One of the nation’s most prominent financial services company did not have the resources to track its complex and vast media coverage, let alone dive in to its context, to better impact business goals like strengthening brand health.

The communications team found itself struggling to keep up with a data-driven culture, where all department leaders must demonstrate how they are using data to fortify and guide their resource allocation and strategies.

To remedy this the team turned to PublicRelay to measure its coverage and expand its media intelligence to analyze things like their brand drivers, competitor coverage, the authors, and outlets covering them, and general industry trends. With this insight, the team could not only evaluate how they are doing today but build more informed strategies in the future specifically around enhancing messaging around key brand and industry topics like “innovation” and “financial performance”.

Clip reports gave the team the ability to hyper focus on their most important coverage, as they used these to inform the communications team’s daily outlook while quarterly in-depth reports helped them monitor brand health progress over months.

Through this robust program, the company could finally answer questions like: Do financial performance or thought leadership topics get shared more often on Twitter or Facebook? Do certain authors write my competitors more than they write about us? How are the top tier outlets performing? Who are influencers that I should target and are they improving my message penetration over time? How is my company’s coverage around major events? Etc. The answers to these questions allow them to enhance their brand reputation management strategies and tactics.

Today, the ability to use accurate data to both understand and inform the future is a game changer for the communications team as they harness insights to elevate their department’s position as a strategic partner to the business.

Read the full case study: How A Leading Financial Services Used Media Intelligence to Enhance Their Media Relations and Reputation Management here.

Influencers are all the hype nowadays, with both communicators and marketers jumping to uncover the perfect social media campaign or engage outlets that receive the most impressions online. Yet, time and time again, one very powerful type of influencer is often omitted from even the most robust of engagement plans. 

The Power of Third Party Influencers

When it comes to traditional media strategy, communicators typically focus on the influencers that they need to have relationships with in order to get coverage. Those journalists and authors in turn have relationships with subject matter experts that they frequently contact for comments. These are third-party influencers that can hold great sway in an industry or significantly increase the social sharing of articles when they are quoted or mentioned.

Read: “How 3rd Party Influencers Can Shape Your Media Strategy“

Third-party influencers such as academics, political organizations, regulatory groups, industry experts and NGO’s have significant clout in their fields and is an important step of setting your PR strategy, particularly in highly regulated industries. Other major benefits of these types of influencers is that they:

• Often have serious audience reach
• Can bolster trust in your organization’s values if they align
• Frequently in the news
• High levels of credibility and expertise
• Carry a sense of objectivity

While getting a brand mention from third-party influencers is rare, developing relationships with subject matter experts will enable you to educate them about your brand stance and key messages. Depending on your industry, you may already have a clear picture of the key third party influencers and are actively engaging with them. In other cases, you may need to do some research to find them.

Uncover and Engage Third-Party Influencers “Hidden” in the Context of Your Coverage 

So, if these types of influencers are so valuable, why do they continue to fly under the radar of many communicators? Because they have been traditionally difficult to uncover.

It is relatively easy to find information about authors and outlets through a myriad of databases. But gleaning a clear understanding about the people and topics they write about is a different and time-consuming task.  Finding relevant articles to analyze is the most important step as the more niche an industry, the more difficult trending topics are to categorize using a word or string of words. Here is where Human-assisted AI is essential – this approach helps to quickly cull through the influx of content published around various topics and isolate the most important coverage and find those third-parties quoted in it.

Once you have the right data you can start to identify trends and figure out which SMEs are the most powerful. This is where you answer questions like “do articles that contain particular quotes or view points from political pundits or grassroots organizations get shared on social media more than those who contain an academic?”, “Do some experts tend to be featured in high powered outlets more than others on specific niche topics?”, etc.

Finally, you can start to engage the third-party media influencers that you deem the most impactful to your strategies. And, over time, you can measure these engagement tactics and see if they are helping you improve your brand position.

Building a comprehensive communications strategy requires engaging with and leveraging multiple media channels. Trends emerging on one channel may differ from another or share similarities in ways you didn’t expect. Knowing if and how much your earned media coverage is getting shared is fine, but you need to understand both how and what is getting shared to strategically amplify your key messages. Dig into the data to identify trends and use those insights to build campaigns specifically designed to drive coverage that encourages social sharing. Leveraging the interplay between traditional and social media can lead to higher levels of trust, engagement, and success for your brand. 

