Sometimes it’s difficult to quantify the business impact of a PR crisis. But in the case of Uber’s string of bad publicity in 2017, the business impact of PR is quite clear – and devastating.

A recent Stratechery article (if you don’t already subscribe, I highly recommend) makes a compelling case for the idea that Uber’s PR problems actually saved their biggest competitor, Lyft.

In 2017 Uber dealt with a federal lawsuit over stolen technology, workplace harassment accusations, and a series of high-level executive mishaps  that ultimately ended with the resignation of then-CEO Travis Kalanick.

At the same time Uber was fighting these crises, Lyft gained significant market share as seen in the chart below from Lyft’s S-1.

 Lyft provided an explanation for these results in their S-1 saying,

“The growth rate in Revenue per Active Rider increased significantly in the first and second quarters of 2017 as our brand and values continued to resonate with riders and they increased their usage of Lyft instead of competing offerings.”

“As our brand and values continued to resonate with riders” is key here. There has been much talk recently about the importance of brand advocacy and values. It’s well-documented that consumers increasingly expect their brands to make a positive impact on society – or at the very least, not make a negative one, as I’d argue Uber did in 2017.

For example, in a recent study from APCO Worldwide, respondents said the single-most important thing a company can do when it comes to being “good to society” is  treat their employees well. Amid harassment allegations and high employee turnover, Uber clearly did not live up to this order and paid the price  – in market share that they have not been able to win back and eventually the loss of their CEO.

Brand building and public relations was a key  differentiator between these two companies in a competitive marketplace where the switching barriers are minimal. If this case study proves one thing, it’s that the strategic and business value of PR cannot be underestimated – Just ask Uber and Lyft.

When a large nonprofit children’s hospital garnered negative publicity around their executive compensation practices, the organization’s issue management team needed to determine if and how to react. The most important questions on their minds were:

• Is this a crisis or not?
• How does this coverage compare to other peers in their industry?
• And will this negative coverage upset our target audiences and donors?

PublicRelay helped the communications team formulate a plan to analyze and handle this looming issue.

Step 1: Determine the severity of the issue and who is producing the coverage

First, the nonprofit’s communications team referred to their historical data to determine the significance of the story. They analyzed where it was coming from by outlet power as well as volume. The team was able to determine the coverage was not being produced by the high power outlets that typically influence the hospital’s donor base. The negative attention was also not significant in volume compared to other brand crises that the hospital had seen in the past. Therefore, the negative press about the brand was unlikely to immediately impact donations.

Step 2: Determine if it is spreading

The communications team paired the information with social sharing data to ensure that the story wasn’t gaining traction. Millennial donors are a key public for the hospital, so the organization was concerned about the reach of this potential issue on specific channels like Twitter and Facebook. After tracking the coverage across social platforms, the team was able to confirm that it was not picking up many social media shares nor growing in traction.

Step 3: Compare the coverage to others in the industry

As a final precaution, the team wanted to compare the issue about its compensation practices with other peers in the nonprofit realm to ensure that they were not getting more attention than their counterparts. The media analysis revealed that out of all the other major research foundations and hospitals of similar size, they had far less negative coverage than their peers during a similar event.

Step 4: Monitor the topic more closely moving forward

Although this instance did not require a response, the communications team now proactively analyzes the topic of executive compensation throughout its industry to ensure that they are not blindsided by any negative stories. Furthermore, they can consistently keep their C-Suite informed about trends in this domain and prove that they are appropriately tailoring their responses to negative stories.

In a digital day and age where crisis can strike a brand in a moment’s notice and spiral into a viral nightmare, command centers or crisis “war rooms” have increased in popularity in recent years. But these insight centers shouldn’t just be reserved for issue management. Whether a command center takes the shape of a multi-screen nerve center or a single screen view for a desktop or mobile device, a central hub of media analysis can provide communicators a 360-degree view of their brand. Consistent access to data about the brand’s traditional and social coverage, industry and competitor news, and spokespeople can help avoid crises in addition to managing them.

Successful Command Centers Help Communicators Track Their Entire Competitive Landscape and How Their Brand Measures Up Against It

So what types of data should you pull into your command center? The following types of metrics will ensure your brand has an ongoing 360-degree view of your brand health and campaign success.

