A company can build up a great brand reputation one day, only to have an unforeseen PR crisis tarnish its brand the next day. Effective crisis management can not only mitigate the negative impact that such an event causes, but also has the potential to build up a company’s brand reputation in the long run. Organizations will inevitably face crises, so they must prepare for the unexpected and know when and how to respond under pressure.  

We recently spoke with Choice Hotels VP of External Communications and Public Relations, Lorri Christou and Prudential Financial VP of Global Communications, Allyson Hugley about the essentials of top-notch crisis and risk management. Our guests shared valuable insights on how to plan proactively, how to determine the impact of a crisis, and how to respond appropriately. 

Make an Actionable Game Plan

No matter the industry, company size, or business model, every organization must have protocol set in stone in case of a crisis. Christou found herself amidst a crisis soon after she had started working at Choice, and on a Saturday no less. Upon realizing that the company’s crisis plan was outdated, unactionable, and impractical, Christou set out to better prepare the organization moving forward.

Starting from scratch to develop an actionable crisis plan, Christou created an enterprise-wide crisis management response team (CMRT), which ensures that the right people are in the right places to provide fast and seamless responses. Furthermore, she recommends training the CMRT appropriately and implementing a call platform, so that when the time comes, there are people throughout the organization that know what to do and how to contact one another. Annual tabletop drills, which test and improve defined processes, are also conducted to ensure that the crisis plan works and does so efficiently. 

Leverage Internal and External Expertise

While it is essential for all businesses to have an actionable crisis plan, reputation management doesn’t mean an organization should act on every disgruntled customer’s complaint. How do you figure out when to respond, or equally importantly, when not to respond?

Hugley recommends leveraging partners both inside and outside your organization for a comprehensive understanding of a potential crisis and its impact. In order to develop a response strategy, it is necessary to have designated risk management personnel who are asking the right questions and are thinking through suitable frameworks to assess reputation impact.

Coupling internal assessments with external resources, from entities responsible for understanding the potential for risk and reputation events, will properly inform your company’s response strategies. By seeking out and working with different types of partners, your organization can make the most effective decisions around when and how to react.

Use Data Analytics for Message Optimization

Understanding the scope of a crisis event goes hand in hand with crafting an appropriate and effective message. In addition to knowing when to respond, it is just as important to know how to respond and who to prioritize in that response.

Data analytics plays a significant role throughout this process by measuring the reputation damage and guiding the messaging strategy. For example, Christou suggests that sometimes there is more emotion in a crisis issue than there really is reputation damage. In other words, people may be interacting with the brand in a very emotional manner, but it doesn’t translate to altered buying patterns. By utilizing data analytics to detect this, a proper response can be formulated to manage the situation.

In any case, internal teams must be very mindful of what their statements say or don’t say. A nuance in wording, Christou emphasizes, can really change the meaning of a message and potentially inflict further damage. Thus, a well-executed message must be crafted using a data-driven response strategy.

AVEs – or Advertising Value Equivalent – are on their way out. Thanks to the efforts of the “Say No To AVEs” campaign that AMEC has been running for the past 2 years, fewer PR pros are using AVEs to measure anything. But the question that sometimes still lingers is what are the alternatives to AVEs? What can we use instead to fill the role that AVEs held?

You’ve probably been using AVEs because “my CEO understands dollars more than data”. And while that statement is true, it doesn’t actually help your team establish its true value to the business. Attributing your work to many points of the business will make you a respected strategic partner.

Topical Share of Voice

Rather than asking for an arbitrary dollar amount, a better metric to seek out is where you stand in relation to your peers for your key messages. Identify which topics are reputation drivers for your business, and analyze the sentiment and volume against your peers over time. This allows you to quickly understand which programs are working and where you need to make adjustments. This type of information allows you to show executives that you are on top of what is happening in your market AND your organization is agile enough to take advantage of gaps or change direction and close them.

