With accurate media intelligence, your team can create data-driven plans, go after goals, and evaluate the impact their communications efforts are having on the company’s KPIs. But first, you need to make sure you’re asking the right questions about your media campaigns and messaging.

Some of the questions that PR/communications teams should be asking include the following:

Questions to Ask About Your Messages and Campaigns:

Is our media message pulling through?

Communicators should determine what outcomes they are trying to accomplish with their messaging and measure campaigns accordingly. For instance, are you trying to improve customer perceptions, strengthen investor relations, or demonstrate thought leadership? Collecting accurate data from both traditional and social media is an important first step. But understanding message pull through means you need to analyze the context of the stories you or your peers are appearing in. Did the author or our spokesperson convey the thought leadership message clearly or favorably? Do we need to adjust our strategy if it’s not working?

Are we over-allocating team resources to push an already successful message or topic?

This will be particularly important for teams that are resource-constrained or experiencing “initiative overload”. You need to accurately allocate resources to the campaigns that need them the most. Still not gaining traction with your efforts around increasing positive SOV for your workplace environment topics? Use media intelligence to determine new publications and influencers who have not yet covered your brand but have written about a competitor. Even with limited resources, this approach of using data to adjust allocation helps your communications team realize the value of using data to drive outcomes and not just output.

How successful was the media campaign or event? Who did we reach?

If you’re not already asking how your campaigns are performing, chances are someone else will ask you. Top performing communicators track how their efforts are impacting the goals of the business  What are the brand and reputation drivers that the business is hoping to impact this year? Executives want to see real results and determining outcomes such as whether you improved not only SOV in your industry but also increased positive tone for your brand, products or executives. Have you earned more positive coverage from authors not previously talking about you? Being able to show a report with data backing up the success of your efforts makes all the difference to leadership.

Is this a PR crisis? Are we helping or hurting the situation?

You know all too well that dealing with a potential PR crisis can be stressful because the crisis can widen if it’s not responded to correctly and in a timely way. Figuring out how and when to respond comes with experience, but wouldn’t it be helpful to have a proactive way to set strategy? The cornerstone of every crisis response strategy is strong data. Good media intelligence not only brings potential PR crises to your attention early, but can also provide a roadmap based on any previous crises. Does this crisis look the same regarding volume and tone? How quickly can we gauge media reaction as we respond so we can course correct? Sometimes a quick look backward can help chart your forward course.

Which messages or topics should we include or avoid in our content creation?

When developing content, you already know it’s important to be in tune with industry keywords as well as current news, trends, coverage, and social media sentiment relating to your industry or brand. Analyzing the tone and sentiment of various topics and subtopics will provide guidance as to what messages are resonating in the market. Adding in data points also available in each article like authors, outlets and influencers will help you more narrowly target your efforts.

Where is there whitespace for message expansion?

This question becomes critical in noisy or volatile industries. Finding a topic in your industry that your audience cares about but isn’t yet “owned” by any of your competitors can be a game changer. You get to jump-start a new conversation with a receptive audience – and offering up new content always gets the attention of the media. A win-win for everyone.

Feel Confident in Your Media Campaigns and Messages with On-Point Answers

The intelligence your media analytics provides should give you confidence that you’re presenting senior leadership with credible reports documenting accurate data tied to outcomes.

Pairing human analysis with technology gets you the story behind the story. Your communications team gets the benefit of accurate and timely media intelligence to inform strategy and measure progress without wasting precious effort on manual clean-up tasks. More importantly, you get to make data-driven decisions that will make your CEO take notice.

PublicRelay developed a human-hybrid media intelligence solution that gets you the data you need. Contact PublicRelay to learn more.

There is an old adage that bad news for your competitors is good news for you, but in today’s 24X7 news channel and social media world, this may no longer be true. Case in point – the Equifax breach.

