Editor’s Note: Our Chief Insights Officer, Mark Weiner, wrote this column for PRNEWS November 2021 issue. The findings cited are based on PRNEWS’s survey of 150 communicators conducted in October 2021. Interestingly, his forecast for predictive analytics became a reality when PublicRelay launched its Predictive Suite in January 2022.
The results are in: The 2021 PR Measurement, Tech, and Talent Survey reveals where we are as a profession and where we’re headed, at least in terms of communications research and evaluation. In this column for Measurement Month, I’m focused on one question, specifically, “What’s the next big thing for communications research and evaluation?”
The Advantage of Predictive Analytics for PR
Everyone answered this question to share their predictions, but, in an ironic twist, only 12% consider predictive analytics as a “big thing.” How odd that everyone felt comfortable aligning on the future, but only 17-out-of-150 respondents believe that research-based predictive analytics will play an important role.
Perhaps that’s why few PR people work in meteorology.
Significant resources are being applied to predictive analytics by savvy research providers who recognize its power to reveal important aspects for planning and activation. Imagine predicting the virality of a news item or a post. How would you like to know where your competitors are headed so you can preempt their position or mitigate any advantage? Consider the advantage of knowing which stories will—and will not – gain traction. How many times have you had to calm a client or an executive over your tepid response to their desire for a vanity press release, or their response to a negative story or a competitor’s announcement?
Why PR Measurement Needs Both Technology and Talent
The pendulum of “what’s important now and in the future” continues to swing. Of course, “near term” and “long term” are important distinctions when contemplating the future, but let’s look at each response to this survey question.
For one, consider the gap between the 5.1% of respondents who believe that what’s most important is “An emphasis on automation, AI and DIY,” versus the 21.7% who chose “A balanced mix of technology and talent.” Could it be that everyone already owns a PR platform? And now that they own it, perhaps they realize that technology in isolation is not the answer (it never was, and it never will be). The question evolves from “which technology?” to “who manages the technology?” and “how do we think about the data?”
Surprise! Current technology is not a panacea: operators need training – the technology needs training, too. As someone who believes in our uniquely human contribution, I’m encouraged by this phenomenon, and you should be too: it underscores the paucity of talent in PR hiring situations – in the absence of viable candidates, talent trumps technology and you command greater remuneration.
I am encouraged by the lower scores attributed to “Automation, AI, and DIY.” While there’s much more that technology can do, we may have reached the stage where technology development for PR evolves towards iterative refinement. There aren’t many pure breakthroughs left to unleash upon the mass PR market beyond contact databases, media monitoring, and simple media analytics (although I believe that predictive holds great potential). When you consider how the activities most vulnerable to automation and AI are those which are rote and routine, we can see how PR is insulated. How many PR days are so mundane? Given our creative endeavors which require innovative thinking to address chaotic, unpredictable situations, you should have nothing to fear. And, based on the responses, you don’t.
That’s good news: we in public relations are safe from robot replacements and we may look forward to enhancements that make our work easier and faster so we can focus on what we’re singularly capable of achieving.
Communicators Still Want to Quantify PR’s Value
The least surprising responses are two sides of the same coin: “A fully integrated analysis across the marketing and communications mix” and “A solution for quantifying PR’s impact on business outcomes like sales and revenue generation.” A combined 46% of respondents envision this as PR’s next big thing. The two ideas are interrelated because to isolate PR’s impact on business outcomes, we also need to know our relative contribution across the marketing and communications mix. As such, the second is predicated on the first.
But it’s been PR’s next big thing for 30 years.
The difference is that marketing and communications analytics have evolved dramatically. And here’s where technology shows great potential to boost integrated marketing communications. With cascades of data, business in general and PR specifically can ascend beyond what anyone would have imagined in the past. And these technologies continue to evolve. Now, we have access to lower-cost multi-touch attribution and marketing mix modeling. Multi-touch attribution collects specific user-level data to quickly isolate specific events and assess their impact on conversion (“the customer journey”). Marketing Mix Modeling was first used in the late 1990s. Applying advanced regression analysis, these statistical models quantify the success of marketing and communications activities over time. Unlike attribution modeling, it is much slower, favoring annual or semi-annual analysis and heavily dependent on historical data but it reveals a much bigger picture.
