Experts in PR and business analytics to hold a workshop at the international event on measurement best practices; session seeks to give PR practitioners ways to tie strategies and tactics to business objectives

Tysons Corner, VA  (October 1, 2018) – PublicRelay, a trusted analytics provider for Communications teams, will be joining other public relations industry experts as a speaker at this year’s PRSA International Conference taking place October 7-9.

On the second day of the event, from 3:45- 4:45 pm on Monday, October 8, PublicRelay CEO Eric Koefoot will deliver a real-world, practical look at how the best communicators are using insights from data about brand reputation, competitors and peers, and messaging to make more effective connections with authors and influencers, as well as build more targeted strategic plans that impact critical business goals.  The session will also contain case studies about teams that are using measurement data to be more agile and even predictive about their efforts.

“Since our founding, our mission has been to change the way communicators see and leverage trusted data and transform it into valuable insights” says Koefoot. “We want practitioners to embrace analytics as a way to enhance their strategies and tactics, align themselves with the broader business, and even boost collaboration across their entire organization.”

Every year the PRSA International Conference attracts thousands of public relations industry professionals for learning and networking. This year’s conference tracks include: Reputation Management and Crisis Management, Big Data and Measurement, Hack-a-Comm, Leadership and Management, Tools and Techniques and Special Interests.

To meet the PublicRelay team during the event, stop by booth 714 or click here to learn more about and register for the measurement workshop. You can also visit www.publicrelay.com, for more information about their solutions for Communications professionals.

About PublicRelay

PublicRelay is the most trusted media analytics solution for communications and marketing professionals at the world’s largest brands. Our clients confidently use our media analysis to plan and measure influencer engagement, reputation management, competitive landscape, and message pull through. Known for its innovation, superior data quality, and actionable insights. PublicRelay delivers accurate analysis that not only shows you what you’ve done but what to do next.

Many communications and PR practitioners today are feeling pressure to prove how their work is impacting the broader business. While there is a plethora of media coverage data to be collected and measured, communicators still struggle with access to accurate data to start with.

Only 19% of PR and Communications professionals feel adequately prepared with PR and Communications Data – even though 71% would change their measurement process for more insightful data.

Even once they have accurate data, many communicators struggle with what to measure, how, and why.

Where is the breakdown? It’s threefold:

• Your PR measurement plan should tie back to business goals like becoming known as an innovative company or a great place to work
• Business goals are more concept than keyword-based and a single article can include multiple topics and brands with varying sentiment
• It is not easy to get to the “so what” of your coverage – you need to analyze more than counts and impressions

In this webinar you’ll discover some key metrics to consider for your PR measurement plan and what you can do with the answers they give you. Learn best practices on how to tie your team’s daily activities like managing your brand reputation, strengthening media relations, launching messaging campaigns and influencer engagement strategies and to the broader business.

Click here to watch!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Target the right authors and outlets

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

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

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

Harness the power of social media amplification

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

Collaborate with third-party influencers

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

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

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

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

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

Use data to prioritize and customize your media outreach:

Prioritization

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

Customization

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

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

The Client

A publicly traded electric utility company HQ’d in North America.

Challenge: Communicating Effectively to Multiple Stakeholders

In a company where most employees are engineers, financial analysts, and lawyers, there was added pressure for the public relations team to concretely prove the value of what has previously been considered by many as a “soft profession.”

However, reporting on communications initiatives is extremely difficult for any team needing to keep track of and communicate with a variety of stakeholders with diverse interests. It was essential for the communicators at this organization to address the concerns of all interested parties, including investors, regulators, customers, and executives. To do so effectively, they needed to stay ahead of media coverage as much as possible to influence Wall Street analysts’ recommendations, customers’ brand perception, and manage executives’ expectations.

Solution: Comprehensive Media Analysis in Near Real Time

The communications team wanted to adopt a data-driven communications strategy to improve the effectiveness of their messaging and measure their contribution to overall business goals. When a new SVP of Communications came aboard, he recognized the value in the strategy that his team wanted to implement and brought PublicRelay on board, providing them with a hybrid media analysis solution that utilizes top of the line technology and human analysis. PublicRelay was able to give the team accurate data and insights in near real time from traditional, broadcast, and social media that they used to drive messaging strategy as well as manage potential crises.