If you’re not already measuring the impact of social media on your traditional coverage, you could be missing out on these insights:

Understand which messages get shared and engaged with and on what channels

Not all messages are shared equally. Often one message will resonate particularly well on one channel, but not on another. Analyze which topics are receiving the most shares and on what platforms. Maybe your CSR coverage is highly engaged with on Facebook, but your business strategy and financial performance news is shared more on Twitter. Use this information to inform your campaign and media relations strategies to pitch more CSR messages that you know will amplify your brand.

Understand which audiences are more responsive on which platforms and target your messages

Not all outlets have audiences that engage the same way on social media. Use demographic and outlet data to understand how certain audiences engage on social and with what topics. Then tailor your messaging to the audience you want to reach.

Use trends emerging on social media to inform and refine your traditional media messaging

It seems counter intuitive, but there are hot topics in traditional media that rarely receive engagement on social media or vice versa. Answer questions like these to build traditional media campaigns that you know will drive high engagement on social:

• Are there topics lightly covered in traditional media that catch fire in social media?
• Do your key social influencers drive engagement with a particular demographic?
• Do certain influencers stand out who weren’t already on your radar?

Consistent measurement will provide historical data you can refer to in a crisis

Consistently measuring and the interplay between traditional and social media will show you what a normal amount of social sharing looks like for your coverage, allowing you to quickly react to any anomalies as they occur. You can then use historic social sharing data around outlets to amplify crisis response messaging to the right audiences most efficiently.

Measuring the interplay between your traditional and social media will give you the ability to leverage the undercurrent of public opinion that spreads through social media. You will gain insight into new social media and third-party influencers as you dig into the context of what is being shared and by whom.  Consistent analysis will give you the data needed to build more targeted campaigns and prove the impact of your campaigns over time.

Pushing key messages rooted in larger reputational goals is one of the most effective ways to contribute to company-wide objectives and demonstrate the communications team’s value to the business in a quantifiable way. Getting your messages picked up though, is easier said than done. 

Using data to be more strategic in the tasks you already perform every day to execute your messaging and campaign strategies will allow you to amplify your messages while using your time more efficiently.

Follow these three tips to amplify key messages without increasing the time spent on messaging strategy:

Target the right authors and outlets

Use data to target the authors and outlets that have a wide reach in your industry space, receive high social sharing, and are interested in the topic you want push. Within your earned media data are authors that have written about your competitors, but not you, or ones that don’t write about your industry as frequently, but receive an outsized amount of social sharing when they do. Narrowing down the authors you pitch will be more effective than mass outreach. You will hone in on the audience you want to reach.

You should also use historical data to personalize your pitches to these authors, increasing the likelihood that your message will resonate with them. Understand how they have written on the topic in the past, reference that in your pitch, and why they should be interested in your organization’s take on the topic.

Creating personalized pitches for a targeted list of authors both increases the likelihood that your message gets picked up and ensures the largest amount of your target audience sees your message.

Harness the power of social media amplification

Analyzing the social sharing of your traditional coverage reveals important trends that can help you quickly amplify key messages. Knowing that your CSR efforts are typically highly shared on Facebook, while financial performance news is shared more often on Twitter is important for pushing your messages to the right channels. You’ll also uncover other valuable insights like when one leading healthcare company found out stories that quoted executives received 6X the social sharing of stories that did not. 

Collaborate with third-party influencers

Third party influencers like industry thought leaders, legislative coalitions, and academics are the experts that authors consult with and quote when writing about industry topics that your brand cares about. Building relationships with these influencers is a powerful way to lend credibility to your organization’s stance on an issue and amplify key messages.

Some of these influencers are known to you, but others will come to light as they appear in the context of your brand and industry coverage over time.  Measure the topics they most often weigh in on and the sentiment of those comments to understand how they align with the message you want to push and reach out from there. In addition, you may also uncover new conversations that you should be participating in based on the topics these influencers are part of.

A third-party influencer doesn’t have to mention your brand by name. The more they espouse your organization’s stance on a policy or industry issue that’s important to your brand, your message gets amplified and your team moves the needle on an important company goal.

To learn more about what data-driven messaging strategies can do for your team, like informing resource allocation and crisis management strategies, check out our e-guide: Make the Most of Your Messaging and Campaigns Data

Data-driven media relations strategies have many benefits. Primarily, it will amplify your key messages most effectively and efficiently, giving you time back in your day.

