Today’s communications leaders are increasingly feeling the pressure to prove their department’s value to executive leadership. Some assume this means attributing revenue, but the business impact of PR does not have to equate to a dollar amount.

One of the ways communicators can have the most impact is by becoming an integrator across the business. This theme was brought up repeatedly in a recent CommPRO webcast in which three expert communicators from PNC, Zoetis, and Strategic Profiles Management discussed their success stories from the field.

PR & communications is in a unique position within an organization to contribute to several company-wide goals. Comms works across departments, raising awareness of their colleagues’ work, enhancing brand reputation, and contributing to each goal they touch. It’s one of the only functions to know what’s going on in all other departments, making it a natural integrator.

Below are three ways top communicators integrated their organizations and increased the business impact of PR:

Enterprise Reporting

Former Chief Communications Officer at PNC, David Chamberlin, provided a simple, but important example of the communications department integrating the business. After David arrived at PNC, his team sent out a newsletter that reported on upcoming events, press releases, and issues for the company. The newsletter made people aware of the happenings around the company at an enterprise-level for the first time. It also showcased the ways in which corporate communications could support other departments’ initiatives. The positive feedback was immediate. People wanted to get communications involved in their own efforts. They now saw the department as a strategic player and someone who could help them do their jobs better. Once your colleagues see your team as essential to doing their job, the business impact of PR becomes immense.

But to have this kind of impact, you must build trust with other departments by aligning communications objectives to the objectives of the business.

Establish Common Goals

When creating a communications strategy for the 5 year anniversary of their IPO, Zoetis’ VP of Communications Bill Price created alignment right from the outset. He had discussions across departments and with his CEO to understand what everyone wanted to get from the company milestone. Bill and his team then leveraged the event to achieve the desired outcomes. This built trust in the comms function to help executive leadership and other departments achieve their goals.

Become a Trusted Advisor

Graeme Harris, CEO of Strategic Profiles Management, shared a similar story of building trust with his executive team. We always say that communications must be aligned with the business, but Graham flipped this on its head. He instead offered that the business align with comms. Graham convinced his executive committee to require execs to engage in a number of media activities per quarter, using data to prove the impact of spokesperson activities on the brand. The communications team became invaluable to the c-suite because their advice and expertise directly affected executives’ job performance. With continued success of the program, trust grew between the executives and comms team. This eventually lead to the communications department taking over the execs’ social media feeds with little editorial review.

In each of these success stories, accurate measurement and analysis enabled them to define strategy and demonstrate their accomplishments. Tying your media measurement to your business goals will enable the integrator role and increase the business impact of PR.

With the communications landscape changing, the required talent is also changing. Now, communications executives must hire people with skill sets, that three years ago, were not necessary. People who understand – How AI is impacting communications. Business in general, including how to read a balance sheet. How fake news is impacting businesses. Even the role of a CCO is modernizing. It’s no longer enough for the role to be foundational. Instead, they must be an integrator across the business to create cross functional collaboration. And they need to use data-driven insights to make their organization more agile.

This topic was discussed in a recent CommPRO webinar by top communications  executives. Here are five key skills for next generation communicators.

Storytelling with Data

Many communicators chose their profession to avoid having to deal with data and numbers. They tend to have very high EQs (Emotional Quotients) and great storytelling skills. And often feel that they are not as adept at the more data-driven business skills found in branches such as finance or legal. David Chamberlain, former VP of Corporate Communications at PNC, explains that these are actually essential skills for next generation communicators because they need to analyze and use media data insights to make better decisions. Media data allows you to answer questions like: are our CSR campaigns working to garner more positive SOV? Do we need to reallocate resources to messages that are not pulling through? Are our spokespeople staying on message?

Communicators can apply their storytelling skills to explain the insights that their analysis provides. Charts and graphs aren’t very interesting without the narrative to explain what someone is looking at and why they should care. Insights from your analysis should ultimately answer the question “what do we do next?”

Agility

Bill Price, VP of Communications at Zoetis notes that having a playbook mentality with only one way of thinking will not make you a successful business partner. Instead, he explains that, “you have to be adaptable to the strengths of leadership and their priorities and what works for them”. Instead of being a coach that makes players adapt to a system, be a coach that understands the talent and build success with that talent. Being able to recognize priorities and adapt to them is an important skill to create great business partnerships.

