Managing communications in an industry with very few direct competitors might seem like a cake walk. Until you need to differentiate your brand from only a handful of others – then it gets interesting.

In the established credit reporting market, the key players are well-known brands that have been servicing this market for decades. That’s why differentiating their offerings and gaining market share is a key business objective for a data and analytics-savvy company.

To accomplish these goals, the communications team of the company needs to have an accurate view of the media landscape – which messages are resonating with influencers? How does this compare to our competitors’ coverage? Are our studies reaching the right audiences? Where are our experts quoted and how often? Thought leadership is a key component to their strategy and message pull-through is a metric that informs if they should stay on course or refocus their efforts elsewhere.

Comprehensive Brand Driver and Subtopic Analysis Drives Action

The communication team measures and compares SOV on topics like data security, credit reporting, and identity protection. They also measure the impact of their research studies, experts and spokespeople, financial performance, and industry litigation/regulations. The analysis of these topics and concepts enables the communications team to not only report on what has happened but also provides a roadmap for what needs to happen next.

Is positive SOV decreasing for data security messaging? The team can quickly uncover the reasons and assign resources to focus on the issue. If authors are not talking about them but covering their peers on this topic they can share the information with their agency and have them focus on outreach.

By consistently measuring and analyzing their key business drivers over time, the team has become more predictive about their outcomes. This allows them to react to anomalies much more quickly. For example, their PublicRelay analyst alerted the communications team when a new non-credit monitoring competitor started dominating positive coverage about data security and identity protection. The company was able to quickly assign resources to formulate a response strategy.

Leveraging Key Studies and Company Experts

Key sources of thought leadership content for the company are their research studies in the Automotive, Finance, Mortgage, and Marketing industries. PublicRelay delivers analysis of the impact their traditional coverage has created – including how often this coverage is shared on social media. This enables them to determine which industry topics drive the most engagement for their brand. They can then refocus their outreach efforts to gain traction on studies that are lagging.

Their consistent analysis of these studies also delivered an added benefit – uncovering a possible competitor. A niche property reporting center started gaining positive SOV for the quality of their studies on disaster damage in the wake of Hurricane Harvey and Irma. Their PublicRelay analyst quickly alerted them and they were able to respond accordingly.

Before the company develops reports in new industries like Healthcare, they can utilize PublicRelay data and insights to assess the media landscape and determine if there are thought leadership and whitespace opportunities. The communications team can then work with their agency to devise a tactical plan to launch the new studies.

Keeping Their Industry Leader Status

Quarter over quarter the company generally receives much more positive coverage than its mainstream competitors, particularly in the areas of its expert spokespeople and research studies. They also keep a keen eye on their brand reputation and can pivot quickly to address any issues.

Working in partnership with PublicRelay to analyze key trends and events for actionable insights, the team ensures the company is in control of its reputation and leadership initiatives. They continue their quest to be the top provider and ultimate authority in the areas of data and analytics.

When the animal health subsidiary of a major pharmaceutical company raised money in its public offering, it was the second largest IPO from a U.S. company in history and it quickly became the largest global animal health company.

The newly public company built a communications strategy around global expansion, innovation, and customer experience. They needed a solution to help them measure how their coverage was mapping to these goals and how they compared to their competitors for metrics like SOV and audience reach.

Measuring Coverage Tonality, SOV and Reach

They deployed a multilayered media measurement program powered by PublicRelay to monitor and analyze social, broadcast and traditional media coverage. Semiannually, the company reviews the in-depth analysis that helps the communications team understand their brand’s dominance in the market and its public perception. The team is looking at both most recent activity and time over time metrics to understand trends and look for anomalies.

The communications team evaluates the top tier outlets they and their competitors appeared in, their coverage tone levels, the authors rewriting about them, how often their spokespeople are getting quoted, and the stories trending on social media. All this data is aggregated to summarize the company’s global coverage reach every six months. Over time, the team can see the types of stories and authors that trend on social media and across what channels and become more predictive about their campaign performance. They also evaluate their spokesperson strategies and determine who is gaining the most traction and on which topics.

The analysis also features reach and SOV for their band and competitors. The data is shared the internal PR team, who can adjust their media engagement plans based on which key topics about its competitors gained the most traction in high-powered outlets.

Understanding Key Message Pull-Through

Brand and product-level analysis of reputation drivers like global leadership, innovation, customer service, and impact on emerging markets helps the team measure their campaigns and message pull-through success. Reports outline the percentage of high-status (high-reach) outlets that cover information about the Pharma company’s different business divisions, ranging from their vaccine arm to their livestock services, and the prevalence of key brand messages.

