The ongoing pandemic and changing social values have redefined brand trust and public expectations of corporate brands. Further, a 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer survey found that 70% of consumers feel that trust in a company is more important today than ever before. But what exactly does it mean to today’s customers?

What is Brand Trust?

Brand trust is the degree of faith consumers have in your company to deliver on its promises. In addition to the quality of a company’s products or services, it can also refer to its financial performance or commitment to social causes. More recently, issues related to ESG and CSR have become more significant aspects of consumers’ trust in a brand. This aligns with the 74% of consumers who say that companies’ sizable impact on society and the planet is the main reason it has taken center stage.

Why is Brand Trust Important?

Brand trust is important because customers are more likely to purchase products and services from companies they feel they can rely on.

Trust significantly influences consumer behavior and purchase intent. Edelman’s 2020 survey – which included respondents from 11 countries – found that consumers rated trust as the second most important factor (behind price and affordability) when deciding to buy from a new brand or become a loyal customer.

Despite its importance, Havas’ 2021 Meaningful Brands Report indicates that only 39% of brands are trusted by consumers.

5 Ways to Build Brand Trust

So, what does this mean for PR teams?

Here are five ways your team can create a brand trust strategy that truly resonates with your target audience:

Know Your Audience

Consumers’ values when it comes to trust vary by audience demographics and interests. When studying trust across generations, Morning Consult found that not only are Millennials (1981 – 1995) and Gen Z (1996 – 2012) less trusting of the average brand, but they are also more likely to prioritize ethical concerns when choosing companies to trust. While the two younger generations are more likely to choose brands that align with their personal values, Gen X (1965 – 1980) consumers demonstrate greater long-term loyalty to their chosen brands.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to appealing to audiences, but it’s evident they all expect brands to meet certain standards. An in-depth understanding of your audience is crucial to building trust and maintaining consumer loyalty to your brand.

Define Your Values

Modern consumers favor brands that care about more than just profit. With your audience’s values in mind, consider where your company stands on each aspect of ESG and CSR. Over half of American consumers believe it’s important for companies to take a stand on social, environmental, and political issues. So, rather than steering clear of divisive topics, determine your company’s stance and publicize it. Millennials and Gen Z claim they are most receptive to brands sharing their stances on social media, in particular. Take advantage of your social channels to promote your values and highlight any work your company is doing to improve sustainability, ensure workplace safety, or promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), etc.

Show Authenticity

Research has shown that authenticity contributes to brands’ trustworthiness and perceived value. Use your social media channels to create authentic content and establish a connection with your audience.

According to Forbes, the key to being authentic is to “keep it real.” This means sharing the good and the bad with your audience, being honest and accountable when you fail, and maintaining a consistent, relatable voice across your channels. Your audience wants to feel as though they are hearing from a human being on the other end of your social accounts, not a disembodied corporation.

Ensure Transparency

A commitment to full transparency is fundamental to building and maintaining brand trust, even when your company makes mistakes. You can ensure transparency by being honest about your company’s operations and making information readily accessible to the public. Your consumers want to know that you are accountable to them and aren’t misleading with any of the information you share or withhold.

Two key steps towards transparency include admitting to your failures and outlining your plans to address them, and responding to online reviews in a way that demonstrates your openness to criticism.

Avoid Empty Promises

Audiences are wary of brands who are hopping on the social values bandwagon without making any operational changes towards an impact. You can show your consumers that your company has put action and money behind those values by measuring and reporting your CSR, ESG, and DEI efforts and impact.

Similarly, avoid claiming that your brand supports any values that align with your audience’s if you can’t back them up with evidence that your company is acting. Your audience will hold you accountable.

Measure Your Impact

In this era of uncertainty, it is more important than ever to build and strengthen consumers’ faith in your company. By taking steps to establish trust with your audience, you can improve consumer loyalty long-term.

But how do you know if your PR strategy is resonating with your audience and moving the needle on brand trust?

With the majority of brand work taking place across social platforms, understanding the conversations happening around broad social topics is essential to inform your strategy. You can then use social media listening to evaluate your social presence.

With our human-augmented AI approach to media analytics, PublicRelay can accurately evaluate text for sentiment, context, and multidimensional concepts across social, traditional, and broadcast media.

Click here to learn how you can start measuring your media coverage today!

Social media analytics that make sense of the conversations happening across social platforms is an essential tool of modern PR. Tracking discussions about specific products, campaigns, and companies using social media analytics tools can provide PR teams with valuable insights into their company’s and competitors’ reputations. However, broader social topics, like ESG, have become increasingly important to stakeholders and are a significant factor in business success.

Read: The Role of Social Media in Public Relations

Communications teams must keep a finger on the pulse of the broad social issues, like sustainability, that impact their industries and align with their target audience’s values. With 500 million tweets sent per day, social media has presented an opportunity for companies by providing an open-source of audience perspectives and attitudes on every topic imaginable, with updates every second.

On the flip side, digesting the sheer amount of social data available while extracting reliable insights is easier said than done. That’s where sampling comes in.

What is sampling in social media analytics?

Sampling in social media analytics is the process of collecting a subset of social media coverage of a specific topic for analysis to infer what the general population is saying about it. Rather than collecting and analyzing every mention, sampling reduces the amount of data to a manageable volume while maintaining the integrity and accuracy of the findings.

For example, let’s say your team wants to know what aspects of ESG people care about most to refine an upcoming campaign. Social media sampling will gather selections of social coverage mentioning ESG topics using a sampling method that accounts for variation across the larger population. That sample of social content will then be analyzed and yield insights that can be applied to the total population.