SOV for Brand and Reputational Drivers

Does your company want to be known as a thought leader? A diverse employer? An innovative company? To achieve such goals, your team needs to track metrics about how your communication efforts are translating to these business objectives. Being able to quickly spot where your brand is excelling or struggling from a reputational perspective helps your PR team best evaluate where to allocate resources.

Competitor and Peer Coverage

This intelligence gives you a read of your market or industry in multiple ways. Messaging and media relations are two of the most actionable areas for using this analysis. Who is writing about you and/or your competitors? Which messages are pulling through for each of you? How are they writing (tone) about your brands or industry? Furthermore, insights from competitive intelligence can be shared with other business divisions like Product Development and Marketing.

Influencer Engagement

Whether your brand engages with authors, outlets, or third-party influencers like pundits or academics or celebrities, you want to see your relationships pay off with positive coverage. You can visualize your progress in a command center dashboard and always be in the know.

Traditional Media Trending

A trending score tells you how your traditional media coverage is performing (or not) on social media channels. Consistently analyzing this data over time may reveal patterns that will help you leverage each channel for maximum impact. Do your CSR stories tend to perform better on Facebook? Do stories featuring your CEO spark sharing on LinkedIn? Do certain authors inspire retweets on Twitter? Understanding these data points will also help you spot anomalies quickly so you dive into why they are happening.

Messages and Campaigns

Lastly, to understand your brand and the impact of your strategies you need to know whether or not your campaigns and their messages are pulling through in your earned media. Tracking which messages are resonating the most with your target demographics, allows you to better allocate resources to areas where your messaging needs amplification or a revamp.

Incorporating these five key metrics into a live communications command center, will help your brand’s PR function consistently make better, smarter and faster decisions. Learn more about PublicRelay’s Communications Insights Center Here.

Establishing and acting on a well-defined corporate Purpose was an important trend in 2018 and discussed widely in the communications field. But as former Shell Head of Communications Bjorn Edlund points out in his blog for the Arthur W. Page society called, “Welcome to the Purpose Wars,” some are becoming skeptical of its role in business, dismissing corporate purpose as an empty promise, rather than a source of social good.

As we move into 2019, it’s worth questioning what is the purpose of Purpose and where does it fit into business?

Purpose as a Compass

Edlund advocates Purpose as a leadership mechanism – a tool that guides decision-making and inspires stakeholders. Indeed, employees and consumers increasingly expect their corporations to act on social issues.

In the 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, 73% of respondents agreed companies can take actions that both increase profits and improve the economic and social conditions in which they operate. 76% said CEOs should take the lead on social change rather than waiting for the government to impose it and 67% expect prospective employers to join them in social action.

It’s clear that corporations must have some guiding purpose, mission, or values to live up to these expectations, but how can they ensure they act on their purpose authentically and earn the trust of their stakeholders?

Use Data to Strengthen Purpose

Companies need to develop a system to measure Purpose because as Edlund writes, “you can only manage what you can measure.”

Developing this framework is an important opportunity for communicators as the gatekeepers of brand reputation. If Purpose is a guiding force behind business decisions, communicators have the opportunity to bring valuable data to their CEO and other executive leaders – data that they probably have never seen before.

In order to measure Purpose, break it down into core values or topics and measure the pull-through of these topics in the media. Your values will most likely be nebulous, hard-to-define topics so communicators must make sure their measurement system takes into account the context of an article, not just keywords. This kind of in-depth analysis will yield accurate and actionable insights to be used across the business.

Contextual media analysis will reveal the public perception of your values – which ones you are living up to and perhaps more importantly, which ones you are not. This is valuable information for not only the communications department to focus their efforts, but for leaders across all business units to use when making decisions. Living up to your company’s purpose should be a company-wide goal and the measurement and sharing of data behind Purpose is another way communicators can integrate the business, break down silos, and become strategic partners to the business.

Today’s modern communications teams are responsible for protecting more than a company’s reputation, they are tasked with communicating their brand position on key issues, influencing target audiences, and even working with the public affairs department to track policy issues and lobby for its interests. To do the job well, professionals need a method of understanding the media landscape and gauging whether key corporate messages around legislative issues are pulling through.