Conversions/Attribution

In order to do this at all, you must understand what your executive team values. Then you must be certain that the data you are gathering is both relevant and accurate. From there you will be able point to revenue, donations, memberships, website visits or sign ups that are directly attributable to your PR work. Understanding your business goals, and then correlating how your PR work impacts that is far more meaningful than simply looking at how much money your one article is worth.

Earned Media’s Social Media Impact

If part of your PR strategy is to establish thought leadership, you know that great content and earned media will get shared on social media. This is a very effective way to immediately tell both whether your brand has established thought leadership, and whether the article you wrote is worth reading. However, this can be more difficult than it initially sounds. Automated social media listening tools look for key phrases or specific URLs – if a social post doesn’t include either of these things it may be missed. With a comprehensive earned media measurement program in place you will already know the key data points about the articles (like key messages and the sentiment around those messages) before you incorporate social sharing information. Now you can start to benchmark whether negative financial news gets shared less or more than positive workplace environment news. Is there an impact when your spokespeople are quoted? Which ones?  

What all these alternatives to AVEs have in common is that they allow you to show a deep relation to broader business goals. It is increasingly important for communicators to illustrate that they understand and align to the goals that the rest of the company is working toward. As an added benefit, the Communications team gets further exposure to different groups within the business – extending their worth as a strategic partner. And finally, more comprehensive and actionable measurement also shows that your team is agile – ready and willing to pivot as business needs evolve.  

Many communicators struggle with shrinking budgets and funding new initiatives. We see it all the time, especially when it comes to measurement. While not as exciting as launching a new campaign, investing in PR measurement is essential to your communications strategy.

PR Measurement is Your Infrastructure

In a recent webcast called “Shaping Communications at First Data Using a World Class Measurement Strategy,” Vice President of Communications at First Data Corporation, Michael Schneider, described PR measurement as a communicator’s “infrastructure.” It is an essential, upfront investment that lays the foundation for the rest of your work. Schneider says, “if you’re spending every dollar on activation and then putting yourself in a position where somebody comes, knocks on your office door, and says, “How did that work out?” and you then have that deer-in-the-headlights type of look… you probably need to set up your infrastructure first.”

Once your measurement system is in place, you will know how campaigns and tactics perform, how your competitors are performing in those areas, where you can improve, and how to allocate resources. Measurement allows you to make data-driven decisions, rather than relying on your gut.

Earn More Budget and Become a More Strategic Business Partner

It might be daunting to direct your resources to a quality measurement strategy and leave less money for activation (perhaps with an already limited budget), but without a system in place to measure results, you’ll never be able to prove what is successful. And if you can’t prove what’s successful, you won’t be able to make a case for why your department deserves a bigger budget.

Schneider points out that business leaders across different functions would agree that spending money on activation without a system in place to measure results isn’t the right order. CEOs and executive leaders want to see success in terms of data and analysis. CEOs are asking the business to make data-driven decisions and their teams are stepping up to the challenge. Implementing a quality PR measurement system will only help make your boss and your peers see you and your department as a strategic partner to the business.

Watch the full on-demand recording of “Shaping Communications at First Data Using a World Class Measurement Strategy.”

Accurate and regularly updated data has become a driving force in the business world. Having in depth knowledge of exactly how everything is performing is no longer a differentiator for your business, it is now a must-have. One effective way of monitoring key data and helping you plan your next move is with a communications dashboard. Communications dashboards display the most important and up to date metrics that a modern business requires.

A good communications dashboard can help a company stay on top of ever-changing news cycles, plan a new PR campaign, monitor an impending crisis or help give a detailed overview of their industry.

Here are three examples of dashboards that have helped PR professionals address their needs, plan strategies and satisfy their curiosity.

Know yourself with an Overview Dashboard

In a world where countless metrics can be tracked, a good business needs to be able to identify what specifically will be the most applicable statistics to track for the goals they are looking to accomplish. The best PR teams need to know how their business is performing, what are its currents strengths and what areas require improvement, so your Overview Dashboard should quickly and easily display the few key data points that answer the question “how are we doing?”.