Such insight is indispensable for strategic and tactical assessment and future planning. For example, when the company recognized that its global leadership and innovation messages where getting picked up by high-powered outlets and accounted for 50% of coverage, the team could then pivot resources to different messages that were not performing as well. Furthermore, the head of communications was able to show his entire company how its communications team is boosting the company’s brand reputation, year over year.

Understanding the Impact of Sponsorship Campaigns, Strategic Partnerships and Events

Aside from helping the company evaluate how well its reach and key message-pull through is increasing, the communications team can also understand how well their communications efforts around key corporate initiatives are paying off, and how the public is responding to those messages.

For instance, the company has strategic partnerships with many other companies like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations, Mayo Clinic, the American Humane Society, the Hero Dog Awards, and others. Bi-Yearly reports analyze the communications around these campaigns and show whether these initiatives have successfully generated positive spikes in coverage.

Similarly, the company measures its earnings reports and acquisition announcements. Comparing spikes related to specific events gives its leadership key insight into how well key stakeholders are receiving strategic partnerships, acquisitions and earnings information.

Daily, Company-Wide Reports and Insights

Semiannual and annual reports are supplemented with a daily clip report that is circulated to the entire C-Suite and Board. The daily updates contain brand mentions and key industry topics across the globe so that the entire organization is abreast of global coverage and key issues, when they arise.

Lastly, the PR team keeps a very close eye on a key competitors and rumored spinoffs, acquisitions and other similar events. These reports are essential to the entire organization as they deliver competitive insight and allow the executive team to be prepared for market shifts.

Challenge: Lack of Actionable Insights to Make Data-Driven Decisions

Large publicly traded companies receive a tremendous amount of earned media coverage and it contains valuable information that communicators can use to inform their media relations, influencer, and reputation management strategies. But only if they can analyze the context of those articles.

A leading financial services company simply did not have the resources to measure its media coverage, especially in terms of an in-depth analysis to drive business decisions. The communications team frequently had the right hunch or intuition when making decisions, but they lacked the data to support these decisions. This deficit was highlighted when business leaders asked for data to back up their strategies, just like other departments were required to do so.

Unlocking Hidden Insights in Media Coverage

The team understood that each piece of earned media coverage contained valuable data points about their brand, competitors, authors, outlets, and their industry. This information would allow them to not only look back at how they were doing today, but also help them build more informed future plans. The ability to analyze concepts like “innovation” would enable them to focus on campaigns tied to broader business goals. The team chose PublicRelay’s human-assisted AI solution to help them uncover the insights that would make them a strategic partner to the business.

The daily clip reports are human curated and toned by PublicRelay so the communications team is able to spend time on more valuable tasks. In addition to the company’s own brand, PublicRelay also analyzes the coverage of their largest direct competitor. This enables the team to answer questions like, ‘what influencers are covering my competitor, but not me?’. They can then refer to specific topics and tone of articles as they build an informed outreach plan to target those influencers.

The team also utilizes analysis of the impact of social media on their earned media coverage to understand how different topics perform on the various social platforms. Do financial performance topics get shared more often on twitter or Facebook? What about workplace environment articles? Does it vary by sentiment? They also review how different authors and outlets are impacted by social media. Do certain authors write about them often but have low sharing numbers? How are the top tier outlets performing? Do they have larger audiences but lower engagement?

As in most publicly traded companies, the communications team is especially tuned in to their coverage during earnings season. PublicRelay supports their efforts with more frequent special reports during this time that enables the team to swiftly address negative coverage and amplify positive coverage. These special reports regarding earnings coverage are often shared directly with the executive team.

Event Strategy

The financial services company attends an annual conference where they speak and make announcements each year. PublicRelay provides analysis of the brand’s media coverage during this annual event. In particular, PublicRelay measures coverage for specific topics such as mortgage technology, innovation, and new product announcements. By monitoring these data points year over year, the communications team can be proactive in its event strategy and establish informed, realistic goals when preparing for the next conference.

For example, the positive sentiment and volume of coverage at a recent event significantly decreased from the previous year. The team dug into the data to uncover that a majority of their coverage from the previous year focused on a new product launch. They used this information to recommend that the company utilize this event to announce new products as that topic generates significant positive coverage for the brand.

