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.

It’s no secret to communications executives that it’s essential to identify key influencers impacting their business. Traditional media strategy typically focuses on journalists and authors engaging with a particular industry, but there are other parties with the power to shift conversations and impact public perception – Third-party influencers. 

Third-party influencers such as political organizations, regulatory groups, industry experts and NGO’s have significant clout in their fields, and gathering data on the way they shape media coverage is a growing trend for communications professionals.

There are many reasons it can be important to understand and engage with these groups. Here are three ways we’ve seen tracking 3rd party influencers help our clients in the utility industry:

Get Upstream from Reporters

Engaging with 3rd party influencers gives communications teams another avenue through which to influence media coverage earlier in the news creation process, rather than relying on a reporter whose opinion may already be set – or worse yet, waiting to play defense.

Several of PublicRelay’s utility clients have seen the significance in building relationships with 3^rd party groups in advance of news events.

Specifically, one energy company was facing challenges from environmental and regulatory groups regarding storage of nuclear waste. Unfavorable coverage was published frequently about the utility, leaving their communications team playing defense too often on an issue critical to their business.

Through analysis of the significant 3^rd party influencers impacting their coverage, we were able to parse out client concerns related to industry groups. The client began restructuring their key messaging to address those concerns, and encouraging spokespeople to proactively engage with 3^rd party groups. Instead of feeling victim to aggressive attacks, the company became part of the conversation. In turn, journalists became more likely to include the utility’s perspective and messaging in their coverage.

Boost Industry Credibility

Relationship-building with 3rd party groups can enhance a company’s standing in its field and bolster media attention within the most prominent outlets.

One energy company discovered last year that nearly one-third of all their most valuable media coverage included a 3rd-party perspective relating to their brand.  The data we provided then allowed the company to identify especially impactful voices and follow trends of tonality and message penetration surrounding those groups.

Relationship-building with 3rd party groups can enhance a company’s standing in its field and bolster media attention within the most prominent outlets.

Generate Hot Content

Finding influencers that support your company’s views could help your content reach new audiences.

By tracking 3rd party influencers, our clients have found that “hot” articles (those enjoying more sharing) have a high likelihood of carrying 3rd party quotations in comparison to other stories.  This means that coverage incorporating the perspective of a regulatory or political group has a higher chance of going viral on social media.

By strategically pursuing these groups, communications teams can raise the odds that their messaging will be shared with wider audiences showing interest in their industry.

The definition of “influencer” may typically stop at journalist or author, but experience has shown that expanding this scope to 3rd party organizations significantly improves a communications team’s understanding of their media landscape. Without attention to these groups, communicators may miss out on opportunities to shape coverage, boost credibility, and achieve wider distribution of their most important messaging.

Read Next: “5 Tips for Influencer Engagement“

Social media is upon us, and many of us in the communications field are grappling with the massive amount of insight – and noise – that can come from outlets like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and the cornucopia of new tools with bizarre names and clever innovations on how people will communicate in the coming years.  It is up to us to determine the smartest ways to use this treasure trove of social media data to help us do our jobs better.

Read: The Role of Social Media in Public Relations

Social Media Insights

Most approaches to deriving social media insights rely on a number of fundamental approaches:

• Extracting trends in keywords, sometimes paired with semantic analysis to identify topics and tones of interest;
• Creating keyword “clouds” in order to try to visualize hot topics (with varying degrees of usefulness I might add); and
• Identifying key influencers based on followers, shares of postings, and frequency of topical postings.

But one area that is gaining favor is tying traditional media to social media to determine which stories and issues are resonating in the marketplace.  As a given article is shared more and more, it indicates that the issues discussed resonate within the social media ecosystem.  If it is a good story, that is great news.  But if the story is negative or problematic, social sharing can indicate a growing problem that needs to be addressed.

Electric Utilities: What engages audiences in social media?

Some issues and topics tend to engage the social media sphere more than others.  And as communicators, we can use that knowledge to our advantage – using the right channels to address issues, share messages, and further our cause.

For example, in a detailed Energy Industry benchmarking study conducted by our analytics team, we found that certain topics tended to get notably more Social Momentum (a proprietary index score that measures social media sharing activity).

In the graph below on the left, you can see the number of mentions of key initiatives in the Energy industry (note that these are not based on a simple count of keywords, rather human analytics based on the macro concepts listed).  During the period, Reliability was the most covered issue, while Customer Service was covered the least.

But in the graph to the right, you can see that when it comes to Social Momentum, Customer Service coverage was shared far more often in social media (about 35% more than other frequently covered topics).  Rates came in second, and Reliability came in a relatively distant third place.

In the Energy example above, the data tells us that we would likely have strong social media engagement when spreading messages about Customer Service, which may encourage increasing social media efforts there. Alternatively, for issues surrounding Community and Philanthropy, we might either focus less of our social media efforts there due to a lower ROI, or perhaps we might move to change the conversation online by investing more in social media on those topics (which are often positive) to raise their social media presence.

Knowledge is Power

So what does this mean to us in communications and marketing?  It means we need to respect the power of social media to share traditional and Web content.  It means we need to acknowledge and act on social media’s power to proliferate traditional and Web content.  And, more importantly, when we are focusing our efforts in social media, it means we should be focused on the areas where engagement is most powerful.

Social media is, in many ways, a gift to marketing and communications teams.  It gives us volumes of real-time data that can tell us a lot about the marketplace and how our companies are received.  But the true value comes when we can be creative and use real, accurate data to guide our strategy.  Social media intelligence tells us what matters most to our audiences – and we should use that knowledge to our advantage.

Eric Koefoot is a Managing Partner at PublicRelay. 