Whether it’s volume and tone of coverage, social sharing broken down by platform or an-in depth view of key topics, you can gain immediate insights into your principal concerns. By taking the time to tailor this dashboard to your specific needs, you may save valuable time that can be put towards planning how best to use this data to be more agile. 

Know your competition with a Competitive Dashboard

A good Competitive Dashboard can be key to gathering a clear and concise overview of just how you stack up to your main competition. Keeping a close eye on one’s peers can help ensure communicators identify areas for improvement as well as points of strength within their own company.

PR and communications teams may require a side by side comparison of themselves and their foremost competitor, or perhaps they need to expand their view and keep track of all their main competition at once. The ability, not only to monitor competitor metrics, but also to accurately compare and contrast their own performance with others, can help teams answer the question “how are we doing in relation to others?”.

Know your path forward with an Issues Matrix

Last week’s hot topic is often this week’s old news. Modern industries have dynamic news cycles and it pays to stay ahead of the curve on matters both big and small. An Issues Matrix Dashboard can help companies monitor key topics within their industry as well as current news trends.

With this dashboard, PR pros can easily determine what aspects of their industry have been trending negatively, which have been trending positively as well as which matters have been the most talked about.

For teams that need to keep abreast of topical industry news, or for those that are interested in how their industry is portrayed in the media, this dashboard can be an invaluable tool. This dynamic dashboard is perfect for an ever-changing industry and can help answer the question “how is our industry doing?”.

The best dashboards are those with the highest engagement levels and teams that take the time to build these dashboards to their specific requirements certainly reap the benefits that these hubs of information can provide. No two companies are the same and those that cater their dashboards to their individual needs stay informed and ahead of the curve.

With the rise of activist and ESG investing, corporate brand reputation is more important than ever to strategic investor relations teams. Your team needs to understand the media narrative around your company – and try to guide it. To do this, IR teams must now proactively monitor and engage the media landscape to manage brand reputation and investor perception.

You need access to accurate media analysis around brand reputation that will allow you to identify looming issues early, engage your shareholder base, guide the narrative on the Street, and optimize strategies.

Here are 5 ways media analysis can be a game changer for strategic investor relations teams:

• Proactively Manage Issues

Indications that activist investors are targeting a stock can now come from a variety of sources including unregulated activities. Red flags might come in the form of a question from a junior analyst at a fund, a private meeting request, or increasingly – social media rumors. It’s important that your team proactively manages these conversations and is aware of the impact of unregulated social activity and all online conversations to stay ahead of the narrative. In an era when leading the news cycle often commandeers the perception of truth, proactive issue management is vital.

• Engage Your Shareholder Base

The growth of passive shareholders has given companies a more stable shareholder base, but made them accountable for delivering results, hence the need for proactive marketing and messaging. The need is exasperated as Activists are savvy and using sophisticated PR strategies to sway your shareholder base.

To proactively engage your shareholders, a richer partnership is required between IR and PR.

Different investors have their own priorities and will react to news uniquely, weighing various aspects of your brand reputation more heavily. It’s important to understand how your messages resonate with key audiences.

Measuring the pull-through of your messages in the media, the tone towards them, and their social media pick up will show you which messages are resonating and where you need to focus your efforts to better influence the conversation.

• Glean Deep Reputational Insights that Guide Strategic Investor Relations Decisions

Media sentiment has been proven to be correlated with stock price. But you must move beyond keyword tracking to get actionable data and understand what people are saying about your stock.

Don’t rely on simply tracking your company name, executives, and focusing on financial sites.  Keyword tracking only will likely leave you blindsided. You need to understand the “reputational conversation.”

Reputational data will help you break down public perception and understand what is driving it. If analysts and the media raise a concern that your company is not innovating for the future, build a plan to change that perception. Benchmarking your reputational data can pinpoint areas for targeted, effective message improvement.

• Identify Influencers that Drive Investor Perceptions

It’s critical to understand your “influencers” – those that drive the perception of your stock as a place to invest. But not all influencers are created equal. Wall Street Analysts aren’t the only ones with authority anymore. You need to know who the right influencers are, whether it’s a government regulator, money manager, journalist, or simply an influential blogger, and engage those that matter most.