Furthermore, by showing data from past performance, the communications team is able to present data to back up their plan and get executive buy in. They can demonstrate that if X spokesperson speaks at this conference and is quoted in Y outlet, then they could receive Z amount of positive coverage. This gives credibility to the communications team to show how they use data like other departments.

Whitespace Analysis – Boosting Thought Leadership

The financial services company is in a noisy and highly regulated industry with few key competitors. This makes it vital for the company to capitalize on topic whitespace and expand its messaging to start a new conversation. PublicRelay consistently tracks popular topics that are being talked about within the industry and examines how coverage of those topics change over time. This includes research about the company itself, its competitors, and the authors and outlets writing about them. By measuring industry conversation at the topic level, the communications team can quickly position itself to be the go to source on a fresh topic and increase thought leadership positioning, giving the company a significant competitive advantage.

Result: Executing Data-Driven Communications Plans

As a publicly traded company in a highly regulated industry, the team focuses on amplifying their positive coverage and consistently communicating with stakeholders. In addition, it is key for everyone to understand stakeholder and market sentiment about the brand. By consistently measuring its earned media coverage, the company can understand the impact of social media on their traditional coverage and discover key influencers in the process. Measuring coverage at the topic level for their brand and their competitors helps them uncover new messages they should be pitching.

Using accurate data to both understand the moment and inform the future is a game changer for the communications team. They can not only show why they are building and executing the plans as they are, but also adjust and refocus efforts as needed.

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

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

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

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

Define your competitors

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

Measure to set your baselines

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

Implement a data-driven strategy

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

Use insights to drive decisions

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

Today’s communications leaders are increasingly feeling the pressure to prove their department’s value to executive leadership. Some assume this means attributing revenue, but the business impact of PR does not have to equate to a dollar amount.

One of the ways communicators can have the most impact is by becoming an integrator across the business. This theme was brought up repeatedly in a recent CommPRO webcast in which three expert communicators from PNC, Zoetis, and Strategic Profiles Management discussed their success stories from the field.

PR & communications is in a unique position within an organization to contribute to several company-wide goals. Comms works across departments, raising awareness of their colleagues’ work, enhancing brand reputation, and contributing to each goal they touch. It’s one of the only functions to know what’s going on in all other departments, making it a natural integrator.

Below are three ways top communicators integrated their organizations and increased the business impact of PR:

Enterprise Reporting

Former Chief Communications Officer at PNC, David Chamberlin, provided a simple, but important example of the communications department integrating the business. After David arrived at PNC, his team sent out a newsletter that reported on upcoming events, press releases, and issues for the company. The newsletter made people aware of the happenings around the company at an enterprise-level for the first time. It also showcased the ways in which corporate communications could support other departments’ initiatives. The positive feedback was immediate. People wanted to get communications involved in their own efforts. They now saw the department as a strategic player and someone who could help them do their jobs better. Once your colleagues see your team as essential to doing their job, the business impact of PR becomes immense.

But to have this kind of impact, you must build trust with other departments by aligning communications objectives to the objectives of the business.

Establish Common Goals

When creating a communications strategy for the 5 year anniversary of their IPO, Zoetis’ VP of Communications Bill Price created alignment right from the outset. He had discussions across departments and with his CEO to understand what everyone wanted to get from the company milestone. Bill and his team then leveraged the event to achieve the desired outcomes. This built trust in the comms function to help executive leadership and other departments achieve their goals.

Become a Trusted Advisor

Graeme Harris, CEO of Strategic Profiles Management, shared a similar story of building trust with his executive team. We always say that communications must be aligned with the business, but Graham flipped this on its head. He instead offered that the business align with comms. Graham convinced his executive committee to require execs to engage in a number of media activities per quarter, using data to prove the impact of spokesperson activities on the brand. The communications team became invaluable to the c-suite because their advice and expertise directly affected executives’ job performance. With continued success of the program, trust grew between the executives and comms team. This eventually lead to the communications department taking over the execs’ social media feeds with little editorial review.

In each of these success stories, accurate measurement and analysis enabled them to define strategy and demonstrate their accomplishments. Tying your media measurement to your business goals will enable the integrator role and increase the business impact of PR.

With the communications landscape changing, the required talent is also changing. Now, communications executives must hire people with skill sets, that three years ago, were not necessary. People who understand – How AI is impacting communications. Business in general, including how to read a balance sheet. How fake news is impacting businesses. Even the role of a CCO is modernizing. It’s no longer enough for the role to be foundational. Instead, they must be an integrator across the business to create cross functional collaboration. And they need to use data-driven insights to make their organization more agile.