When it comes to media strategy, there are times when you have no choice but to play defense.  A negative event – for example, a legal, regulatory, or reputational problem – surfaces in the media and the team has to quickly roll into action to manage the story.

In these situations, your priority is neutralizing or moderating the coverage.  The subject has been dictated to you, and there’s often less latitude to take the story in strongly positive direction.  A win may be simply persuading a reporter to write a less negative story, getting equal airtime for your point of view, or slowing the story’s spread in the media.  Damage control is often top of mind.

Playing Offense…with confidence

Fortunately, there are also opportunities to play offense. When your team has latitude to shape – or even create – the story, there’s extra room for creativity and many more possibilities to consider.  For this “proactive” coverage, the opportunity to positively impact perceptions about your
organization is limited only by resources and ingenuity.

The thought leadership content that some companies publish is one good example of proactive coverage.  Another is coverage related to corporate and social responsibility.  But the effectiveness of such content can vary widely.  Some topics and angles capture consumers’ imagination, while others don’t.  So how should you decide where to invest your limited time and energy to get the best results?

Accurate PR measurement data is invaluable here.  For example, what if your media monitoring system allowed you to look back at media metrics showing how much impact specific topics within your coverage generated among your target audiences?  Wouldn’t this data help you make better content planning decisions?

Insurance Industry Lessons

PublicRelay recently gathered this type of media measurement data for coverage of five leading property & casualty insurers.  The goal was to identify where there might be opportunities to play better offense – i.e., which content topics might be worthy of greater investment because of their tone, reach, and sharing characteristics.

Here are some examples of patterns we observed in the data:

• Coverage of Product Innovations (positive in nature) achieved about three times the reach and significantly higher social sharing than Claims Coverage (which had a significant negative component).
• Thought Leadership coverage (positive in nature) achieved higher social sharing levels than any of the traditionally “defensive” topics insurers encounter, such as coverage of Rate Increases and Lawsuits.
• Certain sub-topics within the thought leadership category achieved still higher sharing levels – more than twice the overall average for thought leadership content – making them especially worthy of consideration for future campaigns and outreach.

Proactive Media Strategy

If you want to improve your strategy for getting proactive coverage, start by asking yourself questions like the following:

• Which topics within your content generate the most positive perceptions?
• Which of these topics are most likely to achieve significant reach?
• Which topics achieve the most social sharing?
• Are there opportunities to shift your content mix and re-focus your relationship-building with the media to boost your results?

If you aren’t getting this kind of actionable intelligence from your current media monitoring and measurement metrics, you may be missing important opportunities to significantly boost the ROI from your team’s efforts and demonstrate impact to your company’s leadership.

Similar thinking can also be applied when you’re playing defense– stay tuned for a future post on this.

Chris Bolster is a Managing Partner at PublicRelay. 

Last month (April 2016), Alaska Airlines announced their intention to purchase rival carrier Virgin America for $2.6B—roughly a $1B premium over Virgin America’s market capitalization just a few days earlier. The $1B difference is primarily attributed to ‘goodwill’ – related to the strong brand that Virgin America has built in the US since launching in 2007.  “Goodwill” is defined by Investopedia as:

“an intangible asset that arises as a result of the acquisition of one company by another for a premium value. The value of a company’s brand name, solid customer base, good customer relations, good employee relations and any patents or proprietary technology represent goodwill.”^[1]

Essentially, “goodwill” is to a business what reputation is to a person.

The Challenge: Effectively Managing Your Brand Reputation During an Acquisition

While Alaska Airlines is highly profitable and the acquisition is expected to be accretive in the first year, maintaining goodwill during this transition is vital for long-term client retention and the value of the business.

Just days after the announcement, articles began to appear that highlight this challenge. For example, an article on Skift (a travel media intelligence company) makes the case that Alaska is not proactively managing customer perceptions, a quote from Chris Nurko, Global Chairman of Futurebrand, is telling. “What is interesting is the voice of the customers, those who are flying Virgin: Alaska needs to reach out to them. From what I’ve heard and I’ve read, they don’t seem to be doing that.” Nurko notes that Virgin America is reaching out to its’ customer base, but Alaska has remained silent so far and that this is unsettling to Virgin’s loyal customers (he is one).

So, What Could Alaska Airlines Be Doing?

Corporate communications—effectively managed—can play a large role in maintaining “goodwill” during an acquisition. A timely, well-managed communications outreach strategy during an acquisition has the power to win over a customer base, while simultaneously maintaining the value of the company.

While there are many examples of communications strategies successfully deployed during financial transactions, those that can be described as ‘best practice’ share a few common elements:

1. Seven-day-a-week media monitoring of channels – print, broadcast, and online – to facilitate real-time alerts on hot, breaking news

2. The ability to profile and deferentially score content from “sources of interest” within the overall coverage, to ensure that thought leader commentary is properly managed towards the positive

3. Comprehensive media measurement and reporting on all media types, to ensure that the communications team maintains a broad strategic view of the media landscape and kept them from being surprised by breaking news

4. As a consumer-oriented company, regular social media impact reports can provide insight into customer engagement levels and tone, as well as highlighting the ‘social momentum’ of any negative stories

5. A ‘rapid response’ monitoring capability, to enable the communications team to redirect the focus of analysis and monitoring quickly. Output from this enables the communications team to continuously adjust their focus and strategy, ensuring they are always able to respond rapidly to fast-moving issues.

With a communications strategy focused on protecting the goodwill of the Virgin America brand and a “best practices” media monitoring strategy, there is every reason to expect Alaska Airlines to successfully navigate this transaction, which is expected to close in 2017.

[1] http://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/goodwill.asp

[2] https://skift.com/2016/04/12/the-death-of-virgin-americas-brand-and-the-aftermath-of-the-alaska-airlines-sale/