Each in their own way contributes to understanding PR’s impact on business outcomes and explains the ways by which PR interrelates with other marketing agents. When combined, attribution and modeling create an even more formidable platform to accurately quantify PR’s contribution and to inform near and long-term planning and evaluation.
Why ESG is the Next Big Thing in PR
Now for my prediction: Often the contrarian, I believe that ESG will be the next big thing because it answers so much of what communicators envision for the future. Investment advisory services like Morningstar quantify ESG as a predicate for investment, and they estimate that one-third of all investors factor ESG into their buy and sell decisions. ESG is a function of two elements: a company’s behavior and the reputation it creates for doing good. To a high degree, PR owns reputation. Until now, investors considered reputation to be a “soft asset” that couldn’t be quantified. With the advent of ESG investing, that’s changed. What’s more, compared to attribution and marketing mix models which reveal PR’s ability to generate a few million dollars in revenue, reputation affects billions of dollars in market capitalization. ESG introduces PR to the big money.
PR’s Continuous Evolution
Only time will tell. As is so often true in the evolution of public relations, business, and humankind: the predicate isn’t so much about technology or methodology; it’s about people’s willingness to change. One thing about which we can be certain: our profession continues to evolve and elevate, and these changes will profoundly affect public relations as we know it.
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Mark Weiner is a Trustee of the Institute for Public Relations and the author of “PR Technology, Data and Insights: Igniting a Positive Return on Your Communications Investment.”
Originally published in PRNEWS November 2021 issue.
Many communications and PR professionals take advantage of media monitoring and analysis to gain insight into their strategies and boost the effectiveness of PR campaigns. With all the data generated by media monitoring at your disposal, using data visualizations to illustrate insights can maximize the return on your efforts.
What is Data Visualization?
Data visualization is the communication of data and information using charts, graphs, diagrams, and other infographics. Visuals make data and text easier to digest by taking different learning styles and approaches into consideration and helping to convey content as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Exasol head of business intelligence Eva Murray shared her experience with how visuals have helped to avoid confusion on her team by quickly creating a shared understanding. Many times in her career, she’d found herself in a situation whereby her team talked around the same subject but failed to establish shared definitions, processes, and priorities. Murray said, “I learned early on that simply drawing a diagram on a whiteboard can prevent these long-lasting discussions and achieve a consensus quickly.”
By establishing a shared understanding, graphics allow everyone to participate in the discussion where misinterpretations of data have been known to derail key conversations about media strategy.
Why is Data Visualization Important?
Data visualization is important because it simplifies the task of communicating many small data points as well as large, abstract concepts.
The Harvard Business Review explains that the old mindset of data visualization, or ‘DataViz,’ as a “nice-to-have skill” is outdated. Now, “visual communication is a must-have skill for all managers, because more and more often, it’s the only way to make sense of the work they do.”
As public relations and communications become increasingly data-reliant fields, the importance of being able to visualize information is immense.
Data visualizations allow your team to look at a data set of thousands of media mentions and quickly identify trends, outliers, and patterns. According to Tableau, “data visualization tools and technologies are essential to analyze massive amounts of information and make data-driven decisions.”
Tableau further stresses the value of colorful, visually attractive graphics and their role in helping communicators to internalize data narratives: “If you’ve ever stared at a massive spreadsheet of data and couldn’t see a trend, you know how much more effective a visualization can be.”
When using visualizations, you can use the principles of design to convey information more clearly and effectively.
How Does Visualizing Data Improve Decision-Making?
Data visualization can improve decision-making by making sense of large data sets in a format that humans can better comprehend. The Harvard Business Review explains, “decision-making increasingly relies on data, which comes at us with such overwhelming velocity, and in such volume, that we can’t comprehend it without some layer of abstraction, such as a visual one.”
Turning large data sets into different forms of digestible material also helps to isolate and highlight important information for communicators. Graphics can make trends and outliers stand out, so it is easier to identify patterns, top influencers, champion outlets, key regions, etc. than if you were looking at a spreadsheet. This is the information that creates actionable insights and provides clear direction to your media strategy.
But the value does not end there.
Data Visualization and Reporting
Once you have identified valuable media opportunities, you can leverage graphics to present your work to company executives. When demonstrating the value of your team’s work (and justifying your department’s budget), conveying information clearly is essential.
Similar to how visuals can help you understand key data, they can also help you to explain the narrative. Forbes reminds us that a picture is worth a thousand words and data visualizations are no exception.