Yet, many busy communicators find issue tracking to be such a daunting task that it is a nonstarter. This is because it is difficult to fully track complex, policy issues that are not summarized by a simple keyword search like: online data security, online content responsibility or immigration reform. Media monitoring tools simply can’t handle such complex topics.

Breakdown the Issues and Find Coverage with Human-Assisted AI Topic Analysis

The key to understanding highly complex coverage is to break it down into topics and subtopics that matter to your business and your stakeholders. For instance, if you work for a major bank and want to track the topic of Regulation, begin by breaking it down into subtopics like:

• Access to capital
• Suspicious activity reporting
• Trump administration regulatory reform
• Compliance reporting
• Financial crimes

Public affairs and public relations teams need to harness human-assisted AI to quickly cull through the slew of media content collected and focus on the coverage that matters to their key stakeholders.

Once they do that, they can start analyzing coverage against subtopics to see which are getting the most positive and negative coverage. Determining the frequency of earned coverage, its tonality, the amount of social sharing this coverage receives, and on which social channels, helps pinpoint where you need to focus your efforts. When done right, it will also show you what to do next. For instance, if one or more of your key messages around certain topics are very successful but others are lagging, you could reallocate resources and budget to others that need more attention.

Find Media and Third-Party Influencers to Target

By analyzing media intelligence over time, you will start understanding key figures in your industry like authors, outlets, and third-party influencers. Topical media analysis will make your team more effective and efficient at reaching the right authors to amplify your message. This is where you answer questions like, “who is writing negative articles about banks needing more compliance regulation and are also gaining traction on social media?” or “are there new authors covering the importance of growing rural access to capital?”

These answers will not only help your team keep an accurate pulse on policy issues but inform communications strategy around media relations. Use insights to tailor a media outreach strategy that gets results.

When companies can hyper focus on the coverage that matters most, they can also zoom in on identifying powerful 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.

Through analysis of the significant third-party influencers hidden in the context of their coverage, companies can restructure their key messaging to better address concerns of third-party groups and/or further ally themselves with those who have similar views.

Move the Needle on Policy Goals

Tracking policy issues over time and whether your key corporate messages around these topics are resonating with third-party and media influencers allows you to demonstrate to your executives that your team is moving the needle on key legislative goals. This way, your team can show that it is helping shape policy favorable for your company and all its stakeholders. Helping to ultimately prevent or pass legislation that affects your organization by influencing public opinion is just one way communicators can have a direct impact on the bottom line.

We are excited to announce the results of our second-edition research report with partner PR News, “The State of Data-Driven Communications.” We surveyed over 400 communicators to better understand the role of media measurement and analysis in communications strategies. One interesting, but not that surprising, finding is that 83% of communicators must defend or are preparing to defend their decisions using data due to pressure from the C-suite. 

We hear this in a lot of conversations with communicators – you need data with which to make informed decisions and again to prove the impact of those decisions to the C-suite. Unfortunately, however, only 21% of corporate respondents have analysis and insights they can easily share with their CEO or executives directly and just 24% are always prepared with accurate data they can trust to make decisions.

There is hope though.  Encouragingly, 65% of corporate respondents said they use media analysis and measurement to show how their efforts are contributing to broader business goals. Communicators are thinking strategically and want a seat at the table, but they still need the right analytical framework and measurement processes to prove it.

Read the full report for more PR measurement insights here and see how you stack up against your peers.

With the rise of artificial intelligence and ensuing hype, many companies in the media intelligence industry and beyond began touting their use of AI. But the story often stops there without further explanation.

Communicators don’t have to be data scientists, but it is worth asking your media intelligence provider how they employ AI. In the world of textual media analytics, there are best practices as in any other industry. If your provider is not following them, it could have serious consequences for the accuracy of your communications data.

Media Analytics Best Practices

Use Ongoing Supervised Machine Learning

Cultural conversation changes quickly. The meaning and connotation of words are situational and evolve over time. This is why several studies have found artificial intelligence employed in the media analytics space must be supervised. One study from communications experts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Georgia found, “the combination of computational processing power with human intelligence ensures high levels of reliability and validity for the analysis of latent content.” Another from researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and Northwestern University found that unsupervised machine learning, “does not perform well in picking up themes that may be buried within discussions of different topics” and therefore missed several mentions of the topic they were tracking of economic inequality. The concept of inequality, whether in the economy or in the workplace, might very well be something a communicator would want to track – and certainly other nebulous concepts like it.