Media analysis breaks down influencers by topics they’ve written about or been quoted on in the past, their social media pick up, and audience reach to prioritize your outreach. When trying to highlight your ESG initiatives or correcting a misguided perception put out there by an Activist, reach out to your top influencers to create the most impact.

• Play on the Same Field as the Rest of the Company with Data-Driven Decisions

When making decisions, a simple opinion doesn’t cut it. Other departments are using data to defend their decisions – from finance and legal to HR and marketing. Your C-suite has come to expect this kind of data-driven decision making and you can bet activists investors and other critics will leverage data in their arguments. Hedge funds have powerful data capabilities, but IR often does not. Ask yourself: do you have the technology and data analytics to give you an advantage over the critics?

Ensure you have the right systems in place to generate quality data to back up your decisions. And if an issue arises, use data to move smartly, agilely, and proactively instead of trailing the issue.

Many of us have probably heard of SMART goals or goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound. Rather than having a vague notion of what you want to accomplish where success is somewhat subjective, setting SMART goals provides structure to your objectives and maps a clear path to success.

Using SMART goals in PR and communications could look something like, “we’re going to increase positive innovation messaging to the Street by 10% in the next 6 months” or “we’re going to launch an employer brand campaign and earn placements with great place to work messaging in our top 20 outlets that reach millennials in the next 6 months.”

What constitutes success here is clearly spelled out and your progress can be easily tracked. But if you want to set even better goals, make your goals SMART-ER. Global Managing Director of AMEC Johna Burke explained SMART-ER goals in a recent webcast, adding ethical and revolutionary to the facets of great goal setting.

Ethical Goals

Ethical refers to the data used to measure success. Your PR and communications measurement should be consistent, transparent, and valid, meaning where and how you get your data, the criteria for success, and other metrics can easily and confidently explained. The measured results should also be replicable. If you don’t understand exactly how you get your data, you can be sure your executives will ask the same questions you’re asking yourself. Make sure your communications analysis is transparent.  

Revolutionary Goals

Are the insights from your measurement program revolutionizing your communications strategies and tactics? Streamlining or changing processes inside and even outside your department? Setting revolutionary goals is all about understanding the impact of your results and using insights to optimize strategies. If you successfully increased positive innovation message penetration to the Street by 10% in the last quarter, what impact did that have on your brand and your organization’s business goals? Maybe you’ll see a correlation between the uplift in positive coverage and an increase in institutional investments. Glean insights from the data and results that not only prove your worth, but show you what to do next.

Learn more about SMARTER goals from AMEC Global Managing Director Johna Burke.

“My boss isn’t asking for data or measurement results so why provide it?”

In Mark Cuban’s words, “the greatest value you can offer a boss is to reduce their stress.” Your boss wants you to think ahead of them, not the other way around. This is the case I make when PR execs tell me they don’t need to measure because their boss doesn’t ask for data-driven results.

Let’s think about it this way – imagine you’re the boss. Someone shows up in your office with a suggestion or even a full-blown solution to a problem that has been nagging you – but one that you had not assigned to anyone. Your immediate reaction is probably something like, “Wow, you mean we can solve this thing without me having to go through the pain of figuring out every last detail?”

Talk about relieving stress. You had absolutely NO expectations of receiving this wonderful gift. More importantly, you now know this person thought through this issue and can do the same with other problems without being prodded. In fact, you will probably leave them alone because you trust they have their arms around problems before you need to intervene. Incredibly powerful.

In my experience, a sure-fire way to succeed where there are no expectations is by using data and analytics in the corporate communications function. It seems hard to believe, but there are businesses that still don’t use data to drive their communications strategy. It’s not for the lack of data and analytics tools; many tools exist, and many public relations practitioners use them.

Yet PR professionals have all sorts of reasons why they don’t measure. The most common reason I hear is, “the boss isn’t asking for data or measurement results so why provide it?” Using data to back up a sound communications strategy is no different than the marketing department measuring the impact of a campaign or using a net promoter score. You do these things because they make sense, they drive strategy, and they improve execution.