For example, check out this chart of news coverage by volume, sharing, and tone and imagine trying to succinctly explain this information to a room full of executives without the supporting visuals. Most communicators would find this task to be quite challenging.
Given the level of detail included, this chart is the best format for the job. It shows both the nitty-gritty details and the big picture, enabling viewers to draw the same conclusions and engage in further discussion about the data.
Forbes advises starting all discussions with shared understanding to remove barriers to participation. A data visualization that gets everybody onto the same page, “provides an opportunity to find agreement, discuss changes, and create solutions and improvements.” This offers a significant advantage when making decisions as a team or reporting to executives and demonstrating your value.
How to Use Data Visualization in Your Media Analytics Strategy
At PublicRelay, we utilize dozens of different visuals to convey media data effectively. Using Tableau, we create custom charts, maps, and graphs that highlight trends and outliers, making the information easier to consume.
Volume and Tone of Coverage
Coverage volume and tone form the backbone of any good media monitoring program. As a result, these metrics appear repeatedly in media analysis. Rather than opting for a basic bar graph to communicate this data, these metrics can be reimagined as the size and color of a bubble on a plot chart and can include additional information like sharing data. There are a multitude of engaging ways to manipulate and visualize volume and tone.
Outlet and Author Coverage
After volume and tone, outlet and author information can be some of the most helpful metrics for providing actionable insights. This data can help your team pivot your strategy to ensure that you’re pitching your key messages to the right people. In this instance, bar or line graphs can extend off the page or include dozens of overlapping trend lines that make it impossible to glean any insight from the data. To illustrate this information, we often create charts in which the outlet or author is a bubble or point on a scatter plot. Bubbles can also display more detailed information in the form of their color, size, gradient, and placement.
Social sharing
Social sharing can be demonstrated using bar charts, bubbles, lines – you name it! Often, we like to compare sharing data to article volume because this can tell you which topics generate natural interest among your target audience. It is also helpful to pair sharing data with outlet and author metrics, so you can identify the influencers that generate the most social engagement.
Geographic Coverage
Geographic data allows us to share information about where news coverage is coming from, typically based on the locations of the outlets that originally published each article. Using infographics, we can show an article’s origin by country, region, state, or city, both on accurate cartographical maps and other, more abstract representations like bubble maps.
Increase Comprehension of Your Media Coverage
Data visualization can help you to make the most of your media monitoring and analytics programs. The value it provides to communicators lies in the shared understanding of complex concepts it enables, and the increased ability to identify trends and meaning from your data.
To learn more about how we use data visualization to turn media monitoring into media intelligence, click here.
The global pandemic of 2020 overtook and overwhelmed many companies’ best communications efforts. With communications teams assuming greater responsibility for effective messaging amid an influx of fake news across the media, their companies have faced tremendous pressures both in battling the pandemic and ensuring their brand stays intact.
Long-term Changes
The impact of 2020’s pandemic has become part of a seismic shift in the way companies collaborate and communicate. As we roll into a new year, many companies will find that these changes will carry forward into 2021, even as the pandemic itself fades.
Here are a few ways in which the events of 2020 will affect the communications function in 2021:
- What we saw in 2020: A massive lift in the value of the Communications function.
Almost every company had to up their game in communications skills and the intensity of their outreach. 2020 saw pressures not just on external messaging, but also on internal communications. Out of nowhere, companies were forced to massively increase their conversations with employees about critical topics like workplace safety, remote work standards, and even the viability of the business itself.
What to expect in 2021: Expect this trend to continue in 2021 as companies position themselves to transition out of the pandemic.
Themes of corporate and social responsibility, including the concepts of social as well as economic justice, are likely to return to the forefront after having been sidelined by a worsening pandemic. Watch for an increase in conversations about broader shareholder responsibilities far beyond stock price.
- What we saw in 2020: A move towards putting employees first.
Finally. Many companies realized that employees were really what mattered when the chips were down. When you have to reinvent your business model in real time, you need an engaged workforce that feels like a partner in the business. In many cases, the companies that survived 2020 were those that had the most engaged and dedicated employees.
What to expect in 2021: This trend will continue as employers negotiate the terms of the post-pandemic employment relationship with employees.
Expect more employee input on work conditions, benefits, and even employers’ positions on social issues.