This topic was discussed in a recent CommPRO webinar by top communications  executives. Here are five key skills for next generation communicators.

Storytelling with Data

Many communicators chose their profession to avoid having to deal with data and numbers. They tend to have very high EQs (Emotional Quotients) and great storytelling skills. And often feel that they are not as adept at the more data-driven business skills found in branches such as finance or legal. David Chamberlain, former VP of Corporate Communications at PNC, explains that these are actually essential skills for next generation communicators because they need to analyze and use media data insights to make better decisions. Media data allows you to answer questions like: are our CSR campaigns working to garner more positive SOV? Do we need to reallocate resources to messages that are not pulling through? Are our spokespeople staying on message?

Communicators can apply their storytelling skills to explain the insights that their analysis provides. Charts and graphs aren’t very interesting without the narrative to explain what someone is looking at and why they should care. Insights from your analysis should ultimately answer the question “what do we do next?”

Agility

Bill Price, VP of Communications at Zoetis notes that having a playbook mentality with only one way of thinking will not make you a successful business partner. Instead, he explains that, “you have to be adaptable to the strengths of leadership and their priorities and what works for them”. Instead of being a coach that makes players adapt to a system, be a coach that understands the talent and build success with that talent. Being able to recognize priorities and adapt to them is an important skill to create great business partnerships.

Chamberlain also adds that it is important to pivot and find alternate solutions. Being a critical observer will make you a well-rounded teammate and help lead situations to a preferred outcome.

Empathy

Having a level of empathy allows you to interpret signals and better understand others’ motivations. This is especially important when trying to understand signals the CEO is sending you, so that you can properly assess their concerns and come up with a solution. Graeme Harris, CEO of Strategic Profiles Management adds that “having that empathy and being able to decipher is a skill that you learn over time dealing with people. For some people its innate and easy, but others need to learn it”.

Persuasion

Unlike newer skills for next generation communicators, like focusing on data and analytics, the art of persuasion is still a core skill that they must possess.  Data will help your influence and support your strategy, but you need the soft skills to fully persuade audiences. Harris notes that “if you’re not able to impact and influence within your organization on behalf of your function, you are going to come up short as a communicator”.  There are strategic ways to impact and influence your organization, but it takes creativity and strategic thinking.

Networking and Diplomacy

Bill Price mentions that “you must be able to understand the allies you need to make before a meeting, who you need to pre-brief and how to manage egos to get people behind an idea when you are not the final decision maker.”

To accomplish this, get better at networking and have a good sense of your internal network. Who are the people that can get things done? Who is going to teach you gaps in your own knowledge of the business? Build your network to get this insight because it’s not included in your orientation kit when you first join a company. Price suggests that you build relationships over constant communication, meetings, phone calls, etc. Over time, this allows you to understand the team, the culture and how to get things done within your organization.

While it’s important to have a great internal network, next gen communicators should expand even further. It’s easy to become internally focused when working at a large company, but this blocks out such valuable information from the outside. Stay externally focused to research best practices and even look across industries. Don’t get bogged down in your day-to-day to do list.

• Attend webinars, read books and even follow social feeds of other companies or executives.
• If your company uses an outside firm, consult them and ask what their other clients are doing.
• Build your network and consider creating a group of people you trust, who are in similar roles, to occasionally talk and learn from one another.

For more executive insights on How to Be a Next Gen Communicator >>

The role of the Chief Communications Officer and the communications function is changing rapidly. Communications has been elevated to a proactive function that is increasingly providing value across the organization. This topic was discussed in a recent CommPRO webinar by top communications executives. Here are 5 ways the communications function is changing:

You Need to Be a Business Person

You may have turned to communications because you weren’t a math person, but gone are the days where communicators can shy away from understanding broader business numbers. The next generation of CCOs are using business data to earn themselves a seat at the decision-making table.

Bill Price, VP of Communications at Zoetis, explained that having that clear line of strategy across the business is essential to achieving goals. But to play the game, you must speak the language. David Chamberlain, former VP of Corporate Communications at PNC, adds that “we have to be business people who are communications experts, that are socially engaged.” He adds that “what I mean by business people, is that we’ve first got to be able to have a discussion about the business on the businesses’ terms, not just as a communications expert, for us to be able to move with them”.

CCOs Must Align Comms to the Business through Data-Driven Strategies

All-star communication teams are characterized by a close alignment of communication targets and business goals. However, current metrics commonly employed by PR teams fail to live up to modern standards.

