialist who carries out this task, is far from ideal. The next disadvantage of doing things the old-fashioned way is the significant expenses on expendable materials since in printing the articles, paper is used by the pack, not to mention the ink and cartridges for the printer. The worst part is that these sheets become worthless immediately after scanning. Literally half an hour after printing they get thrown away! Of course, in reality, it is the client that pays for expendable materials. However, it never hurts to lower the expenses of your service allowing you to either increase the profits of your business or to lower costs and sharpen your competitive edge. Automating Press Clipping As we already mentioned, press clipping consists of two stages. The search and selection for materials is practically impossible to automate. However, preparing articles that have been found on the Internet and sending them to the client can be organized differently. For this we need the program Universal Document Converter. What is special about this program is that it works as a virtual printer. This fact makes it possible to convert documents from any program in which it is possible to print information on paper (including browsers), as well as insuring that the program is easy to use. The process of press clipping using Universal Document Converter works in the following way:

• Mass media sites on the Internet are examined that are of interest to the client.
• All selected materials are printed from the window of the browser, using Universal Document Converter as a printer and setting the parameters of the output file.

It must be noted separately that Universal Document Converter enables you to add new pages to already existing files. This makes it possible to create one PDF document containing all the articles from a certain period or all publications from a given Internet resource. Using Universal Document Converter for press clipping solves all the problems of the traditional approach. First of all, the quality of the resulting PDF documents completely corresponds to the original material. During the conversion process the formatting and color scheme of the publication remains unchanged. Secondly, the size of the outbound pages can be changed in the settings for the conversion process. This makes it possible for the entire original article to fit on one page of the output file or to turn a large volume of material into a multipage PDF document. Not having to print and scan documents during the clipping process makes it possible to cut expenses on paper and ink as well as decreasing the wear and tear on office equipment. Therefore, Universal Document Converter significantly economizes on expendable materials. In addition, decreasing the consumption of paper is not only a reduction in the overhead expenses of the company, but is also caring for the environment. And of course, Universal Document Converter enables you to significantly increase the efficiency of employees engaged in mass media clipping. This is achieved through automating the processing of selected materials and avoiding manual labor. In Conclusion Clipping online mass media is a laborious and time-consuming task. Many PR agencies solve it by manual labor on the part of their employees. At the same time, part of such work can be automated. Using Universal Document Converter makes it possible to save time on such work while increasing the quality of reports sent to clients as well as decrease the overhead expenses of the agency.