Chamberlain also adds that it is important to pivot and find alternate solutions. Being a critical observer will make you a well-rounded teammate and help lead situations to a preferred outcome.

Empathy

Having a level of empathy allows you to interpret signals and better understand others’ motivations. This is especially important when trying to understand signals the CEO is sending you, so that you can properly assess their concerns and come up with a solution. Graeme Harris, CEO of Strategic Profiles Management adds that “having that empathy and being able to decipher is a skill that you learn over time dealing with people. For some people its innate and easy, but others need to learn it”.

Persuasion

Unlike newer skills for next generation communicators, like focusing on data and analytics, the art of persuasion is still a core skill that they must possess.  Data will help your influence and support your strategy, but you need the soft skills to fully persuade audiences. Harris notes that “if you’re not able to impact and influence within your organization on behalf of your function, you are going to come up short as a communicator”.  There are strategic ways to impact and influence your organization, but it takes creativity and strategic thinking.

Networking and Diplomacy

Bill Price mentions that “you must be able to understand the allies you need to make before a meeting, who you need to pre-brief and how to manage egos to get people behind an idea when you are not the final decision maker.”

To accomplish this, get better at networking and have a good sense of your internal network. Who are the people that can get things done? Who is going to teach you gaps in your own knowledge of the business? Build your network to get this insight because it’s not included in your orientation kit when you first join a company. Price suggests that you build relationships over constant communication, meetings, phone calls, etc. Over time, this allows you to understand the team, the culture and how to get things done within your organization.

While it’s important to have a great internal network, next gen communicators should expand even further. It’s easy to become internally focused when working at a large company, but this blocks out such valuable information from the outside. Stay externally focused to research best practices and even look across industries. Don’t get bogged down in your day-to-day to do list.

• Attend webinars, read books and even follow social feeds of other companies or executives.
• If your company uses an outside firm, consult them and ask what their other clients are doing.
• Build your network and consider creating a group of people you trust, who are in similar roles, to occasionally talk and learn from one another.

For more executive insights on How to Be a Next Gen Communicator >>

The role of the Chief Communications Officer and the communications function is changing rapidly. Communications has been elevated to a proactive function that is increasingly providing value across the organization. This topic was discussed in a recent CommPRO webinar by top communications executives. Here are 5 ways the communications function is changing:

You Need to Be a Business Person

You may have turned to communications because you weren’t a math person, but gone are the days where communicators can shy away from understanding broader business numbers. The next generation of CCOs are using business data to earn themselves a seat at the decision-making table.

Bill Price, VP of Communications at Zoetis, explained that having that clear line of strategy across the business is essential to achieving goals. But to play the game, you must speak the language. David Chamberlain, former VP of Corporate Communications at PNC, adds that “we have to be business people who are communications experts, that are socially engaged.” He adds that “what I mean by business people, is that we’ve first got to be able to have a discussion about the business on the businesses’ terms, not just as a communications expert, for us to be able to move with them”.

CCOs Must Align Comms to the Business through Data-Driven Strategies

All-star communication teams are characterized by a close alignment of communication targets and business goals. However, current metrics commonly employed by PR teams fail to live up to modern standards.

David Chamberlain adds: “How we take in all that data and make sense of it and turn it into the insights that are actually actionable, to me, is something that most communications teams that I’ve seen struggle with …But as our social media and our traditional media evolve and new forms of media give us greater ability to measure and see analytics, I think that this type of interpretation and insight is probably going to be one of the critical skills that we all need to develop and strengthen going forward.”

Far too many departments are still struggling to understand data, let alone capture accurate metrics around tone, share of voice, or brand reputation. Next generation CCOs and their departments need to show their impact on business goals and the key is to tame the data wilderness by focusing on harnessing it for actionable insights.

Leads Must Modernize and Keep Up with the Times due to the Competitive Landscape

According to Arthur Page Society, the environment in which enterprises operate is fraught with emergent challenges from new competitors reinventing traditional business models to new modes of work, regulatory and socioeconomic factors. This has transformed how individuals communicate with one another and engage more actively with organizations.