On Sept. 7, 2017, Equifax made headlines when it announced a data breach that affected 145.5 million consumers in the United States, making it one of the largest cybersecurity breaches of all time. In an industry where companies like Equifax, Experian and TransUnion track virtually every piece of our financial lives, this news made waves across media outlets everywhere.

At PublicRelay, we dove in headfirst and examined the number of mentions with positive and negative tone across Equifax, Experian and TransUnion versus the previous quarter. Understandably, the total number of relevant mentions for this quarter for all three credit bureaus increased substantially to 2,303 relevant mentions in Q3 from 313 in Q2 – a more than 600 percent increase.

In the wake of this major breach, how did each company fare? How truly bad was it for Equifax? Did negative perceptions of Equifax bring the other companies down? Here’s a quick summary of our findings about mentions of Equifax and two competitors:

• Equifax – Negative mentions increased by 180X (1,459 vs. 7)
• Experian – Negative mentions increased by 4X (23 vs. 6)
• TransUnion – Negative mentions increased by 2X (24 vs. 10)

Now, let’s dive into that data to see how a competitor’s PR crisis can impact perception of your brand.

How Bad Was the Negative Media Coverage of Equifax?

Just how bad was the coverage for Equifax? The company had 180X more negative coverage in Q3 vs. Q2. In Q2 Equifax had the smallest Share of Voice (SOV) out of the three companies with 27 percent SOV overall. Understandably, that number increased dramatically to 68 percent in the quarter with the breach and had the largest SOV

Impact of Equifax’s PR Crisis on Competitor Experian

Experian’s negative mentions increased by 4X, however we found that only 8.4 percent of breach articles that included Experian mentioned the company negatively. The rest of the Experian mentions were neutral or positive. Additionally, only 52 percent of articles mentioning Experian received any negative social sharing.

Interestingly enough, Experian was the only company who had an uptick in its positive Share of Voice with an increase of 7 percent due to thought leadership coverage.

Impact of Equifax’s Data Breach on TransUnion’s Media Coverage

TransUnion negative mentions increased by 2X. We found that the company’s coverage consisted of 6.3 percent of breach-related articles mentioning TransUnion negatively. Only 52 percent of articles mentioning TransUnion negatively received any social sharing (same percentage as Experian).

Most Trafficked Outlet for PR Coverage

The online outlet Krebs On Security (cybersecurity blog with a reach of 200k) was the #1 most shared outlet spot for TransUnion and the #3 spot for Experian. Typically we see that when big news breaks the most shared outlet is large, mainstream publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. However, interestingly enough in this case, when people are looking for facts and ways to protect themselves, the public turned to this niche specialty outlet for the most accurate and up to date information.

Looking at this data, all three companies suffered from an increase in negative sentiment during Q3. Equifax suffered the greatest reputational damage; however as a result, its competitors also faced negative repercussions. This shows that when crisis strikes your industry, it’s essential to monitor your media mentions, competitors, and consumer sentiment to ensure you’re taking the right steps to gain or keep trust.

Want to be ready to react before negative mentions of a competitor hurt your PR? PublicRelay uses a combination of cutting edge technology and expert human analysis to deliver media intelligence that helps you nip PR crises in the bud. Top brand communications rely on us to track the progress of their media strategies and compare themselves to competitors. To learn more, contact PublicRelay today.

For today’s corporations, a commitment to diversity and inclusion isn’t simply the right thing to do – it’s a competitive advantage. Especially when it comes to brand reputation, customer loyalty, and recruitment. In fact, companies ranked in the top quartile for ethical diversity are 35 percent more likely to financially outperform their national industry medians, according to research from McKinsey. Those ranked in the top quartile for gender diversity fare 15 percent better.

From a recruitment perspective, no less than one-third of employees – and nearly one-half of Millennials – consider diversity and inclusion when assessing a new job opportunity, according to research from the Institute for Public Relations (IPR) and Weber Shandwick.