Result: Proactive Media Outreach

Positive public perception of the overall brand and corporate leadership was essential to the client because they are a publicly traded company with a guaranteed geographic territory. Daily media coverage in national and trade publications influences investor relations while local outlets influence customer opinion. This wide array of outlets adds a complex layer to the team’s strategy and it is vital that they ensure their brand messaging is present in coverage from all as it has a direct impact on corporate success.

With PublicRelay, the team was soon able to use data in every staff meeting to answer questions like, “How can we capitalize on this trending topic?” or “How can we course correct our strategy on this topic?” They now use historical data to identify which authors and outlets typically write favorably about their company or the topics they care about so that they can build relationships with those authors and push their key messaging to the right audiences in both local and national media. This boosts reputation drivers, strengthening the company’s brand and contributing to overall business goals.

Result: Crisis Management and Prevention

When one tweet can turn into a full-blown crisis, comprehensive social, traditional, and broadcast media monitoring is essential. PublicRelay ensures the team never misses an important mention. Since customers now take to Twitter and Facebook to voice their complaints, the team uses near real time social media data to identify potential crises and address them as fast as possible.

They also rely on PublicRelay’s proprietary trending score to recognize when traditional coverage could become a crisis. Trending Scores are assigned to articles receiving shares on social media and indicate whether the sharing volume, channel relevance and significance are above or below their average. If a negative story is trending upward, the team strategizes and responds before the situation gets out of hand.

The client’s analyst often alerts the team to coverage spikes and trends as they occur. The team uses special reports on trending topics to combat critical coverage and inform crisis messaging. They then use historical data to determine which authors to push this messaging to in order to disseminate information as efficiently as possible.

The team’s focus on author influencing proved valuable when there was a safety concern at the company’s nuclear power plant. While this story could have easily spun out of control into a crisis situation, a journalist with whom the team had a good relationship covered the incident. The author reported fairly, accurately, and ultimately in favor of how the company handled the situation.

Result: Reliable Executive Reporting

Communicators know all too well that executives remember one bad story far longer than any amount of positive coverage. Quarterly and ad hoc reports ensure executives have an accurate view of their brand’s public perception from all interested parties – from Wall Street analysts to rural customers. These reports put negative coverage in context for executives. When the team shows at least four positive stories for every negative one, the negative coverage no longer seems as important. In Q3 2017, because of their partnership with PublicRelay, the team was able to show execs that positive key messaging was present in 66% of all coverage, supporting their strategy and demonstrating contribution to corporate success.

Analytics like these give the Communications team a seat at the table at an organization that places a premium on hard data and concrete outputs.

Challenge: Tackling a Competitive and Complex Media Environment

When a booming cloud services company became one of the top ten players in its marketplace, it had to take steps to protect the ground it gained. Being blindsided by new competition is a constant threat in the technology world. Companies need to be wary of giants like Microsoft, Oracle, and Amazon suddenly entering your market.

Thankfully, media intelligence can provide a lifeline to critical competitive information. For this cloud provider, share of voice (SOV) translates directly to market share. As a result, the communications team was tasked with answering ‘Who’s covering our competition but not us?’, ‘How does our coverage stack up to competitors?’ and, most importantly, ‘Who are our competitors?’

Accurate media measurement had been difficult for the team, as mentions were too vague for automated systems to categorize. For instance, the company tracks mentions of PaaS and SaaS cloud-based solutions, its competitors offer these plus other irrelevant cloud offerings, such as cloud data center services. To make matters worse, technology does not handle rapidly changing topics well – a crippling issue for a volatile industry.

Solution: Accurate, Multilayered Coverage of the Global Market

PublicRelay developed and deployed a multilayered media measurement program divided into three categories: brand analysis, country/region specific analysis, and product/division level analysis. This approach would help the tech company see the full scope of its communications operations and measure the interplay of metrics between the different levels of the organization.

Coverage is reported on a daily, bimonthly and quarterly basis to help the company dissect its impact on SOV across all its markets as well as at the industry level over time. Reports contain analysis of key industry topics, top industry mentions, spokesperson mentions, employee news pickups, and social media mentions of the company on Facebook and Twitter. The same analysis is done for its known competitors.