Communicators are responsible for keeping pace with these times and advising their senior leaders on how to keep up. The communicator of the future harnesses media intelligence to understand their market and share findings with other parts of the organization like the C-Suite, IR, marketing and product development.

CEO of Strategic Profiles Management, Graeme Harris echoed this when he explained that during his past tenure as SVP of Communications at Manulife, it was his job to track key technological innovations. He added that this was essential information to help advise the senior executives on how their institution was keeping pace with the industry.

The Communications Function is Breaking Down Silos and Elevating itself

Communications leaders must communicate both internally – bringing together data and, externally – bringing voices from across the entire organization.

In many organizations such as PNC, communications is playing the role of breaking down organizational silos. For instance, David Chamberlain has taken the role of not just reporting on his team, but also sharing the results of the entire organization across the board. He adds that playing this new role as an integrator within his organization “has helped give Corporate Comms a halo, not only as an integrator, but as a strategic player and someone that people want to involve.”

Strategic Planning is a Much More Integrated Process

In addition to serving as a corporate integrator, communications itself has expanded tactically. Bill Price recounts “I can remember years ago when you developed communications plans and social media was an add-on at the end, or it was all about the press release…the way we approach everything now is much more integrated.”

Today, modern communications plans often encompass a mass array of tactical plans from media relations, to digital communications and even customer engagement. With all these different activities, teams need to find a way to pull in different sources of data from traditional and social media and measure them in a consistent matter that tracks your impact on the bottom line: specifically, quantifying brand reputation and impact on corporate goals.

For more executive insights on staying relevant as a communicator and the evolution of the communications function watch our CommPRO Webinar: How to Stay Relevant in 2020

Last week, I spoke at the annual NIRI conference addressing the changing nature of activist investing and how the IR function needs to evolve to keep up with these changes. As the rise of activists continues, so must strategies to monitor and engage across the media landscape and proactively manage brand (and investor) perceptions. A critical piece of being prepared for a brand crisis is building consistent and accurate data about your brand and reputation before a problem arises.

The Landscape Has Shifted – Social Media Has Made Leading the News Cycle Very Important – Albeit More Difficult

The Trump Era has ushered in a period where leading the news cycle with a narrative and message can commandeer the perception of truth. This “direct narrative of the truth” is often driven or amplified by direct communication on social media.

There can be many indications that an activist is targeting a stock – a regulatory filing, a phone call from the fund manager, or a newspaper headline. However, indications can also include questions from a junior analyst at a fund, a private meeting request or now increasingly a rumor on social media. Today, it is imperative that IR teams are aware of the impact of unregulated social activities in addition to all online conversions so that they can get in front of that “truth narrative”.

IR is no longer about surveillance and is now quickly shifting to proactive management. You need to not only understand how things are spreading on both traditional and social media, but more importantly, understand the entire media landscape and its key players to quickly react.

Activists Are Now Using Sophisticated PR Strategies to Engage the Shareholder Base – and So Should You.

The growth of passive shareholders has given companies more stable shareholder bases and made them accountable for delivering results, hence the need for proactive marketing and messaging. The need is further enhanced with the rise of Activist Investor movements and fast-moving market volatility. To carry out this proactive engagement, a richer partnership is required between IR and PR.

Here are some things you need to be thinking about now:

1. Different investors will react to various types of information and weigh various reputational aspects of a brand uniquely. It is important to determine how your brand drivers are resonating with key audiences. How are these key elements being captured in the media and in social conversations? Where is there a need for improvement?
2. Brands need to identify their weaknesses and their comparative advantages versus the competition at all times. Then you need to build the right messages to correct misguided perceptions with investors.
3. It is critical to understand your “influencers” – those that drive the perception of your stock as a place to invest. Not all influencers are created equally; it is not just about the Wall Street Analysts anymore. You need to know who the right influencers are, be it a government regulator, money manager, journalist, or simply an influential blogger, and engage those that matter.

Generic Tracking of the Media Conversation will no Longer Protect you – Go Deep to Get Smart.

Analyzing media is extremely important because media sentiment has been proven to be correlated with stock price. But, you need to go beyond simple keyword tracking to get accurate and actionable data – the “why”.