Such perspectives also extend to what a company does externally – with its ad campaigns, marketing strategy, public statements, etc. We’ve noticed an uptick in analysis around inclusion of minority groups with our clients in the banking and insurance industries. In the banking sector, diversity is a concept growing in importance, particularly in understanding a key brand driver like workplace environment. In insurance, more industry leaders are launching campaigns to communicate the importance of minority inclusion in their customer base.

But analyzing concepts like diversity in traditional and social media coverage is tricky. The topic may be one of many in a piece about your brand, your mentions may be passing ones in coverage primarily about competitors, you may be actively pitching stories on this topic, or customers may rake you over the coals on social media. Whether it’s reactive or proactive, you still need to know the sentiment about your brand, your executives, your products or your services to understand what to do (or not do) next.

4 Steps for Tracking Perception of Factors Like Your Brand’s Inclusivity

So how do you build a report card that shows whether your brand is perceived as inclusive?

Here are 4 steps to follow if you want to see how your brand scores when it comes to diversity and inclusion or a similar topic:

Ask yourselves.

Are we trying to increase positive SOV in our industry? Earn more positive coverage from authors currently not talking about us? Create more opportunities for our spokespeople to weigh in on the topic?

Any time you are trying to move the needle, you’ll need an accurate baseline from which to work.

Collect accurate data that relates to sentiment around your brand.

You don’t want to miss anything meaningful, but you also don’t need passing mentions or your digital ads in the mix. The most strategic information about how you are doing is often revealed during comparisons against your competitors and peers. This significantly increases the sheer volume of data you need to collect and clean up. In some cases, an outlet list can help you hone in on what content is most important. Is it counts or concrete results from your effort that chart your course?

Correctly categorizing topics and subtopics during this step is how you glean the intelligence from your analysis. This is also the step where humans are essential. The more complex the topics (like hot-button social issues), especially where keywords are nearly non-existent, the more critical it is to correctly identify sentiment. Was that social media post sarcastic? Did the author make positive statements about our brand but negative statements about our peers?

The analysis – time to answer the questions.

Some of these questions should relate back to your goals and progress measuring. Others should help define or re-define strategy. Popular ones that our clients ask include:

• Did we move the needle on the topics we put our efforts toward?

• Are we over-allocating resources on goals we are already crushing?

• Which authors or outlets produce high social sharing?

• What’s the SOV of our spokespeople vs our peers?

• Are there other industry influencers we should be engaging with?
• Where is the whitespace for message expansion? Can we own the conversation in another market segment?

Answering “Now What?”

With accurate answers in hand this is one of the easier ones. It could be as simple as stay the course. In other cases, you may uncover that you need to redirect resources or change course altogether.

Regardless of industry, communicators responsible for topics like diversity must be enabled to build and react to programs with trustworthy media intelligence. Technology with just the right dose of human input delivers the accurate research you need to drive impact when it comes to corporate goals.

Pushing an organization’s key messages is a priority for communications professionals. Yet effectively promoting that messaging can be daunting, especially in a noisy industry with many different players and trending stories. Strategizing a messaging campaign requires quickly identifying the influencers and media channels surrounding an important topic.

A Fortune 500 telecommunications company wanted to better understand the media landscape for a hot-button industry topic, data privacy. The company particularly cared about how influencers framed that topic in relation to top telecom companies. They needed specific, tailored data for their industry, but they were uncertain where to start.

Don’t Miss: “How Third-Party Influencers Can Shape Your Media Strategy“

Working with their media analytics team, they quickly pulled together a year’s worth of data about authors and publications writing about the topic. The team had already been cataloging these concepts and their connections to the company and its top competitors. This accurate data enabled them to easily visualize the dominant players in these critical conversations.

The data provided other valuable insights for the company. They had details about the authors who wrote positively or negatively towards each telecom companies’ stance on privacy. They also could see which authors’ articles tended to go viral on different social media channels.

