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.
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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 >>
This blog was written by Darren Sleeger, SVP of Enterprise Solutions at PublicRelay.
If you had a dollar for every time your Communications team has uttered the phrase “Thought Leadership”, you’d probably be able to buy your dream vacation home.
In nearly every industry, being recognized as an expert on the issues relating to your products and services is an aspirational goal. As such, some of our clients invest a lot in their PR Thought Leadership programs – they build in-depth reports around strategic topics, mobilize spokespeople to share their messaging, and otherwise invest substantial time and resources into becoming a company the industry looks to for new thinking.
However, despite the importance these programs can play in building a brand and creating media success, we’ve found that some companies have invested a lot in their Thought Leadership initiatives without a reliable way to track how they perform.
A strong Thought Leadership strategy is characterized by sustained media coverage, reader engagement, and influencer pick-up. Metrics addressing these aspects of your program can go a long way toward gauging how successful it is.
Can your team answer the 3 crucial Thought Leadership questions below?
Is our Thought Leadership generating sustained coverage by the media?
One of our clients in the Business Services industry chooses to track individual reports over time. This analysis gives their team the ability to compare reports to one another, providing insight into which topics seem to be working best. The ability to examine trends in specific reports and topics has helped the client to sharpen their publishing strategies.
Secondary Questions to Answer:
• Which report has the media reacted to most favorably this past year?
• When does our Thought Leadership coverage ultimately die out, on average?
• How frequently (and how sustainably) do top-tier outlets cover us compared to lower-stature outlets?
The following chart displays the daily potential impressions for coverage pertaining to three Thought Leadership reports, all released by our client around the same time.
How do readers engage with our Thought Leadership coverage on Social Media?
Understanding how readers react to your Thought Leadership releases is an important data point for Communications teams. Measuring how much your audience is engaging with your content (and on which social platforms) can help you improve your strategy for future releases.
Secondary Questions to Answer:
• Which social platforms show upward trends in engagement over time?
• Which social platforms historically do not trend well with our Thought Leadership content?
• Are there specific influencers in social media who help our content gain positive attention? Or negative attention?
Doing this analysis has revealed interesting data for many of our clients. Some have discovered that their content doesn’t become popular on Facebook until a few weeks after a Thought Leadership release, or that Twitter coverage is strong initially and then dies quickly. These pieces of information can help your team develop aspirational and well-informed plans to engage audiences when and where it will be most effective for your team.
Are the right authors picking up our Thought Leadership content at the right times?
It’s likely there’s a group of top influencers your company hopes to build a relationship within relation to Thought Leadership initiatives. By gathering metrics on frequency of pick up by key Thought Leadership influencers, your team can assess how often it’s getting content in front of the right audiences and look for opportunities to make pitching more effective.
Secondary Questions to Answer:
• What caused us to meet our pitching goals in certain months?
• Which pitching strategies provided results and which didn’t?
• How much penetration do we achieve with our key authors compared to our competitors?
Pulling this data for our Business Services client revealed some interesting insights. After identifying the top reporters they hoped to gain attention from, our metrics revealed that a majority of coverage pertaining to Thought Leadership wasn’t generated by that influential group. This data drove home the need to make a change in strategy and refocus on the set of influencers offering the best audience for the client’s ideas.
Investing time and resources into Thought Leadership can lead to huge wins for your team. But these rewards may prove elusive unless you are also tracking metrics that will help you optimize the performance of your content.
Measuring coverage sustainability, how readers react to your Thought Leadership, and the relative impact of different authors will give you the data you need to get the most from your Thought Leadership investment
This blog was written by Eric Koefoot, Founder of and Strategic Advisor at PublicRelay.
Deciding how much media measurement to share with senior leadership can be a dilemma for communications leaders. The media monitoring systems most teams use can produce many metrics, but how much of the data is worthy of a C-Level discussion?
In our conversations with numerous teams across many industries, we’ve observed three models for reporting to the C-Suite and Board:
- Some teams don’t do any formal reporting of media metrics, or they keep whatever they prepare internal to the team.
- Others circulate a few macro statistics, such as clip count trends, cumulative reach, or average tonality and include titles and mastheads from the more prominent stories.
- The remainder share a much deeper analysis of coverage: topics and campaigns of special importance, impact achieved, how results supported goals, competitive/peer bench-marking, and other factors. The best of these reports also tie the coverage to broader company initiatives and goals, corporate reputation, or other dimensions of interest to senior executives (a subject for a coming post).
Here are some takeaways we’ve derived from our work with many of America’s leading companies:
No External Reporting
In today’s business environment, most departments quantify their results. Executives in IT, finance, marketing, operations, and sales all manage their organizations using relevant metrics. In this context, we have had more than one communications executive confide in us that they feel like they are always behind their peers when they cannot show similarly compelling data in management meetings. One said, “Without that, I’m concerned we won’t have a seat at the table.”