All this data is compiled into detailed SOV reports toned for sentiment and broken down into topics so that the company knows not only its SOV across different product divisions and whether the coverage was positive or negative, but also what key topics are driving the conversation. Competitors are monitored closely, to see how they are weighing in on key topics and if their SOV is growing – integral data for the communications team as it decides where to focus resources to influence market share. Through this multidimensional reporting, they can continuously pinpoint areas where their competitors are dominating, to revamp spokespeople strategies, media engagement campaigns and media events – or launch new initiatives altogether.

Key themes like AI, machine learning and cloud innovations, as well as an influencer publication hitlist from across the globe are tracked to ensure that the cloud services provider has an almost real-time, 360-view of the industry. This information, often analyzed from multiple language sources, allows the company to find coverage whitespace and thought leadership opportunities. Additionally, this is the best way to identify new competitors coming up in the scene. In fact, the company relies on PublicRelay to tell them who to track as competitors. The company can then agilely refine its competitive outlook and set new goals, as necessary.

Result: A Partnership that Drives Strategic Decisions Across All Levels of an Organization

By delivering timely and accurate insights, the communications team is viewed as a strategic partner to the business. It has a direct connection to the executive team who relies on them for intelligence about the complex, volatile and highly competitive market. The team is one of the company’s key lines of defense, ensuring that it will never be blindsided by competitors as it continues to grow its market share.

Challenge: High Coverage Spikes

Publicly traded companies with multiple business units pose several major challenges to communications teams. With high volumes of coverage around each unit and several brand drivers to keep track of, it is difficult to understand message pull through and if the company is in control of its own reputation. Add high coverage spikes to this list of challenges and it is even more difficult to understand the success of a communications strategy. Despite this difficulty, proving the value of the communications department becomes even more essential at these companies, with both an executive team and board of directors to appease.

A leading business services company produces a regular study that receives a tremendous number of media mentions. A four-day coverage spike around the study’s release accounts for the clear majority of the company’s media mentions each month, as well as for the quarter. These mentions consist predominantly of statement of fact references, not brand messaging that the communications team drives.

The large amounts of coverage around the study posed a problem for the company. The team wanted to move their media measurement beyond keyword counts and potential impressions to enable a proactive communications strategy. However, with a media monitoring tool they could not cut through the massive number of mentions of the study to uncover the success of other earned media and strategic communications initiatives.

Transitioning to a Data-Driven Communications Approach

The company transitioned to a media intelligence solution that utilizes both top of the line technology and careful human analysis. With this solution, the company extracts coverage of the study from all other coverage and analyzes it separately. This allows the team to cut through the noise to understand where their strategy is working, as well as where they need to improve brand messaging and pull through, especially against competitors.

Measuring brand and reputation drivers is important to the team because the company as a whole is highly invested in furthering brand drivers like thought leadership. By pulling through thought leadership messaging around research that the company makes significant investments in, and increasing share of voice against competitors, the team contributes to the achievement of overarching company goals, demonstrating tangible value to the c-suite.

The organization relies on detailed media coverage insights to drive strategy around message pull through and share of voice. For example, the company uses data to determine which authors and outlets to target for editorial coverage. Looking at data that’s been collected over several months, the team can easily determine which authors and outlets to target based on factors like the authors’ tone toward the subject in the past and which outlets typically receive the highest social sharing.

Solution: Augmenting PR Agency Work

The client did not replace their PR agency, but rather changed its role. While they rely less on the agency for metrics, they continue to work with their agency on strategic PR issues.

Armed with accurate traditional and social data, the company’s communications strategy is now proactive, rather than reactive. They can more effectively steer the conversation around topics they care about. They are not complacent with coverage that finds them, rather they are seeking out and finding the right coverage and reaching the right audience. This enables the team to boost reputation drivers, differentiate the company from competitors, and thus impact corporate goals.

Quarter over quarter data supports the team’s success with the more data-driven approach. The company continually increases its share of voice in the industry over competitors on topics they care about. Positive share of voice against competitors increased by 16% in one year. When coverage of brand drivers is broken down, the company has 5% more positive Thought Leadership coverage than competitors on average.

A Communications Crisis: Taking a Proactive Strategy in an Unexpected Situation

When a PR crisis occurred, the team was prepared because they had smart processes and a great partner already in place. While the company was fighting an unexpected situation that they could not prevent, the communications team was confident in their ability to shape the narrative around it and take a proactive strategy. The client requested 24/7 media monitoring which allowed the team to influence the story as much as possible by responding to any critical coverage right away. It also allowed them to assess the impact of their crisis management strategy in near real time.