Equipped with this analysis, the company efficiently and effectively created a messaging plan around data privacy. They cultivated relationships with top authors who write positively about data privacy and were able to reach wider audiences. The company was also able to predict the influencers that would most likely cover their privacy practices unfavorably and respond to that negative messaging in traditional and social channels. With access to rich, curated data, the company continues to stay informed and remains a part of the data privacy dialogue.

If you’ve ever done PR work for a telecommunications company, you know that special events matter. In an industry where customers are always shopping for the next best deal, the media buzz around a new product launch, data plan, or ad campaign can make or break the company’s bottom line.

With all this fast-breaking news, understanding an event’s success in near-real time can be difficult. Here are 5 questions our top telecom clients ask during a special event:

• What is the general sentiment towards the event? Distinguishing the positive and negative coverage by authors and outlets can help you strategize in real time. You should be able to quickly locate and share the favorable and unfavorable reporting from your organization’s point-of-view.
• What does our media audience look like? Identifying the reach of publications writing about you and the stories going viral on social media can ensure you stay informed about top influencers. Use advanced analytics to marry the impact of traditional and social media on your event.
• Are our key messages pulling through? Drilling down to the messaging of your event news can help you measure the effect on your overall brand. Having a dedicated human analyst ensures that even the tiniest details about your media coverage are recognized correctly – including concepts and topics that do not appear in text.
• Is our CEO or other key executives mentioned? Knowing how the news cycle relates the event to its top decision-makers can help you deliver valuable media feedback to your leadership. Discover how an event’s coverage can affect your CEO’s reputation or whether executive mentions can influence a story’s pick-up.
• How does this event stack up to previous events? Use past performance analysis to be proactive in your event strategy and set more informed goals. Then quickly debrief on your current efforts – from message pull-through to social amplification and author tonality to share of voice.

Getting to the big answers behind these event questions takes more than traditional media intelligence solutions can deliver on their own. When the best technology is paired with human analysis you get the most accurate and timely answers that drive smarter business decisions

Read Next: “6 Steps to Measure PR At Your Next Event“

Company crises can be deal-makers (or breakers) in the career of a PR or Communications professional. C-suite execs want proof that a crisis strategy is working, both during and after the event. How can teams prove that their handling of an event is sufficient, and that it results in a return to business as usual as quick as possible?

When a major safety hazard threatened a pioneering tech company, a PR exec encountered a media firestorm. New to the company and the role, the communicator pushed an unexplored strategy to manage the story. In doing so, he needed to prove that the change in direction was worthwhile.

His strategy for doing so? A focus on strong analytical data. However, prior to his arrival, the Communications team had never provided measurement data to the Executive team.

With a lack of historic media analytics, he couldn’t see if his leadership brought the company back to business as usual faster than in previous crises. He turned to a new measurement method: technology plus human media analysis. Utilizing skilled analysts who could analyze months of data within the context of the current situation allowed him to compare the current crisis messaging to that of past incidents.

Analysts worked round the clock to track coverage across media platforms, isolating the impact in real time and providing visuals that could help the C-suite truly understand this event by comparing it to the past.

As the public debated the company’s safety and future, the robust data gathered by the intelligence team made one thing clear: the communicator’s strategy had worked. The positivity of coverage increased dramatically compared to a prior, identical incident. Social media of the coverage was triple the volume of the past event. And the negative coverage decreased significantly.

The verdict? The communicator’s strategy had worked. His crisis strategy was better, and he had reliable data to prove it. To the C-level execs at this numbers-driven tech giant, the data was convincing.  Not only did reliable media intelligence enable him to establish a measurement standard, it also earned him a seat at the table at a crucial moment and moving forward.

The best part about a company special event is that you know it’s coming – in the unpredictable world of Communications, that alone is a gift.

The worst part is that an influx of coverage can mean an influx of bad data – unless your team has a strategic plan in place to draw actionable insights from the media attention you gain.