David Chamberlain adds: “How we take in all that data and make sense of it and turn it into the insights that are actually actionable, to me, is something that most communications teams that I’ve seen struggle with …But as our social media and our traditional media evolve and new forms of media give us greater ability to measure and see analytics, I think that this type of interpretation and insight is probably going to be one of the critical skills that we all need to develop and strengthen going forward.”

Far too many departments are still struggling to understand data, let alone capture accurate metrics around tone, share of voice, or brand reputation. Next generation CCOs and their departments need to show their impact on business goals and the key is to tame the data wilderness by focusing on harnessing it for actionable insights.

Leads Must Modernize and Keep Up with the Times due to the Competitive Landscape

According to Arthur Page Society, the environment in which enterprises operate is fraught with emergent challenges from new competitors reinventing traditional business models to new modes of work, regulatory and socioeconomic factors. This has transformed how individuals communicate with one another and engage more actively with organizations.

Communicators are responsible for keeping pace with these times and advising their senior leaders on how to keep up. The communicator of the future harnesses media intelligence to understand their market and share findings with other parts of the organization like the C-Suite, IR, marketing and product development.

CEO of Strategic Profiles Management, Graeme Harris echoed this when he explained that during his past tenure as SVP of Communications at Manulife, it was his job to track key technological innovations. He added that this was essential information to help advise the senior executives on how their institution was keeping pace with the industry.

The Communications Function is Breaking Down Silos and Elevating itself

Communications leaders must communicate both internally – bringing together data and, externally – bringing voices from across the entire organization.

In many organizations such as PNC, communications is playing the role of breaking down organizational silos. For instance, David Chamberlain has taken the role of not just reporting on his team, but also sharing the results of the entire organization across the board. He adds that playing this new role as an integrator within his organization “has helped give Corporate Comms a halo, not only as an integrator, but as a strategic player and someone that people want to involve.”

Strategic Planning is a Much More Integrated Process

In addition to serving as a corporate integrator, communications itself has expanded tactically. Bill Price recounts “I can remember years ago when you developed communications plans and social media was an add-on at the end, or it was all about the press release…the way we approach everything now is much more integrated.”

Today, modern communications plans often encompass a mass array of tactical plans from media relations, to digital communications and even customer engagement. With all these different activities, teams need to find a way to pull in different sources of data from traditional and social media and measure them in a consistent matter that tracks your impact on the bottom line: specifically, quantifying brand reputation and impact on corporate goals.

For more executive insights on staying relevant as a communicator and the evolution of the communications function watch our CommPRO Webinar: How to Stay Relevant in 2020

Last week, I spoke at the annual NIRI conference addressing the changing nature of activist investing and how the IR function needs to evolve to keep up with these changes. As the rise of activists continues, so must strategies to monitor and engage across the media landscape and proactively manage brand (and investor) perceptions. A critical piece of being prepared for a brand crisis is building consistent and accurate data about your brand and reputation before a problem arises.

The Landscape Has Shifted – Social Media Has Made Leading the News Cycle Very Important – Albeit More Difficult

The Trump Era has ushered in a period where leading the news cycle with a narrative and message can commandeer the perception of truth. This “direct narrative of the truth” is often driven or amplified by direct communication on social media.

There can be many indications that an activist is targeting a stock – a regulatory filing, a phone call from the fund manager, or a newspaper headline. However, indications can also include questions from a junior analyst at a fund, a private meeting request or now increasingly a rumor on social media. Today, it is imperative that IR teams are aware of the impact of unregulated social activities in addition to all online conversions so that they can get in front of that “truth narrative”.

IR is no longer about surveillance and is now quickly shifting to proactive management. You need to not only understand how things are spreading on both traditional and social media, but more importantly, understand the entire media landscape and its key players to quickly react.

Activists Are Now Using Sophisticated PR Strategies to Engage the Shareholder Base – and So Should You.

The growth of passive shareholders has given companies more stable shareholder bases and made them accountable for delivering results, hence the need for proactive marketing and messaging. The need is further enhanced with the rise of Activist Investor movements and fast-moving market volatility. To carry out this proactive engagement, a richer partnership is required between IR and PR.

Here are some things you need to be thinking about now:

1. Different investors will react to various types of information and weigh various reputational aspects of a brand uniquely. It is important to determine how your brand drivers are resonating with key audiences. How are these key elements being captured in the media and in social conversations? Where is there a need for improvement?
2. Brands need to identify their weaknesses and their comparative advantages versus the competition at all times. Then you need to build the right messages to correct misguided perceptions with investors.
3. It is critical to understand your “influencers” – those that drive the perception of your stock as a place to invest. Not all influencers are created equally; it is not just about the Wall Street Analysts anymore. You need to know who the right influencers are, be it a government regulator, money manager, journalist, or simply an influential blogger, and engage those that matter.