Use data to prioritize and customize your media outreach:

Prioritization

Use data to first prioritize your outreach to the authors and outlets who have demonstrated interest in the topic you want to push, have a wide audience reach, and are most likely to receive high social sharing.

Customization

Authors are stretched thinner and their inboxes are more full than ever before. Mass, impersonal pitches won’t cut it to truly increase coverage of a message and move the needle on your reputational goals. Use historical data to customize an attention-grabbing pitch that you know the influencer is more likely to pick up based on the way they’ve written about the topic in the past.

For more about the benefits of data-driven media relations and steps to target authors and outlets, watch the video below.

Using competitive media intelligence to understand your competitive landscape is almost as important as managing your own brand. As we witnessed first-hand with the Equifax data breach, the entire industry was dragged into brand crisis mode. While you may not have a line of sight into a crisis this extreme, having a good grasp on the key players in your industry helps you manage your own brand better.

For instance, today, many companies are proactively taking stances on key social issues and making pushes to improve on diversity and inclusion, lessen their footprint on the environment and much more. And for publicly traded companies, the ESG (environmental, social, and governance) movement has become an important pillar of investing. Competitive media intelligence is key here to understand the position your peers are taking or not taking on these issues. You also need to know how your key audiences are reacting to your messages for these key issues.

Regardless of what industry you are in, you need specifics to really understand your position in the market and find where you stand vis-à-vis your competitors. The insights you will glean from competitive media intelligence will help you build or revise your strategy and take advantage of weaknesses in your competitor’s positioning and messaging.

So how do you get started? Here are 4 steps to help you glean intelligence about your competitors:

Define your competitors

List out your competitors and define what insight you want to learn about them. It is very important that you perform your comparison analysis on key data points that you also gather for your own brand. For example, if you analyze your own coverage for topics that include Innovation, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Workplace Environment, you would gather the same data about your competitors.

Measure to set your baselines

You’ll want to answer questions like these: Are there topics where you are dominating the conversation? What is the sentiment used when discussing your brand versus competing brands? Are there authors writing about your competition but not you?  And are there differences in the quality of outlets covering companies or issues, the amount of social sharing of content, or the syndication and reach of the coverage?

Implement a data-driven strategy

Now that you are collecting the right information, it’s time to assess your weaknesses and opportunities on a regular basis. Are your competitors getting more influencer pick up for their CSR initiatives? Are they growing positive SOV for their customer service? Use data to direct resources toward strategies that will bolster under-performing brand drivers. Alternatively, continue to boost categories that are doing well if you still want to make gains in your SOV.

Use insights to drive decisions

Over time you can become more predicative about your messaging. You will be able to see trends in your coverage and that of your competitors. This will help you quickly identify anomalies. You can then dig deeper into the data to see the underlying causes that might help you take advantage of competitor weakness.

In today’s 24/7 news cycle, staying on top of what’s going on is a Sisyphean task for companies, non-profit organizations, and industry groups (not to mention private citizens). Issue tracking is a nonstarter for many busy professionals — especially in fast-paced industries like tech. What about tracking policy issues and concepts that aren’t summarized by a quick three-word Google search, like “online content responsibility?” The bigger the players involved and the more complex an issue, the more time-consuming and tricky it is just to keep up. The minute you’ve got a handle on the conversation, it transforms into something unrecognizable. Back to the drawing board.

Finding influencers who write about these issues can also feel like nailing Jell-O to a tree. Who’s writing about my complicated topics? Which of their articles is getting traction on social media? Who has a bone to pick with my industry? What authors write favorably about my topics and might be interested in my pitch? These questions are tough enough to answer when your topic is niche. What if your industry is “tech” and your topic is “who’s responsible for content posted on social media?” Tracking big policy areas like these (and the people with influence) takes time and resources and we know how scarce both of those are. That’s why analyzing industry/topic-related news to locate influencers is something few companies have the bandwidth to do well — despite the potential rewards.

Wading through the melee is possible, though — with a plan. Recently, PublicRelay and a leading tech industry advisory group picked five hot technology-related topics and set out to get an idea of what was being written about them and who was doing the writing:

• The effects of AI on job creation/destruction
• Who is responsible for content posted online?
• Use of the internet by terrorist/extremist groups
• Hacking/online security breaches
• Antitrust issues in the tech sector

Finding relevant articles to analyze is the first step. These topics are not simple, and cannot be summarized by a word or string of words. Human-assisted AI helps to quickly cull through the slew of media content published about the tech industry and isolate the most important coverage.