Setting your team up for success in advance of your next product announcement, trade show, conference, or earnings release is perhaps the most important step of managing PR surrounding an event.

Without that strategic plan, you’ll end up chasing huge volumes of noise and miss out on actionable insights that speak to the issues you care about. Here’s how some of our clients have successfully tackled media analytics surrounding large events.

Look at the Past

At the early stages of planning your media strategy, ensure a solid understanding of how your company has tackled similar event situations in the past.  If you’ve consistently done well with specific tactics, make sure those are repeated and communicated to your team.  If there were unexpected challenges and areas of weakness in your last event, you can focus on those now.

At the onset of a huge tradeshow, one of our clients analyzed how they performed at a similar event several months prior. Historically, data showed that they should expect more than double the readership of the next largest trade event of its kind, and that tonality was over 80% positive.  Here are some of the other items they reviewed before game planning a new strategy:

• How much coverage they received and from which target media outlets
• Tonality of coverage from the last event, including sentiment analysis of key event messages
• Which influencers drove the conversation
• Impact of executive spokespeople
• How coverage was shared on Social Media and which topics drove the most engagement

Bonus: Right after the chaos dies down from the upcoming event, don’t forget to document what went well and what didn’t.  This will help with Step 1 in the future.

Set Goals

Now that you’ve reviewed the past and understand how your team has performed historically, you’re prepared to set goals for the upcoming special event.  These goals are crucial for bench-marking after the event is over and will provide unified direction in the moment.

A few great goals our clients have set before special events:

• Connect with influencers in new, unique ways (providing greater access to new products than before, for example)
• Refine messages to supporters and critics based on reception last year
• Shift tone to positive or neutral on specific topics that played predominantly negative last year
• Set a list of targeted, influential authors to engage with who haven’t driven coverage historically
• Employ spokespeople in a more effective way (greater readership from certain spokespeople)

Bonus: It’s good to have goals that are realistic, but be sure to set one or two “reach goals” that you can encourage your team to shoot for – this will provide motivation, and your team may even surprise themselves.

Make Sure You’ve Got the Tools

Without the right tools, you’ll have wasted time reflecting and game planning without the means to execute. The right resources will give your goal legs and hopefully protect you and your team from feeling overwhelmed and defeated during an event.

There are several tools and resource allocation opportunities your team may consider, including:

• Training your team on new responsibilities and divvying up tasks in advance
• Working with existing vendors or hiring new ones to help
• Utilizing measurement tools and software that cut through irrelevant mentions (without you doing the work)

One solution our clients have found is to lean on outside help to keep them updated.  Our client at the trade show partnered with a PublicRelay media analyst to update their team periodically as coverage streamed in – they even had him come to the event. This extra set of eyes in the coverage allowed the team to move quickly without getting bogged down or overwhelmed.

Additionally, the focused analysis from outside resources kept the client from drowning in details and getting distracted by having to curate every piece of information coming in.

Bonus: Ensure that if you do invest in new tools and software to track an event, you do your homework before contracting. Make a list of what is most important to you and seek advice from peers on which tools have worked best in the past.

Recognize You Can’t Do It All

The biggest challenge our clients have faced in previous events was the sheer amount of information thrown at them. For our client organizing the trade show, we analyzed 3,500 unique articles on the event – and those were only the relevant stories! The company received tens of thousands of media mentions during the week of the show, a large portion of which was simply noise.
We’ve seen the following plans help our clients tackle the most important aspects of an event:

• Identifying a concentrated list of outlets they want to monitor in real time
• Committing to reviewing only the most important subset of tweets from influential accounts
• Circulating twice daily updates on coverage, as well as an end-of-day comprehensive summary

Bonus: Recognizing you can’t do it all is helpful in effectively reporting to CEO’s on the progress of your event.  Your CEO will only need summarized updates on coverage, not an overwhelming amount of information.