For media analysis to be successful, you can no longer rely on simply tracking your company name, executives and focusing on financial sites.  Old-school keyword-driven tracking and analytics will likely leave you blindsided. Instead, it’s time to understand the “reputational conversation”. Reputational data can help you break down your public perception and understand what is driving it. You can also know how to pitch content that will positively impact your image it by identifying authors and outlets that are pushing certain messages and receiving a lot of social traction. Benchmarking your reputational data can pinpoint areas for targeted, effective message improvement.

The World has Moved to Data-driven Decisions. Don’t Get Left Behind.

When making decisions, a simple opinion does not cut it. You need to work with numbers now – fight fire with fire – and get savvy fast. Interestingly, the best defense is a good offense. Hedge funds have huge data capabilities, but IR often does not. So you need to ask yourself: are your technologies and data analytics giving you an advantage versus your adversary?

You need to make sure you have the proper resources working reliably to generate quality data to back up your decisions.   And should a crisis hit, use that data to move smartly, quickly and in a proactive manner instead of chasing the issue.

Speed of AI is Increasing, but AI Still Struggles with Accuracy and Can Lead us Astray.

Use of artificial intelligence (AI) in IR is growing at a rapid pace. Enterprise IR solutions (Bloomberg CMi2i, Q4 Activism Alarm, Nasdaq IR, and others) apply machine learning to big financial data sets to predict vulnerable companies, investor trends and behavior, and overall investor sentiment towards specific industry sectors.

This information is useful as a baseline for a company to understand investors and identify when their company is being viewed as vulnerable. But repeated studies continue to prove that unsupervised machine learning is still missing the mark with media analysis.  Changing zeitgeist, linguistic nuances, sarcasm, and a variety of company perspectives and priorities greatly limit the effectiveness and accuracy of machine-only solutions.

In addition, automated story-writing on company earnings has taken off.  In 2014, Associated Press started to publish automated earnings stories. In Q1 of 2014, 300 of these stories were published. Fast forward to Q1 of 2018 and 4,700 stories were published. Clearly, the speed of AI is increasing, but at what cost? Neil Hershberg, SVP at Business Wire states, “While they certainly provide greater visibility to small and mid-sized companies that were previously excluded from editorial coverage, the template format of these reports can often result in material information being left out of stories.”

So if you are responsible for investor relations, your world is changing fast.  Social media, data analytics, artificial intelligence, and a rapidly changing investor landscape seem to have conspired to make your job more difficult.  So how are you going to regain control?

The Department of Treasury had an organization-wide goal to move towards online communications. To better engage their users and improve their operational excellence, they began surveying the constituents that came to their site.

The survey was a mix of “closed” (yes/no) questions and open-ended responses. While open-ended or freeform text answers are invaluable, they are often more challenging to analyze for trends. Now, couple this with the fact that most people who completed the questionnaires routinely didn’t answer the questions that were being asked– they answer different questions entirely – the information became very difficult to categorize for insight.

Discover how PublicRelay’s analysis allowed the Department of Treasury’s Online Services to improve usage and enhance satisfaction across the site, as well as ensure the on-going success of their push towards more modern, online communications.

Read the full case study here >>

The world of data and measurement in PR is consistently a mixed bag. In a perfect world, organizations would have a useful bounty of accurate data and insights. Unfortunately, many times this aspirational goal is unrealistic. The major downside to data-driven analytics right now is that people simply don’t trust the data.

According to recent (2017) studies by MIT, Cal Berkeley, and Northwestern University, technology alone, including artificial intelligence (AI), is not even close to delivering the needed insights. It’s going to take some hefty shifts to gain the right information along with the industry’s trust. According to a recent survey by PRNews, over 60% of communications professionals are asked by their CEO and executive boards for data-driven analysis and metrics. Gone are the days of measurement simply to prove one’s worth – measurement is now necessary as organizations look to tie efficacy of campaigns and broader business goals.

While it’s great that executives and board members are seeing the value that strategic data and intelligence can bring to their business, more than 75% of communicators found the data to be unreliable. This number is staggering considering that both communicators and executives all desire media analysis to drive both reactive and proactive strategies.

So what do you do when the data just isn’t up to par? When practitioners are wasting time cleaning up data to figure out what insights can be derived? Here are some things that communicators can do now to take steps toward this ultimate data utopia.