Next is the analysis of the coverage. This is where you answer questions like “who is writing negative articles about anti-trust law in the tech industry that are gaining traction on social media” or “are there new authors covering the effects of AI on job creation?”.

These answers not only help the association keep an accurate pulse on policy issues their members turn to them for but also inform their communications strategy. Insights around key media conversations that impact consumer and legislative stakeholder perceptions help them tailor an advocacy and influencer outreach strategy that gets results. These takeaways help bolster the association’s ongoing efforts to develop essential standards and ensure its members are heard on the Hill.

Read Next: “How Third-Party Influencers Can Shape Your Media Strategy“

Read Next: “How Third-Party Influencers Can Shape Your Media Strategy”

It’s easy for PR pros to feel left behind in the Big Data era. While marketers have countless tools for targeting, personalizing, tracking, and measuring how their campaigns perform, public relations initiatives can seem harder to quantify. After all, how do you measure influence or public sentiment? And how can you connect those concepts to business outcomes?

Communications teams need a way to measure the impact of influencer engagement strategies, uncover new brand influencers, and be ready with data to prove the value of their influencer strategies.

Here’s the good news: using accurate data to guide your influencer outreach strategy isn’t just possible, it’s also the key to getting an edge on your competition. Using these five tips, you’ll be able to answer:

• How is our influencer engagement strategy performing?
• Do we have the right influencer relationships?
• Are they worth the investment?
• What should we do differently?

With data to prove your influencer engagement is delivering results, you’ll have more leverage when allocating budget and resources towards your PR program — and become a strategic asset to your company.

Take Your Influencer Outreach Pitches to the Next Level

Let’s face it: your brand’s ideal influencer likely keeps a busy schedule and a packed inbox, so if your pitches aren’t laser-targeted and personalized to perfection, you’re wasting time and a potentially lucrative relationship.

To make a great first impression, you need solid data about your influencer. Many author and outlet databases provide high-level details about an author’s beat and background, but that’s not enough information to engage the influencer, let alone ensure that they’re the right fit for your brand.

You need to take these insights to the next level. Analyze how someone has written about a topic, industry, or competitor. With a more complete picture of your target influencers, you can craft a pitch that catches the right influencer’s attention and piques their interest.

Pay Attention to the Interplay of Social and Traditional Media on Influencer Coverage

Say a powerful industry influencer mentions your brand in a large trade publication — that’s terrific, but what traction did this article get on social media? The sheer volume of articles written and the reach of the publication are not necessarily indicators of high social sharing probability.

With accurate media intelligence and social listening, you can measure influencer engagement on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn and determine whether they have enough reach to drive your brand’s message home. Before you even identify influencers, you can get a sense of who to look for by overlaying social sharing data on your traditional coverage data, revealing which platform each topic gets shared on most often.

A firm understanding of how social and traditional media build on one another in your particular industry points you in the right direction. Look at how frequently an influencer’s messages are shared on the platforms most important to your business, and you can efficiently and effectively create a messaging plan to engage these thought leaders.

Go Beyond Authors and Outlets — Identify Third-Party Influencers

Reporters and social media stars aren’t the only influencers you should reach out to. You should also identify third-party influencers like industry experts, regulatory groups, academic researchers, political organizations, and NGOs. These thought leaders may be less visible than the influencers you typically think of, but they hold tremendous sway over media coverage of their fields.

Using accurate analytics, you can track the impact of third-party influencers by several measures, including:

• How often they are quoted or cited in articles
• How powerful their social and traditional media channels are
• How frequently they publish

Once they’re on your side, you can access industry trends just beginning to bubble up — and be top of mind once those topics make impact.

Find Industry Whitespace, and Leverage Influencers to Make It Yours

The attention economy is a buyer’s market. To engage new audiences and boost your influence, you need to find topics your audience cares about before your competitors get hip to that conversation. A data-driven influencer engagement strategy is a powerful tool for carving out that niche.

One Fortune 500 telecommunications company used this tactic to craft messaging around a topic that was picking up steam: data privacy. They identified industry influencers shaping the narrative, as well as the sentiments underlying their coverage. The company cultivated powerful relationships with many of these influencers, who helped guide the organization’s messaging plan. These alliances gave the telecom firm confidence as it joined the data privacy conversation.