Evaluate as it Happens

Monitoring coverage in real time may seem like an obvious step, but it’s important to plan how your team will succeed in this aspect – without a plan, you risk missing actionable metrics due to the flood of news coming at you in the moment (see Step 4).

During their real-time evaluations, our clients have found it helpful to:

• Make expectations clear across the team – internally and with CEO’s. Everyone should know what information they should be expecting to receive, such as twice daily media updates or end-of-day charts/graphs that expose actionable data.
• Schedule frequent check-ins with the team scouring through the media
• Set a plan for reviewing all the 2^nd priority coverage from the event after the dust settles (or not even bother with it at all)

Our media analyst who attended the large trade show alerted our client that an exhibitor was thrown out of their event – something he saw in the press before they knew it had happened.  Their team was able to speak with the reporters who had started tweeting and publishing negative coverage on the incident and positively shifted the conversation through the rest of the trade show.

Bonus: This is your moment to benchmark against goals – be sure they are clearly accessible either in a shared document or in an interactive document that compares key metrics. This will allow for either real-time correction of course or real-time celebration.

To learn more about what to consider during an event, read “What PR Data Pros Ask About Event Coverage“

Report on the Event   

Once the dust has settled and initial evaluation has been done, compile your findings into a presentation that can be used to educate the team and report up to Executives. This is the time to call out your successes and identify shortcomings.

Creating useful visuals, especially ones that incorporate comparison between industry events, are often the best way of sharing media intelligence with an internal or C-Level team.

Bonus:  Take slides from each individual event and compile an end-of-year report that gathers comprehensive metrics over 12 months. This will give a useful bird’s-eye view as you enter a new year filled with even more media opportunities.

Use Case: Analyzing autonomous vehicle news at trade shows

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 with in 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

Corporate communications teams often have responsibility for developing and distributing PR messaging to several internal and external audiences. However, the audience made up of current and prospective customers is arguably of special importance.

In the eyes of sales and marketing (and for many senior executives) this is a crucial constituency due to the impact it can exert on the bottom line – whether through purchasing products or influencing others to do so. Developing and executing a thoughtful PR strategy in this area can therefore boost a communications team’s credibility and stature in the company.

So which approaches can your team use to demonstrate value to senior management in this area?

Assuming the team already has a clearly defined set of messages that are being distributed to current and prospective customers, here are some media intelligence strategies to help you demonstrate clearer impact in this area.

Manage Perceptions on Key Product Attributes

The PR messaging your team distributes may relate to key characteristics of the company’s products, their positioning in the market, or the way you want buyers to feel about them. If so, media analysis applied to this type of coverage can reveal which aspects of your products and services messaging authors tend to repeat and which they are prone to criticize. It can also show how audiences react to these opinions and, when sentiment turns south, how successful the team is in defusing negativity.

For a large telecom firm, PublicRelay analyzed coverage relating to attributes of their products and services – pricing, performance, and other factors. By using a carefully constructed taxonomy of topics and issues, we found a strong upward trend in complaints related to the company’s infrastructure.

We also found that this content was getting inordinately high sharing compared to comparable content for peers, signaling growing discontent among opinion leaders. Later, when upgrades were announced, PublicRelay’s media analysis detected a groundswell of customer support.

What if product-related messaging is not an area of emphasis for your team? It still pays to be vigilant, since both professional and amateur writers may be filling the void and writing content of this type (and social media commentators almost certainly are). Carefully analyzing attributes within a specific product line allows your team to detect problems early – and to get more mileage out of perceived strengths.

Support Your Product and Operations Team

Keeping an ear to the ground on feedback gleaned from news and social media can also add substantial value to your product and operations team.

For one customer that was launching a major software product, PublicRelay found a key error being discussed in a small number of social media posts by early adopters. The error condition caused the software to shut down, leaving customers stranded.