Be Your Own Advocate

55% of communicators use media analysis to drive both reactive and proactive strategies…BUT only if they can trust it. It’s essential to prove to board members and business leaders that smart communications data is in fact available and deserves a seat at the table. Mapping results to business goals is the best way to advocate for a strong measurement function.

Historically, the data executives saw wasn’t smart, helpful or insightful. In fact it was rather surface level including things like mentions, reach and impressions. Today we have copious amounts of relevant, helpful and strategic data at our fingertips that should be used to inform business strategy. Communicators don’t need to use data to prove worth and ensure job security anymore; they can instead turn it into something useful and become a strategic partner to the business.

Implement Efficiency

Nearly 40% of communicators find it difficult to understand the media data they receive and are spending way too much time hunting for insights instead of developing strategic campaigns. In fact, 69% of communicators said they’d rather spend time building strategic messaging plans and 65% said they’d prefer to put more effort into pitching or focusing on influencer outreach rather than media analysis. Basic metrics aren’t helpful, and automated tools aren’t enough to add enough valuable context to business leaders. Operating efficiently is paramount.

It’s essential to know that you don’t need to go overboard on measurement, especially when you clearly understand your business goals. In both cases of B2C and B2B – it’s the context and not the counts that are going to move the needle.

Similarly, we often see sarcasm used on social media and even in traditional media which can be easily misinterpreted when looking at tone. This can be as challenging to detect as contextualizing a positive statement about you in an otherwise negatively-toned article. Analysts expertly trained at picking up these nuances are extremely efficient and accurate, giving you back time for more strategic endeavors.

Gain More Insight

Over 60% of communicators would like media intelligence to be more “insightful.” Now that is an aspirational concept that could mean different things for every business, but in reality it goes deeper than surface level measurement.

Say goodbye to content overload. In today’s media landscape, business leaders would much rather have fewer pieces of very insightful data, than a mass amount of media coverage without much context.

Now to obtain this data can provide insight into share of voice and how companies are doing against the competitors, digging into sentiment for brand and reputation drivers, and also looking at how your organization is perceived on social media. Communicators need to illustrate how corporate social responsibility efforts are progressing along with sentiment at conferences and trade shows. At the end of the day, this is the type of aspirational data that is going to put businesses ahead of the competition.

As it stands, there needs to be a fundamental shift in the way communicators generate trustworthy media intelligence. With CEOs and boards demanding data driven analytics to help make decisions, communicators need to take the next step with their analytics solutions. The industry needs to rise to the measurement challenge so the information they are delivering is insightful, reliable and exceeding expectations.

As technology brings stakeholders closer to their beloved brands, the immediate and direct communication platforms intended to nurture the brand-stakeholder relationship are leaving little room for miscalculated brand communication strategies. Add to that the propagation of social media newsfeeds that are extending the lifecycle of news, which can spotlight and prolong any misalignments.

Just in the past year, we’ve seen an iconic beverage brand miss its mark with a controversial commercial, a groundbreaking international restaurant chain still reeling from a food-safety crisis, and a consumer credit reporting company suffering reputational damage from a security breach. To respond effectively to such instances and navigate tactfully through news cycles, it’s essential that communications strategies are insight-driven and that business executives are maintaining a focus on stakeholder sentiment. This way of thinking is essential to the success of media communicators tasked with cultivating a brand’s voice and building a positive brand perception.

Below are four goals from best in class brand communicators. Aim for these goals in order to effectively act and react to evolving stakeholder sentiment and news cycles:

Influence, Align and Incorporate Business Objectives into Brand Communications

Good brand communicators don’t just create positive publicity. They create meaningful media coverage, real relationships and stakeholder sentiment that aligns with and supports broader business objectives. By tying communications strategies back to corporate goals (such as growing thought leadership in a key area, improving corporate social responsibility or improving customer/investor perceptions), proactive professionals can improve brand value and deliver relevant and impactful results. In today’s environment, this requires business objectives and media communications strategies to work in synergy, influencing one another. Business leaders must recognize these strategies as a means to empower the company brand and meet corporate goals.

Get to Know ALL of Your Audiences

With a business mindset in hand, a successful communicator can turn their attention to stakeholder engagement. The first step is for the media communications team to utilize all available market and customer intelligence to gather as much intel as possible about their most important audiences. Recognizing “who” is the recipient of the intended message is crucial to crafting a strategic campaign.