Proactively Measure Your Impact

Measurement is more than a look backwards — it’s a constant, multifaceted evaluation. Start by establishing your baseline across brand values, then prove that your program is working with robust data that you can tie to KPIs.

Constantly combine data about sentiment and tone toward your brand, your executives and spokespeople, your products and services, your industry and competitors. Determine how that tone maps to your reputation drivers, corporate values, and goals. Evaluate whether the frequency of coverage about your brand and the topics it cares about is increasing or decreasing.

Finally, ask yourself the following questions:

• Are influencers helping to grow my brand’s audience, reach, and engagement?
• Is my influencer strategy helping with message penetration among key publics?

Get Results From Brand Influencer Engagement

Become an indispensable strategic partner to your business with the media insights you need to engage new audiences, boost your reputation, and reach powerful brand influencers. PublicRelay provides the expert data analysis you need to identify influencers, cultivate relationships, and prove the value of your efforts with measurable results.

Follow PublicRelay on Twitter for more news, advice, and insights on influencer engagement, and contact us today to learn more about how PublicRelay can turbo-charge your PR strategy.

In today’s world, “You are what you tweet” – as well as what others tweet about you. Take the popular “Mean Tweets” segment on ABC’s late night show Jimmy Kimmel Live!: Celebrities sit on a stool and read hateful Twitter posts addressed to them, as the classic R.E.M. song, “Everybody Hurts,” plays in the background. By showcasing the not-so-nice things users write on social media, the segment satirically underscores the power of negative tweets.

Companies too are paying attention to what social media users are saying about them, as opposed to simply measuring metrics. While an impressive volume of shares, re-tweets or likes demonstrates online engagement, after all, they don’t illustrate how the audience perceives the brand’s story. Engagement can be both good and bad, and the latter may convince you to shift gears. But does it provide you with enough insight about which direction to take?

Read: The Role of Social Media in Public Relations

This is where substantial and valuable measurement comes in, in which a partnership between humans and technology proves critical. Why? Because social media analytics delivers insights about stakeholders’ perceptions of brands. But whether positive or negative, there are always many layers to those sentiments. Disappointment and sarcasm, for example, represent key indicators of an ongoing campaign’s health — recognizing these reactions as more than just “negative” can help a company successfully redirect the campaign. Because analytics solutions will encounter some limitations here, human analysis should play a lead role in fully understanding social media posts, and discerning between feelings, i.e. the “why” behind the “what.”

In addition, accuracy remains an elusive quality, especially when organizations solely rely upon tech solutions to interpret the public’s voice. An analytics tool will misinterpret a sarcastic tweet as praise if it cannot detect what “mocking looks like. But people can often spot sarcasm, mockery, irony, etc. the moment they see it.

With people filling in “what” and “why” gaps which tech tools cannot, brands can narrow in on the nature of user sentiment, to design, readjust and execute more targeted strategies in real-time. What’s more, humans and technology can combine to bring a higher level of intelligence to predict social media storms or viral shares. With this, organizations can pinpoint factors that trigger a viral post, and then customize and model their approaches with new-found enlightenment which contextualizes user engagement. This will bring unlimited potential for highly positive conversations about your brand.

To summarize, brands must focus on two essentials in developing a social media measurement strategy, as supported by people and technology:

Directing Campaigns as Sentiments Dictate

Let’s illustrate this “must do” with a common scenario: A news story or brand initiative hits the public radar, and clearly misses the mark. Through effective social media measurement, the company in question deconstructs the intention behind stakeholders’ posts and traces it back to the specific aspect of the news story or brand initiative that drove negativity, to modify this element. Thus, near real-time insight reroutes a campaign that was headed for a cliff, while identifying what worked and what didn’t.

Understanding the “Why” Behind the “What”

To rise above the noise and really hear what online stakeholders are saying, it’s essential to understand the “why” behind a reaction, to come up with a response which is genuine and distinct. Ultimately, this reinforces a brand-stakeholder relationship built upon trust, overcoming hurdles along the way.

At PublicRelay, we ensure that our clients take full advantage of both human and technological resources to maximize the value of the morphing social media landscape. We enable them to transform quality data into actionable insights, to confidently and accurately manage and adjust strategies based upon stakeholder sentiment. We empower them to measure shares, re-tweets or likes in business terms. If this sounds like something you’d like to discuss further, then please contact us.