- What we saw in 2020: A shift to remote work.
Historically a perk for a subset of employees that was only implemented by a small number of organizations, remote work became commonplace in 2020, with many companies forced to make their entire staff remote. After some initial glitches, it was largely a successful transformation of the workplace across industries. Technologies improved, home offices were upgraded, and every function innovated to make it all work.
What to expect in 2021: Where possible, remote work or partial in-office work weeks (like 3-2-2), will become a long-term fixture for many jobs.
Expect a major impact on the size of office spaces leased by companies, and a corresponding hit to commercial real estate that will continue for many years. Secondary effects, like lower public transportation usage (a problem), and lower traffic congestion (a blessing), will have negative secondary impacts on businesses like coffee shops, gas stations, and even commercial construction.
- What we saw in 2020: True adoption of video conferencing.
Using video calls for business used to be rare, but now even basic calls have shifted over to video. Social protocols for video calls were quickly developed, and every function in the organization figured out how best to make it work. As a result, in 2020 many businesses improved their ability to build better relationships with customers and vendors across the spectrum. In addition, businesses that used to sell 100% in-person found out that video sales worked, saving them substantial time (and money), all while making sales professionals particularly efficient.
What to expect in 2021: The big unknown in the future is its impact on business travel – how much travel is truly required to build and maintain effective relationships with customers?
Will the sales function migrate back to in-person calls, or will the massive efficiencies of virtual meetings remain so compelling that the days of in-person calls are numbered? Expect the answer to be a blend: some activities will remain virtual, while high-end sales will return to travel because in-person sales work best.
- What we saw in 2020: The entrenchment of fake news as an art.
The election year (and its aftermath) showed the power of aggressively using traditional and social media to spin and control a message, even if that message was patently false. Many communications professionals (and politicians) were forced to reckon with baseless claims against their companies and brands, while countering them became more difficult as news sources and social media polarized and fragmented in 2020.
What to expect in 2021: This problem is not going away.
Fragmented sources of information will continue to allow fringe conspiracy theories and fabricated news to reach receptive ears. Business and government leadership will need to improve their communications efforts – both the accuracy and the frequency of communications – and they will need to employ trusted voices to rise above the clutter. There is no end in sight for this battle since any regulation of “facts” goes directly against the constitutionally protected concept of free speech.
The Future Has Been Thrust Upon Us
The changes driven by the global pandemic are not going away any time soon. In fact, the fundamental shifts in communications, collaboration, and messaging that were forced upon companies in 2020 will remain with us in 2021, with some of them settling in our daily lives for the long term.
An Era of Change is Upon Us
Most people have heard the saying “the only constant in life is change.” Change comes at us from all directions, and it is relentlessly driven by the many events and factors that swirl around and impact us every day.
The communications profession certainly is not immune to the forces of change.
In fact, because of the coronavirus pandemic, many organizations are seeing unprecedented levels of change to their business models. Every department is being asked to adjust and innovate to weather the next 12-24 months until the world (we hope) passes through the pandemic. As a communicator, if you already have not been asked, it is likely you soon will be challenged to find a way to do business smarter, faster, and more efficiently. Unfortunately, efficiency is often sought out by trying to do the same work with fewer people who end up working longer hours.
But such a challenge also creates the perfect opportunity and motivation to rethink what you do and how you do it.
Times of transition are strenuous, but I love them. They are an opportunity to purge, rethink priorities, and be intentional about new habits. We can make our new normal any way we want.
– Kristin Armstrong, Three-Time Olympic Gold Medalist
Taking what some call a “zero-base approach” to your work can be a lifesaver. Zero-base planning means rethinking from scratch how you do your job, where you invest your resources, and how you make your team more focused and effective together. And frequently zero-base changes deliver a cathartic moment that pays huge dividends.
Fortunately, in the past few years things have changed in the world of media monitoring and analytics that make this approach to planning particularly effective right now.
Things Have Changed
In recent years, many of the world’s most sophisticated brands and their communications teams have chosen to embrace a new approach to communications analytics. Instead of relying on the approach from the early 2000’s – throwing technology blindly at the problem – they have moved forward to a new, proven method that utilizes the best that technology has to offer while respecting the unique abilities that humans have to interpret complex human communications.