In the past, media communicators relied merely on demographic data. Today, we must be more granular –  not only to identify stakeholder drivers, but also to unveil and pinpoint niche audience groups that weren’t traceable before. Simply relying on generic characteristics isn’t enough to determine factors that influence stakeholder behavior and interests, which are essential for any strategy to be truly targeted. Armed with this intelligence, PR strategists can now “deconstruct” the audience profile – what’s important to them, what their brand demands are, what the customer concerns are – thus creating a more intimate experience with consumers. By mining the data in such a way, intelligence morphs into targeted action that can drive results or mitigate damage should a crisis break.

Hack the Media Landscape by Tracking Sentiment and Adjusting

Once you visualize the end goal and understand all of the characteristics that make up your most important stakeholders, you need to assess “the battlefield.” The 24×7 news cycle is constantly reacting, responding and keeping up with viewers’ and readers’ attention span. Therefore, to penetrate the morphing cycle, it’s essential to assess the opportunities and most effective strategies and activities to align with media narratives.

This is where media sentiment is essential to detect the lifecycle of news. Deciphering the tone and sentiment of coverage provides context to news cycles, as it provides a more granular understanding of authors and outlets – what issues are spiking their interest or what type of stories are prompting them to veer from their traditional reporting style. For example, detecting sarcasm in a reporter’s story is an indicator of the level of interest and engagement attaching them to the issue and the potential of follow-up or additional stories that your brand can pursue. By contextualizing content and media interest, we can envision how a brand’s intended message fits in, adjusting its delivery accordingly.

Rethink How You Measurement Efficacy of Your Media Communications Strategy

How does a good brand communicator determine if their media strategy hit the mark? Or if they reacted adequately to or recovered from a publicity issue? Once media campaigns are complete, it’s time to provide the boardroom with a clear and concise view of the effect on corporate strategy.If campaigns are data-driven, data-based evaluation is built in from the beginning, making it easier and more accurate.

For many years, communicators would measure their outcomes in a simple numeric form – a number of hits, a percentage of the industry narrative, etc. But as PR strategies work in lockstep with the boardroom, it’s not enough to simply deliver a metrics report that’s overwhelmed with disparate numbers. Instead, it must present measurable outcomes, weaving data points into context and correlating the data with the stated business goals. In other words, “yesterday” one would present a coverage report; today they must explain the value of the results, translate the report into a context of corporate goals and measure a campaign’s impact on the brand-stakeholder relationship. By adding context to these metrics, they become relevant to business leaders and support the board’s decision-making process.

However, measurement is more than “a look backward” after the completion of a campaign to evaluate the outcomes; it’s an “active” tool during a campaign that helps determine if a course correction is needed, identifying what’s working and what isn’t, in order to readjust your strategy in real time. The longer you measure against business goals like brand and reputation drivers, the better able you become to predict outcomes.

If “moving the needle” is the expectation a good brand communicator starts off with, then measuring the “grounds gained” is the qualifier of a media campaign’s success, once it crosses the finish line.

Get Real Media Intelligence About Your Brand Communications

Ready to take your media intelligence to the next level? PublicRelay uses a combination of cutting edge technology and expert human analysis to deliver media intelligence you can count on. Top brand communications rely on us to track the progress of their media strategies.

Contact PublicRelay today to get started!

Unfortunately, most of our clients have lived through the following scenario. The Head of Communications is delivering a presentation to the CEO (or the Board), showing graphs with various data points like spikes in positive coverage and then someone in the room challenges them. “What was that uptick from again?” “Really? Can you dig in deeper on that?” “That just seems off, based on what I’ve seen in the media.” And they go back to their team to get more detail.

Then it happens – they uncover that not only was that spike based on irrelevant media hits, but they’ve been inaccurately analyzing the content in their data set. Now what?

• Go ream out the staff you put in charge of not only finding, but correctly using, a media intelligence tool
• Own this problem and make sure it never happens again

We all know that (b) is the “right” choice, but how are you supposed to accomplish that, with so much on your plate? There is no way you are going to sit through vendor meetings if they are just demos of “tools” that you aren’t going to use yourself. But YOU own the outcome and YOU are going to have to go into future executive meetings and tell your stories with confidence.  That means this process must entail more than just hiring a “tool” provider to solve the issues; it must get you the answers that make a difference in executive-level conversations.