Teams shunning measurement entirely also miss out on opportunities to use data to be more effective. Who wouldn’t want to know, for example, which of the messages you’re putting out are generating passion and engagement among readers, and which are flat-lining? This is just one example of the practical, actionable data that many communications teams are using to hone their strategy.
Limited Macro Reporting
Broad measures such as clip volumes, average tonality, and some share of voice measures can give a general feel for performance. But they often raise more questions than they answer when presented to senior executives that are accustomed to drilling into data. And when there’s no clear connection between metrics and business goals, even executives who are shown a positive trend may question whether it is all that meaningful – and perhaps privately doubt whether success is being measured the right way.
Topic-level Metrics Connected to Business Priorities
Those of our clients who share deeper topic-level analysis with senior leadership feel this strategy has built significant credibility for their team. By accurately quantifying results and tying them to important issues and themes, reporting becomes more relevant to senior leadership. A thoughtful framework for tracking and evaluating results also shows that the team is systematically managing toward clear objectives – and is equipped to quickly identify problems and respond with adjustments when necessary.
At times, teams considering more granular reporting are concerned that it may highlight unfavorable trends. Periodically, some part of the communication plan won’t go as well as hoped, and the data will likely show this. However, most executives we know don’t blame the team in this scenario. Quite the opposite – they appreciate when the team proactively identifies challenges and discusses plans to respond. Teams that clearly define their goals and then objectively report on both disappointments and successes gain credibility and autonomy in our experience.
The Bottom Line
Even if you’re not being asked for deeper, more analytical reporting (or perhaps any reporting at all!), you should consider proactively introducing it anyway. Our experience is that thoughtful metrics foster the type of fact-based dialogue that C-level executives favor. They also allow you to better frame your team’s strategy and results – and to build credibility and support at senior levels. In a world of frequently shifting organizational priorities, budget battles, and high turnover, those are valuable assets.
Written by Chris Bolster, Managing Partner at PublicRelay.
Over the years, we have all seen markets respond to rapidly changing environments with a quick solution that solves the problem at hand, but not as completely as we’d like. More time is needed for a complete solution to be developed.
Shortly after 9/11, I recall waiting in long lines at the airport – sometimes upwards of 2 hours – so that the hastily-implemented extra TSA screeners could do their job. We all saw a very real need (airline safety) being met by a quick solution (thorough screening) that was often frustrating and time-consuming. It took years until the Trusted Traveler programs were put into place, new passenger queue areas were built, and agents were trained to be more effective and polite for the worst of the security delays to abate.
The PR Quick Fix
In public relations and communications, we faced our own major crisis when the Internet took over: anyone could instantly access any content from virtually any publication, any opinionated person could be a publisher via their own blog, and social media made the worst of those people into both critics and amplifiers of bad news. We in the communications industry had to do something – fast – to get our arms around what was being said, and how our messages were resonating. So what did we do?
We turned to our friend, “technology”, to solve the problem quickly.
Powerful software was developed to deliver automated content scraping via rich Boolean keyword searches. Sentiment software extracted words that reflected opinions and emotions. Coupled with beautiful graphs bolted on the front end, this approach gave us a glimpse into all that content whizzing by at the speed of electrons. It was far from perfect, but it worked.
From Automated Tools to Curated Media Analysis
But now there has been more time to understand the rich complexity and interaction of content, the Internet, and social communications. Many senior communications professionals are finding that automated tools can only go so far in addressing their needs for insightful and actionable media analysis, particularly for large, complex brands with broad coverage across many outlets. They thirst for knowledge beyond the keywords. They hunger for relevant, insightful media analysis from mass-volume, multi-channel coverage.
Automated PR software applications cannot accurately and comprehensively interpret; they will only do what you tell them to do in the most literal terms. Even with the best search terms, first-generation tools will pick up irrelevant content (false positives) or exclude important content (false negatives). They struggle to determine comparative relevance. And just forget about subtle things like sarcasm, double meanings, or context. For example, is “He is the Tiger Woods of X” a compliment or an insult? For golf, that would very likely be a compliment, but used in the context of being a good husband? Probably not.
One approach that has been gaining increased acceptance is media analytics based on advanced technology, yet augmented by highly trained, specialized human analysts that wield sophisticated analytics tools.
Many organizations are finding that a human deeply analyzing a statistically relevant subset of coverage from the most important outlets, social media influencers, and channels allows them unprecedented quantitative insight into what is working, what is not, and how they are performing versus their peers. Human discretion also accounts for those subtle nuances that software applications cannot reliably pick up.
Organizations are discovering that as they understand the problem – and their goals – better, they are employing solutions that achieve the original goals, yet do them more effectively, gracefully, and usefully. Humans leveraging technology can understand and analyze content like no computer can, and they can be flexible as situations change quickly. They solve the original problem, but in a better, easier way.
…just like a shorter security line at the airport – who wouldn’t like that?
Eric Koefoot is a Managing Partner at PublicRelay.