Computers can improve at processing language, but they need to be told what’s right and wrong. A computer cannot tell when the use of sarcasm in an article contradicts the normal sentiment of a word it has already learned to label positive, so it will continue incorrectly analyzing your content until it is corrected.

That’s why media intelligence providers cannot take a “set it and forget it” approach to AI. A constant feedback loop is required to educate the computer in the nuances of language. If the data set remains static, it will make your analysis inaccurate and irrelevant.

Target Analysis Specifically to Your Company and Your Perspective

The most accurate communications analysis comes from ongoing supervised machine learning targeted specifically to your business. Every organization has different goals, challenges, and perspectives on the world. Two companies can read the same news article or social post and analyze it completely differently based on their point of view. A solar energy company and electric utility company would categorize and tone the same article about energy regulation very differently. If you use the same data set across clients, you run into the same problem again in that the computer will continue analyzing content as it originally learned, not accounting for the context of what a specific organization cares about.

At PublicRelay, we perform client specific media analysis leveraging ongoing supervised machine learning to ensure that our clients are getting the most accurate data possible. This accurate, contextual analysis tailored to their business goals enables them to not only understand what they’ve done, but yields insights that tell them what to do next.

Crisis strikes in the blink of an eye and can erupt into a full media catastrophe overnight. Even when a crisis is done, if it is not dealt with successfully, the aftermath can translate into long term financial loss, not to mention a destruction of public trust.

To top it off, brand turmoil can be a make or break moment for your career. Because every shred of time is important during a crisis, you need to use data to make agile, strategic decisions.

The following questions will help you get off on the right foot:

How Bad is the Situation?

How do you even know when you’re in a crisis? This is when you refer to your historical data. Not every negative article is a death sentence for your brand, although your executives might not agree. First off, determine if this is a real coverage spike. Comparing coverage trends overtime can help you measure the magnitude of the story pickup. If there is a legitimate uptick in coverage, it is time to hyper-dissect the issue.

An effective reputation management strategy starts with identifying your key brand drivers. Analyzing these drivers over time allows your company to develop a baseline which will make obvious any deviations from that baseline. These deviations are indications that the issue is starting to hurt your brand.

You cannot put together a response strategy without fully evaluating the scope of the situation. Your team needs to answer things like who is talking about the issue? Are these my key publics? What influencers are picking up the story? Is it getting heavily shared on social? What audiences are sharing the article and across what channels? Without this information, it will be impossible to quickly target the right people with your key messages in your response strategy.

Are You Connected with the Right Audiences to Fix It?

Once you’ve assessed the damage and determined the messages you need to push, you need to find the right influencers to engage. If you don’t spend time building relationships when things are going well, you’re left out to dry when things go bad. 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.

How Effective Are Your Spokespeople?

Not only are spokespersons needed for media communications, but in a crisis, they are essential. You need to know which of them will most effectively resonate with your target audiences and which work best when “under fire.” Data from past crises or from previous campaigns must be harnessed to select and coach your top spokespeople.

Are Your Messages 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 against a faulty product, strengthen investor relations in light of a crisis, or demonstrate a united company front? Collecting accurate data from both traditional and social media is an important first step in determining if coverage is improving in your favor and if it contains the key messages you are pushing in your crisis plan. To understand your effectiveness, ask questions like, are influencers or our spokespeople conveying the right message? Is it resonating? Or, do we need to adjust our strategy and reallocate resources if it is not working? Even with limited resources and time during a crisis, using data to adjust allocation helps your communications team stay agile and effective.

Can I Prove that My Strategy is Working?

Once your strategy starts to take hold and the conflict is dying down, it is time to loop in your C-suite. 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.

Help the C-suite truly understand that negative coverage around the event has stopped by comparing coverage to the past. Your data should show that the positive coverage has increased dramatically or that it is back to neutral levels.

The cornerstone of every crisis response strategy is accurate data. Good media intelligence not only brings potential PR crises to your attention early but provides a road map on how to assess, manage and defuse the situation. It is important to always track your customers, brand drivers, your industry, and your competitors – you need to make sure that nothing is spreading once it is contained.