Companies like Merck, Berkshire Hathaway, Exelon Energy, and many others – all with reputations for using the world’s best talent and technologies – have embraced this new approach. They have found through robust testing that it consistently generates more reliable analytics and much richer insights that make them smarter, more effective, and more efficient.
In short, people paired with technology delivered the exact improvements they were seeking.
The Evolution
So how did we get here? The evolution of media monitoring and analytics has moved through three distinct phases over the past decades:
Phase 1: Big Books (1950-2000)
The world moved slower in these times, and so did communications. Monitoring was done manually, usually with thick clip books filled with physical copies of media coverage. It was not uncommon to wait weeks or months for metrics, and communications impact often was measured simply as the thickness of the clip book.
Often communications teams claimed success simply by talking about the stories that were written about the company and its executives. While that approach created great presentation theatrics, it rarely reflected the overall success of the communications effort accurately.
Some organizations also relied on (the now-discredited) Ad Value Equivalent, or AVE, a misguided attempt to equate news coverage with the value of ads that ran on those same pages or in the same broadcast segment.
But technology marched on, and scissors and tape no longer did the job.
Phase 2: Technology Cure-All (2000-2018)
This is the era that gave us the exponential growth of digital communications; during these years, email, text, and social media all came of age. Communications teams gained access to digital streams of any news content they desired, all delivered in an instant via the Internet.
Communicators jumped on the idea of instant analytics, and metrics became (sometimes obsessively) focused on counting mentions and impressions, regardless of the quality, context, or sentiment. Often with this model a headline story in the Wall Street Journal was counted the same as an irrelevant mention by a hobby blogger with 30 followers, and a keyword mention was considered equivalent to a complex message pickup by an influential writer.
On top of that, the endless pursuit of increasing impressions created a “hamster wheel” environment in communications teams, where the obsession to generate clips of any kind dominated what should have been a focus on strategic messaging and guiding public opinion. Compensation plans sometimes included counts of mentions as a key component for bonuses, leading communicators to push for stories of any kind regardless of messaging strategy and business impact.
Another approach favored by this automated model is so-called Attribution analytics. The problems with this automated attribution approach have been well-documented. In a nutshell, these attribution models use technology to connect dots in ways that do not hold up to the scrutiny of even a high school statistics class.
Over time there became an increasing awareness and acknowledgement of the severe limits of this all-tech approach. Technology was not delivering on its promise to reliably understand complex concepts and sentiment – both of which were (and are) absolutely critical to the communications function. Irrelevant articles were picked up, sentiment was frequently wrong, and complex concepts (like Innovation and Trust) were often completely missed, so the resultant data was bad.
“I don’t know what circle of hell bad data may be, perhaps it’s the third or fourth, but no matter what, who wants to live like that? No one.”
Steve Molis, Renowned Development Guru, Salesforce.com
In fact, multiple disciplines came to the same conclusion at the same time as corporate communicators, including software companies, self-driving trucks, delivery robots, medical diagnostics, and investment services. The conclusion was simple yet powerful: augmenting great technology with talented human resources was a killer application that consistently delivered the best balance of fast data and valuable, reliable insights.
Phase 3: Expert-Guided Tech (2018- )
We are now in the third generation of media monitoring and analytics – one that has moved to recognize the limitations of technology and that has embraced the value of human-technology collaboration. Industry after industry has embraced the marriage of fast technology paired with the unique creative, analytical, and introspective nature of human experts.
With this hybrid approach and the resultant quality data and deep insights, these professionals are able to make much better decisions, focus their resources, and achieve consistently better results. With this now proven superior capability and insight, Expert-Guided Tech has become the fastest-growing segment in the media monitoring and analytics sector.
As an aside, technologists still look to software to reduce human effort and cost whenever possible. Will technology ever replace humans in these roles and understand relevance, context, sarcasm, and underlying sentiment? These challenges may well be solved someday, but despite the claims of some bold marketers, the consensus among experts is that the General Artificial Intelligence to achieve this is at best decades away.
How far are we from general A.I.? I don’t think we even know enough to estimate. We would need dozens of big breakthroughs to get there, when the field of A.I. has seen only one true breakthrough in 60 years.
Kai-Fu Lee, Former President, Google China and Author of ‘AI Superpowers’
Going Forward
So what have we learned? Fundamentally, the model of the past 15 years – fully-automated, human-free measurement – did not deliver on its promise. And like in many other industries, the approach is being tossed aside by many of the smartest minds in corporate communications. These experts have also realized that chasing mentions, keywords, and impressions is not the best use of their time and talent: every year the team was tasked to lift these (largely meaningless) counts even higher; no matter how hard they ran, they were just going nowhere fast.