Because the company had already taken a data-driven approach to communications, they used their backlog of data to quickly understand the scale of this media event. The team discovered coverage around this crisis outgained coverage of their regular study, an unprecedented occurrence. That insight helped them plan the resources and time needed to fight this crisis.

Result: Analyzing the Aftermath

The company was understandably worried about how the high volume of coverage affected their reputation and wanted deeper insights. They assumed coverage would negatively affect their reputation, but data revealed that only 2% of the company’s coverage was negative and only 1% of coverage about their CEO was negative. In fact, coverage around the crisis drove increased positive coverage of many reputational drivers because the team continued to push key messaging to the right authors and audience.

Armed with these statistics, the VP of Public Relations proved the effectiveness of his team’s crisis management strategy to the executive team and proved to the board of directors that this crisis did not negatively affect reputation or overall business goals.

After seeing the power of data-driven measurement in daily communications, as well as in crisis, the company is now looking to integrate this practice across international offices to ensure accurate comparisons through company-wide metrics and a more unified communications process.

Challenge: The Complexity of Strategic Media Measurement

After the global financial crisis and numerous data breaches and scandals over the last decade, top banking and financial institutions have placed a growing emphasis on public perception and maintaining robust communications with increasingly wary customers and shareholders. With branches and locations both globally and across America, large banks must stay in front of news in individual regions and on top of issues like customer experience and perception, corporate compliance and responsibility, cybersecurity, and community relations.

A major national bank was struggling with the complexity and sheer volume of coverage they were receiving. They were attempting to track 7 reputational drivers, 8 corporate messages, 37 competitors (including 10 national and 27 regional banks), and 82 spokespeople, regional presidents, and executives. The bank also operates in many regional metro areas across the United States and their Communications team is responsible for media analysis both nationally and regionally. As a data-driven business highly invested in keeping tabs on what publications and which influencers discuss their brand and their competitors, they needed to find a media intelligence solution that could handle a high level of complexity and deliver accurate, reliable insights.

A new Communications leader joined the firm with a keen understanding of the value of media measurement and benchmarking results. He realized the need for a comprehensive solution that could break down national and regional coverage as well as track key industry topics like cybersecurity, a growing threat in the banking and financial industry. The bank focuses on tracking reputational drivers and company goals to better understand how they can improve and where they are doing well. Reputational drivers, often surrounding broader themes and not directly mentioned in the text of articles, are easily identified by human analysts. As they work on gap plans to push and refine their messaging, particularly in weaker performing areas, PublicRelay helps them answer questions like “Are we improving coverage? And if so, is it positive?” and “Is our share of voice increasing?”. By taking a more strategic approach to media measurement, the team has insights that they can act on and not just report on.

Solution: Tracking Coverage in Near Real-Time

A website crash in the heat of the summer caused a considerable scare as scores of irate customers turned to social media to express their frustrations with the bank. In order to stay abreast of mounting negative coverage, the bank received hourly updates detailing who was saying what and quickly directing their Communications team to the customers and influencers they needed to immediately engage with. The analysis of social media included hundreds of tweets without the bank’s identifying Twitter handle. This ability to track untagged tweets allowed for a much more comprehensive understanding of social media coverage in real time. Their customer service team was empowered to promptly reach out to hard-to-identify customers and offer much-needed assistance and updates.

The bank also receives near real-time coverage for important events like economic forecast reports and major philanthropic events. Daily reports on events of this scale help them to understand how and where they are getting picked up in the media, especially with initiatives that are launching nationwide. Prompt media analysis on these occasions, particularly when there’s a steady stream and high volume of articles, allows the bank to stay well-informed of the bigger picture but also swiftly pivot and plan. Daily morning clip reports, defined by a complex, subjective changing set of rules, allow their Communications leader to come prepared for meetings with the C-suite. Irrelevant mentions are also weeded out to eliminate noise and clutter, allowing for the most suitable stories to receive a deep-dive analysis. The bank reaps the benefits of actionable insights on outcome-based metrics like message pickup and share of voice against peers and brand drivers.

The team also measures the impact of social media on their traditional coverage using PublicRelay’s Trending Score. Trending Scores are assigned to articles receiving shares on social media and indicate whether the sharing volume, channel relevance and significance are above or below their average. These trends help the team become more predictive over time as they are able to see how certain themes or concepts are shared on various channels.