Many of our clients have been in this situation and never want to go through it again. And when we dive into how the problem materialized, we uncover the same underlying issue – no one on the PR team was hired to be a data scientist –  they were hired to be communications pros, helping to execute strategy in their area of expertise.

While this may seem overly dramatic, it’s an unfortunate truth. The tools most communications teams use simply collect and generally categorize content and tone from keywords found in the text. If anything is irrelevant or incorrect at this point in the process, the analysis is useless and can send your team in a completely wrong direction.

So, your teams spend valuable hours constantly training the system. Trying over and over again to get the perfect mix of keywords and Boolean strings. And what is perfection? Never missing a single article or post AND not cleaning out their relevant mentions? Is this really what you are paying your team to do? (And by the way, if your agency is managing this on your behalf the same frustration is happening on their end and you’re paying the bill.)

How important is demonstrating to your Board and CEO that you’re making strategic decisions? Is it as crucial (or even more crucial) than choosing an agency of record? Would you leave your agency decisions entirely up to your staff? If not, then why would you entrust them to run your analytics strategy and hire business partners on their own without your guidance?

Now is the time to take the reins on your measurement and analysis. Focus less on finding “tools” to track your programs and more on ways to deliver the answers your business leaders expect. This way, you can confidently make data-driven decisions that tie to the company goals. Never again will you worry about the perceptions of the C-Suite –YOU can come equipped with key insights when they start asking hard questions – and the hard questions will come.  Fortunately, hard questions are easy to answer when you have the right approach and reliable data to back it up.

9 Questions You Need to Ask Your Media Intelligence Solution Provider >>

By now most everyone has seen the LifeLock commercials poking fun at monitoring your credit versus doing something about the fraud that’s found. That shift in terminology and mindset is happening across all industries, moving from “reporting on” things to giving you “actionable intelligence”.

The Public Relations and Communications space is no different, moving from using solutions for media monitoring to media analysis and media intelligence. Now that we’re calling it intelligence, can I do anything different with the output I’ll get or is it more of the same?

Media solutions are technically easy to replace so if you are not happy with the one you have, you simply choose another vendor and hope the experience is better. But what if the issue isn’t that your solution doesn’t have great charts or an intuitive interface, but that the output must be cleaned up just to get the story that you are comfortable taking to your CEO or Board? Can you draw market conclusions or make decisions on what you are receiving directly from your vendor?

While this list is not exhaustive, I think these nine questions will help you uncover the quality and accuracy of the intelligence you can expect to receive from the solutions you are evaluating.

9 Questions to As Your Media Analysis Partner

1. Do you extract sentiment from a social posting? Can you handle sarcasm? How?  Can you distinguish between acronyms with multiple meanings (SMH = “Shaking my Head” and “So Much Hate” or more obscure abbreviations)?
2. Can you exclude trivial mentions of products (like “Let’s carpool and meet in the lot next to the Exxon station”)? How?
3. How do you extract out concepts like Social Responsibility and Technical Innovation if the words are not used in any manner in the post? If you cannot, how would we work around it?
4. Historically, what percent of search result postings that you provide are relevant to the brand and product team? (versus those that are peripheral postings that triggered a keyword but were not really relevant and/or actionable for our efforts?)  How do you know?
5. How do you determine who is influential? Is it keyword hits plus attributes like reach, likes, and retweets?  Can you take into account whether the tone and substance of their postings align specifically with our brand’s values and philosophy?
6. Can you show the actual results for our business live in your system right now?
7. Can you tell me the authors and outlets that are covering three of my seven competitors and five of the topics (not keywords) I am interested in but have not yet written about my company?
8. After the account is set up in your system, who maintains evolving keywords, brands and hashtags?
9. With imagery analysis, how do you capture the overall feeling that an image is conveying (cool, exciting, pensive, tranquil, apprehensive)?

These are questions any communicator with a complex brand or intense competition should be asking.  The answers will help tell you how sophisticated and truly insightful your potential provider is.  And if nothing else, this list might provide you with some new ideas and inspiration for additional metrics that you are not looking at today – but should be.