Generic Tracking of the Media Conversation will no Longer Protect you – Go Deep to Get Smart.

Analyzing media is extremely important because media sentiment has been proven to be correlated with stock price. But, you need to go beyond simple keyword tracking to get accurate and actionable data – the “why”.

For media analysis to be successful, you can no longer rely on simply tracking your company name, executives and focusing on financial sites.  Old-school keyword-driven tracking and analytics will likely leave you blindsided. Instead, it’s time to understand the “reputational conversation”. Reputational data can help you break down your public perception and understand what is driving it. You can also know how to pitch content that will positively impact your image it by identifying authors and outlets that are pushing certain messages and receiving a lot of social traction. Benchmarking your reputational data can pinpoint areas for targeted, effective message improvement.

The World has Moved to Data-driven Decisions. Don’t Get Left Behind.

When making decisions, a simple opinion does not cut it. You need to work with numbers now – fight fire with fire – and get savvy fast. Interestingly, the best defense is a good offense. Hedge funds have huge data capabilities, but IR often does not. So you need to ask yourself: are your technologies and data analytics giving you an advantage versus your adversary?

You need to make sure you have the proper resources working reliably to generate quality data to back up your decisions.   And should a crisis hit, use that data to move smartly, quickly and in a proactive manner instead of chasing the issue.

Speed of AI is Increasing, but AI Still Struggles with Accuracy and Can Lead us Astray.

Use of artificial intelligence (AI) in IR is growing at a rapid pace. Enterprise IR solutions (Bloomberg CMi2i, Q4 Activism Alarm, Nasdaq IR, and others) apply machine learning to big financial data sets to predict vulnerable companies, investor trends and behavior, and overall investor sentiment towards specific industry sectors.

This information is useful as a baseline for a company to understand investors and identify when their company is being viewed as vulnerable. But repeated studies continue to prove that unsupervised machine learning is still missing the mark with media analysis.  Changing zeitgeist, linguistic nuances, sarcasm, and a variety of company perspectives and priorities greatly limit the effectiveness and accuracy of machine-only solutions.

In addition, automated story-writing on company earnings has taken off.  In 2014, Associated Press started to publish automated earnings stories. In Q1 of 2014, 300 of these stories were published. Fast forward to Q1 of 2018 and 4,700 stories were published. Clearly, the speed of AI is increasing, but at what cost? Neil Hershberg, SVP at Business Wire states, “While they certainly provide greater visibility to small and mid-sized companies that were previously excluded from editorial coverage, the template format of these reports can often result in material information being left out of stories.”

So if you are responsible for investor relations, your world is changing fast.  Social media, data analytics, artificial intelligence, and a rapidly changing investor landscape seem to have conspired to make your job more difficult.  So how are you going to regain control?

The Department of Treasury had an organization-wide goal to move towards online communications. To better engage their users and improve their operational excellence, they began surveying the constituents that came to their site.

The survey was a mix of “closed” (yes/no) questions and open-ended responses. While open-ended or freeform text answers are invaluable, they are often more challenging to analyze for trends. Now, couple this with the fact that most people who completed the questionnaires routinely didn’t answer the questions that were being asked– they answer different questions entirely – the information became very difficult to categorize for insight.

Discover how PublicRelay’s analysis allowed the Department of Treasury’s Online Services to improve usage and enhance satisfaction across the site, as well as ensure the on-going success of their push towards more modern, online communications.

Read the full case study here >>

A leading financial insurance company wanted to revamp its media measurement strategy. The new CCO tasked with implementing the improvement wanted to move their strategy beyond the manual media monitoring that the communications team had been employing. The team decided to adopt a human-assisted artificial intelligence solution that yields fully analyzed, accurate results in near real-time. The communications team can now spend less time worrying about collecting and organizing all the coverage data and instead focus on macro-level strategy. Company-wide goals like being known as a socially responsible organization are now attainable with all the new insights available. The communications team also has access to intelligence on their competitors, so the company knows how well it stacks up against the rest of the field.

Click here to learn more about the benefits provided to this financial insurance company with the help of their new human-assisted AI solution: Creating a Media Measurement Strategy Tied to Business Goals.