Result: Setting Benchmarks and Steering Business Directions

Through dashboards, daily clip reports, and quarterly reports, the national bank identifies and tracks three major gap plans (cybersecurity, CSR, and community education) bolstered with a concrete measure of how each is performing. Key messages like brand quality and customer perception are tracked separately from corporate messages like inclusivity, so they can easily parse out how each is performing individually and not just as a collective whole.

This data is incorporated into narrative-based insights that go straight to their board and CEO. Actionable data—such as widespread positive coverage on company statements regarding natural disasters and the resulting impact on job performance and recovery time—allows their team to understand the results of their efforts and reinforce strong, effective communications strategies.

Before implementing a comprehensive media intelligence solution, the bank could only look back at their output. Now the team understands precisely where their effort needs to focus—on effective and proactive gap messaging plans. With historical benchmarks now set in place for a diverse set of reputational drivers and key messages, the bank can now measure how its communications efforts are performing over time and not just at a moment in time.

When you run the communications department for a pipeline company, every day is a balancing act. You need to push positive messages to key stakeholders while also countering key opposition and general coverage of safety and environmental issues.

Two key metrics for the team are whether or not they are successfully improving their brand’s corporate perception while mitigating the impact of negative coverage. At first glance, it is overwhelming to determine which of the seemingly endless negative coverage is just “loud noise” and which directly impacts their stakeholders. They need to get deep into the context of their coverage to uncover any useful insights.

Key Message Penetration

The team’s top priority is to counter negative information about the pipeline by emphasizing its benefits to local communities. Secondarily, they focus their effort on keeping a positive perception to stockholders and potential acquirers – as mergers are prevalent in this industry. With PublicRelay’s analysis, the company can see what messages are having the most positive mentions whether it is CSR initiatives, investor relations, or community benefits. They can also see if their message penetration is growing or shifting and how the positive coverage of these messages compares over time. This helps put all coverage both positive and negative into context.

PublicRelay was able to notify the team that although they were dealing with legal backlash for one of their pipeline projects in Pennsylvania, their key messages about operational excellence and investor relations were essentially drowning out the negative coverage. They recorded a 12% growth in positive mentions on the topic of investor relations, as the company received praise from a major Wall Street publication for its restructuring arrangement and overall operational superiority. Insight like this allows the communications team to double down on communication strategies that are working and shift resources to other messaging campaigns that are not pulling through.

Gauging the Severity of Issues

In near-real time the team can measure and compare the traditional and social coverage around current and past pipeline projects down to a sub-topic level. This access to past analysis is essential to both identify if negative commentary is in a normal range or if they need to devise a strategy to quickly react to it.

For instance, PublicRelay was quick to alert the company when an issue with protestors affiliated with a religious group started driving the largest portion of negative coverage on the topic of land rights. They helped the company quickly pinpoint which social media users were driving around 60-70% of negative mentions about environmental issues, specifically gas and fracking concerns. Insight like this helps the company quickly create engagement strategies to counteract some of this negative publicity.

Measuring Opposition Coverage

PublicRelay’s media intelligence solution enables the team to break their opposition coverage into three different categories:

• The highest potential reach across traditional media
• Most likely to be shared on social media
• The types of social media mentions shared by influencers (users with high numbers of followers)

They further categorize this coverage into topics such as: safety, environmental, and legal issues so they can pinpoint exactly which topics are of main concern on a regular basis. This two-dimensional look their data enables the team to build out granular strategies for each of the key themes.

Furthermore, this data is analyzed quarter over quarter, to uncover areas where they historically dominated positive coverage and are now losing traction. For example, one quarter, the company’s positive mentions of community benefit and job creation had significantly decreased – particularly in Pennsylvania where their latest pipeline was being constructed. Given history, this outcome was not unexpected. The team used the data to pinpoint authors and outlets in the region and quickly set a plan to turn around positive coverage on those topics.

Maximize Company Value

In volatile and regulated industries, quickly understanding your reputation in the market and how, or if, you need to react is critical. Using accurate and timely data to build and execute their PR strategy has made the communications team much more efficient and agile. They are also able to show their impact on key company goals like maximizing company value to potential buyers, investors, and local communities.