Now is the time to turn over a new leaf. Things have changed, and you need to make the choice to evaluate moving to Expert-Guided Tech and seeking higher-quality data and analytics.
Quality data is cited regularly by its proponents as being more focused, less stressful, and more efficient with limited resources. They also regularly brag about newfound strength in measuring their impact, being more competitive, and proving their worth in the organization. The approach gives Communications an equal seat at the table with more data-driven disciplines like Marketing, Sales, and Technology.
As an added bonus, this approach, when all resources are measured, is frequently less expensive than the Technology Cure-All approach. In short, reliable tech-human analytics has provided a more effective communications strategy, better measurement of impact, and a leaner, higher-performing team.
Do something today that your future self will thank you for.
Anonymous
How Does Expert-Guided Tech Change My World?
Many aspects of the communications function take on new characteristics of precision and focus when the power of technology is paired with the ability of humans to understand and interpret communications.
The efforts of your PR team can decide whether your company’s actions make a real impact by appearing in top media. Some companies underestimate the importance of public relations and assume the media will write about their company’s actions even without input from their communications team. While this does happen at times, what these leaders fail to understand is that their competitors are fighting for the same column inches and space on top websites.
In 2019, developments in the U.S. banking industry provided a clear example of how a more significant effort from a communications team can make a huge impact on the company’s coverage.
Background: Divestments from Private Prisons
Banks provided lines of credit to major operators of private prisons and detention facilities for decades, but that mostly came to an end in 2019. Following controversy surrounding the conditions at immigrant detention facilities, private prison companies drew further scrutiny and it became clear that they depended on funds from major banks for survival. This led to protests against the banks involved through late 2018 and much of 2019. Eventually, most major banks bowed to activist pressure and divested from the private prison industry. Since they’d been getting bad press around their policies for a long time, these banks drew largely positive reactions from the decision to divest. Presumably, the banks all wanted to promote their new practices to benefit from the positive media coverage.
Differing Approaches to Communication
While this movement impacted the entire industry, we focused our analysis on coverage of three of the largest banks: JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo. All three changed their policies in the first half of 2019 and they had varied methods of publicizing the decision:
Bank of America’s team set up an interview with Bloomberg for bank Vice Chair Anne Finucane, who discussed the decision as well as the bank’s decision-making process.
JPMorgan Chase had a communications leader send email a statement to the press highlighting the decision.
Wells Fargo included a small note in their annual Business Standards Report but didn’t highlight this change during the promotion of the report, in other press releases, or public statements.
Measuring the Impact of Policy Decisions
PublicRelay gathered and analyzed media coverage from top publications and Twitter to assess the impact of these decisions. We found that the differing approaches led to significantly different results, with the greatest effort yielding the best results:
Bank of America saw more than double the media coverage of JPMorgan Chase and more than three times their Twitter mentions in the month following the Bloomberg interview they set up.
JPMorgan Chase generated more than 20 articles about their decision in the month following their statement and received more than eight times the posts on social media that Wells Fargo did.
Wells Fargo received no media coverage about their decision in top publications in the month following the release of their report but did see some minor traction on social media with just over 100 tweets on the topic.
An interview was the most effective strategy and required a significant amount of effort and strong connections with contacts at Bloomberg. The next most effective strategy was sending out an email to the media. While emailing is less intensive than setting up an interview, it still requires knowing who to reach out to and careful message crafting. On the other hand, the least effective strategy, implemented by Wells Fargo, was one that cut the PR professionals out of the process. This strategy resulted in no media coverage and low social media traffic.
What does this Mean for Me?
In a time when communicators feel pressure to prove their impact, it’s important to keep in mind that the actions of a skilled communicator can make a significant impact on the visibility of important company activities. To show your leadership the impact that your communications is making, make sure to carefully track and analyze your media coverage. For a small company, this might be a simple process to handle internally, but if your company appears in multiple articles each day and you’re interested in bench-marking against competitors, you would be best served by working with a company that specializes in media analysis. If you’re interested in learning more about how PublicRelay can help your team show its value, you can get in touch here!
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.”
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.
“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.
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.