If a public relations practitioner provides quality analysis on the effectiveness of a campaign or the overall department’s contribution to shareholder value, then the CEO naturally will have greater confidence in their ability to manage their department. Moreover, the CEO likely will trust them and let them keep moving forward – and will look forward to the next report. Build it, and they will come.

But what if the report has bad news? The only thing worse than bad news is you not knowing about it and having no plan to deal with it. Any quality PR analytics solution will provide insights to help you gauge the scope of the issue and develop an appropriate response. Scope and context are important because it is not uncommon for some people to blow things out of proportion, particularly when it comes to media. Any PR strategy must have measures to show that the problem has, in fact, been fixed. If you don’t measure it, how do you know if you have actually fixed the problem?

What if the CEO is the problem? Some public relations people who report to their CEO believe you can’t get data out of the news. I have met them. I have also seen a PR executive, armed with solid data, face down a bunch of engineers – and win. Data can help convince your CEO of the true nature of the issue when they think a negative story is a catastrophe, or worse, dismisses a substantive problem as “fake news.”

Despite all this, I still come across PR execs who demur. To them I say: Who do you think is the best communications team in your industry? Find them, and ask how they drive their strategy and tactics.

If they don’t say “with data,” I’ll buy you lunch.

Communicators agree vague potential impressions metrics are quickly becoming irrelevant because they don’t provide business value. But how can PR pros demonstrate their contribution to business goals and become more strategic business partners is the question that naturally follows – especially when their executives are accustomed to seeing potential impressions grow ad infinitum.

One way to correlate PR activities to your organization’s goals is to conduct demographic and psychographic audience analysis of your earned media coverage to ensure you’re reaching your target potential audience, not millions of anonymous people. Leverage demographic and psychographic analysis in the following ways:

Demographic Audience Analysis

Demographic audience analysis segments your audience by data points such as age, gender, income, education, marital status, and political affiliation. Compare your readership on these demographics to see if you’re getting coverage in front of people that you are trying to get to take action.

For example, a non-profit organization benefitting children is trying to increase their millennial donor base. They can understand exactly how much of their earned media is currently reaching not just millennials but those above a certain income threshold with children.  Using this information they can determine if they need to adjust their outreach plan.

Psychographic Audience Analysis

Psychographic audience analysis segments your audience by data points such as social and consumer behaviors and future buying intent. This allows you to get extremely granular with your targeting, especially when combined with demographic audience analysis.

Say you work for a utility company and want to get coverage about your organization’s R&D in clean energy in front of a more liberal audience, whereas you want conservative readers to see your message against a certain energy industry regulation. Use psychographic audience analysis to target a specific segment down to the key message.

Benchmark your reach to this segment and improve penetration over time using insights from campaigns as you continually perform demographic and psychographic analysis. It might surprise you what demographics and behaviors drive increased relevant web traffic, report downloads, and other conversions.

Influencer Identification

Use demographic and psychographic audience analysis by outlet to proactively pitch outlets and authors who aren’t covering you or are only covering your competitors, but reach the audience you want to target.

Demonstrating your ability to reach relevant audiences is a business conversation your C-suite will want to have and appreciate your effort to contribute to business goals.  

The PR profession is moving away from impressions, reach, and AVE metrics because they cannot be used to answer how PR is affecting business outcomes. They are also single data points that don’t illustrate the value of your work. At a recent PR conference, one of the speakers asked, “Have you ever wondered why there isn’t a ‘PR Equivalency’ metric?” Excellent point.

Attributing how your Communications work is impacting the business, requires a comprehensive measurement program. Not a “magic bullet” metric that cannot be defended. Your PR measurement program should enable you to correlate your earned media analysis data with other data points from the business – website traffic, revenue, reputation, donations, membership, hiring efforts, etc.