Due to the small volume of comments and inconsistent vocabulary used to describe problems like this, it’s not uncommon for fully automated media monitoring tools to miss complaints of this nature. In the scenario described above, only 5 comments, drawn from many thousands of posts about the organization, described customers’ problems with the software.

Understanding more precisely what customers or reviewers are happy about (or frustrated with) can boost the communications team’s value to other parts of the organization and improve public relations strategies. By providing data on product perceptions, the team can become a source of rapid market intelligence to product and operations teams within the company, and make a real economic impact.

Think Expansively About What Customers Want from the Company

Many aspects of your PR messaging that are not directly related to products can still affect how customers feel about the company and influence the likelihood that they’ll become customers.

Below are three categories of coverage that can affect consumers’ affinity for a company.  For each, we’ve included examples of topics within the category and a description of the impact they can have:

Measuring your effectiveness in placing messages related to themes like these with the right audiences can be a useful indicator of team success.  Over time, reinforcing positive perceptions should lead to greater customer affinity for the brand. However, accurately analyzing content like this may be difficult to do with software alone, since many of the themes are concepts and don’t lend themselves to simple keyword searches.

Keeping in mind what your customers care about — not just product-specific topics, but content affecting the company’s overall image — can boost your team’s value to internal groups, prospective clients, and to the bottom line. Are you missing an opportunity to capture strategic media intelligence, support your company’s growth and make the communications team more valuable to senior leadership?

Chris Bolster is a Managing Partner at PublicRelay. 

“From the Trenches” is a PublicRelay blog series that shares stories from our Media Analysts about the day-to-day discoveries they make working with communications professionals at Fortune 500 corporations, government agencies and more. 

As a communications professional, you move fast.  Really, really fast.

In an industry where the only constant is change, media teams need to understand news coverage in real time, predicting possibilities before they happen – and be ready to jump into action at the drop of a hat.

If we could wish any superpower for our clients, it’d be the ability to tell the future. As a next-best alternative, we utilize another day-saving tool to predict outcomes: Data.

The Story

We began working with a large telecommunications company nearly 3 years ago during a time of structural change within the industry. Companies were rethinking their standard order of business, dreaming up innovative payment plans and new ways to serve customers given an ever-evolving technological landscape.

Day in and day out tracking of this industry drew our eyes to interesting patterns such as the introduction of pay-in-installment plans. We put measures in place to track initiatives that we saw gaining momentum, so when our client called our office one afternoon desperate for metrics about a new payment plan they had introduced just hours earlier, we were set to jump into action.

Not only could we track specific coverage on the announcement in near-real-time, but we were able to provide historical comparisons across competitors. This approach revealed long-term patterns that predicted outcomes in the current round of product innovations, thereby informing our client’s strategy moving forward and enabling them to make data-driven decisions.

Shortly after, one of our analysts presented to a room of executives at the client’s headquarters, sharing the rich trend data we had developed for the client.  The Vice President of Corporate Communications looked at our analyst and said “You know our business better than 99% of the folks who work here.”

The Lesson

Although we’d like to say that this foresight came from our amazing superpowers, we know that is was the combination of the talented team we hire and the data they were able to extract from the coverage.  We’ve discovered that when you rely on quality data, it simply makes your decisions stronger.

In an industry where the only constant is change, media teams need to understand news coverage in real time, predicting possibilities before they happen.

Through patterns and quantitative facts, we can make big picture decisions that impact all of the small details. Data lends to understanding, and understanding opens you up to strategic possibilities that can truly drive success. It leads to more accurate assumptions about the future and moves us from hunches based in feeling to informed decisions rooted in a historical framework.

The trends we derived from metrics in the telecommunications world helped our client to see the areas they should be focusing their communications efforts on. It continues to influence the products and topics they draw analytics from, and the information that is reported out to their internal executive team.

Whatever solution you utilize for media monitoring, staying on top of data will help you move faster and act smarter. We may not have superpowers in real life, but utilizing data could be the untapped power you and your communications team have been hoping to discover.