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:

1. Some teams don’t do any formal reporting of media metrics, or they keep whatever they prepare internal to the team.
2. 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.
3. 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.