PR Attribution technologies may provide media tracking options beyond link tracking – tracking visitors from earned media articles back to your website. There are three important questions to ask any vendor, especially if you are trying to attribute revenue:

1. Are my attributed articles relevant?

Repeated studies show that even in news stories with rich keyword matches, less than 25% are actually relevant to the brand.

• For example, a burglary at the jeweler next to the Starbucks does NOT mean that the visit to the Starbucks web site had anything to do with that news story
• For example, the redevelopment of a local office building that is next door to the local office of McKinsey & Company is not a relevant McKinsey news story.

2. Will the articles be toned for my brand, product, or message?

 If you do not take into consideration the tone on these additional data points, you may end up attributing sales or website hits to articles that are negative and clearly not driving sales.

3. Can I understand exactly how my results are calculated?

If anyone challenges your results or wants to dive deeper into your numbers, can you defend the “credit” you’re taking? Be wary of the “black box” calculations masquerading as PR Attribution.

Your PR Attribution efforts should yield reliable and defensible analysis that can hold up to scrutiny in the C-Suite and the Board Room.

PR News’ recent Measurement Conference provided an interesting glimpse into the state of PR measurement and analytics, bringing together a cross section of practitioners. Some attendees had fully integrated PR measurement strategies and others were just starting to look at PR measurement and analytics. Wherever they were in their journey, it was encouraging to see so many communicators in one room who recognize the importance of measurement and analysis to not only help them prove their value but also become more proactive and strategic business partners.

A few common challenges emerged regardless of experience level. Whether they were seasoned data analysts or measurement newbies, many continue to wrestle with these issues when it comes to creating an insightful PR measurement strategy:

1. How to Tie Your PR Measurement Strategy to the Business

Starting with the first session and throughout the day, speakers unanimously agreed that reach and potential impressions metrics are quickly becoming irrelevant. As AMEC Global Managing Director Johna Burke pointed out in her session about the Barcelona Principles 2.0, if you have 6 billion impressions but can’t walk out on the street and have one person tell you about your brand, it’s probably a fake metric. To implement a PR measurement strategy that provides insight, you must root your metrics in the goals of the business.

I think all communicators can agree with this premise, but attendees’ first question was: how do I actually do that?

The simplest and best answer is to have a conversation with your senior leadership about the company’s priorities and how you can contribute. Once you know the challenges they’re trying to solve, you can bring forward insights that matter.

2. How to Attribute Business Impact

The ways in which you can attribute your business impact are not always obvious. Even after you’ve had the conversation with senior leadership, it might take some creative thinking to determine how you can contribute to that goal. If your CEO says, “our only goal this year is to grow by 30% percent,” you might feel pressure to tie to a dollar amount. But unless you’re an online retailer or similar direct to consumer business, this is very difficult and PR pros should be wary of metrics like AVE’s that claim to do so.

Think creatively about this goal: will you be recruiting new sales and marketing employees? You’ll want to be known as a great place to work. Trying to attract a millennial and Gen Z audience? They want to do business with socially conscious organizations.

Using accurate and relevant data, correlate how your work impacts:

• Website Traffic
• Reputation
• Revenue
• Donations
• Membership
• Hiring efforts
• Sign ups
• Employee engagement
• Loyalty
• Advocacy

3. How to Find Agreement and Get Buy-In

Most questions throughout the conference revolved around how to get stakeholders on board with a new measurement strategy. If executives are accustomed to seeing growing impressions quarter over quarter, how can you convince them that new metrics are more valuable?

Panelists agreed you can’t completely rip the rug out from under them. Show them impressions, but then introduce a metric that actually provides an insight into a business challenge they’re trying to solve. This is a sure-fire way to get buy-in from senior leadership. Try introducing demographic and psychographic data that shows what percentage of your coverage and key messages reached your target audience – not just 6 billion anonymous people. Those are conversations that the rest of the business can understand.

Getting people on board with a new measurement strategy requires asking a lot of questions of your stakeholders, from executive leadership to teams outside your department like Marketing and HR. It’s worth the effort to ensure agreement across stakeholders and align your metrics to business goals from the outset of your PR measurement strategy.