Why is sampling in social media analytics important?

Sampling in social media analytics is important because it enables communications teams to distill massive amounts of data on a broad topic spanning social media into actionable insights relevant to your industry.

As broader social topics, including ESG and CSR, become more significant facets of companies’ reputations, understanding public discourse and sentiment surrounding these themes is equally as important as tracking your company mentions to managing your brand.

While standard automated social media monitoring tools can track your and your competitors’ social presences, they aren’t designed to accurately analyze mentions of concepts or complex topics. Human analysis, on the other hand, can more accurately capture this kind of content but struggles with the volume of data across social platforms. However, sampling is a statistically validated method for extracting insights from enormous data sets, like the one made available by social media.

How does social media sampling work?

Essentially, sampling is the process of taking and analyzing small (representative) samples of a dataset to draw conclusions about the total population without having to analyze each data point.

Social media sampling uses a statistical method often used in accounting that arranges large quantities of data into groups based on similarities, then draws subsets of data from each group reflective of the general population. The subset of data is then cleaned and analyzed to generate insights that can be extrapolated to larger populations.

How can you apply insights from social media sampling to your communications strategy?

Social values and priorities can change from one viral Tweet to the next. Understanding the topics and subtopics receiving the most positive coverage and engagement across social media in near-real time can guide your campaigns and help you to capitalize on opportunities to promote your key messages at exactly the right moment.

Here are a few considerations for making the most of social media sampling:

Determine the topics that are relevant to your industry

Consider your range of stakeholders and their priorities. Generally, sampling for social media analysis is best applied to broad topics related to corporate reputation (e.g., CSR, workplace environment, etc.) or timely social issues (e.g., ESG, DEI, gender equity, data protection, sustainability, etc.).

Each of your stakeholder groups will have differing and, at times, competing interests. Outlining the issues relevant to your industry stakeholders (e.g., consumers may care about sustainability and data protection, while employees value compensation and DEI, and local communities are concerned with CSR) will help you define the topics you’ll benefit from tracking.

Measure subtopics

Analyzing the right subtopics will provide your team with a more nuanced understanding of the conversations surrounding each tracked topic and enable you to finely-tune your messaging.

For instance, when measuring social media discussions around workplace environment, breaking coverage down according to subtopics can tell you whether people currently care most about DEI, compensation, or gender pay equity.

Develop a responsive strategy

Communications guided by insights from sampling social media require a PR team prepared to react quickly to changing social values and adjust messaging accordingly.

The insights made available by sampling social media can highlight what people care about most, when they are talking about it, and how to best frame your campaigns surrounding each topic and subtopic to resonate with your audience.

By having a strategy primed to adapt to abruptly changing views on significant topics, your team can take advantage of the nuanced understanding of social media discourse enabled by sampling.

Inform Your Communications Using Sampling in Social Media Analytics

Effective communications require a nuanced understanding of more than your company’s reputation. Tracking the social topics that span social media platforms can change how you deliver your key messages by capitalizing on the trends and nuances of the conversations surrounding them.

Though social media analytics tools that rely exclusively on technology can’t extract reliable insights on broad social topics, employing a statistically proven sampling method supported by human analysis can.

Not to mention, analyzing text for concepts, sentiment, and linguistic devices (like irony, sarcasm, and slang), often used in social media conversations, requires a human understanding that technology alone can’t match.

At PublicRelay, we apply our human-augmented AI method of media measurement to sampling social media content. By combining advanced technology with human intelligence, our team analyzes each social media topic according to the subtopics, sentiment, and concepts relevant to your industry and company. Click here to amplify your social media analysis using sampling now!

Brand credibility is crucial for a company to establish itself and is a key factor in sustained growth. For that reason, understanding brand credibility and how it can be influenced by earned media coverage is an important aspect of managing a company’s reputation. While it is most effectively built over time, PR teams can take several steps to help expedite the process.

What is Brand Credibility?

Brand credibility is the level of trust consumers have in a brand and their perceptions of its expertise. The Association for Consumer Research further explains it as “the believability of the product information contained in a brand, which requires that consumers perceive that the brand has the ability (i.e., expertise) and willingness (i.e., trustworthiness) to continuously deliver what has been promised.” It is an aspect of a company’s reputation that is most often cultivated over time as the quality of its products or services proves consistent and its brand awareness increases.

Why is Brand Credibility Important?

Brand credibility is important because the ability to garner consumers’ trust is essential to brand health. Trust in a company’s product and message, along with confidence in its ability to deliver a consistent and high-quality product, reflects positively on a company’s reputation and sets it apart from competitors. Customers must be able to rely on the quality of the product or service the brand is providing. A 2019 study of trust and risk perspectives of high-value brands noted that “customers adopt trust as a shortcut to avoid complex decision processes that carry risk.” If a company gives reason for skepticism, a consumer is more likely to forgo it for another brand. Overall, credible brands have more forgiving relationships and personal connections with their consumers.

Ways to Build Your Brand Credibility

Brand credibility can be difficult to build because of the time it takes to develop consistency and social proof. It can take years to prove to consumers that your products or services are reliable and for positive reviews to accumulate. However, a brand’s earned media coverage can increase its visibility and boost public perceptions of the validity of its claims.

Here are four ways you can build brand credibility:

Promote Spokesperson Coverage

Coverage of your company spokespeople and executives in reputable or industry-recognized third-party media outlets can establish the credibility and expertise of your brand. By securing bylines or offering quotes or interviews to relevant trade publications, consumers will see that your brand representatives are regarded as credible and experts in their fields. Even simply having a quote appear in a priority outlet can help build the integrity of your brand and perceived expertise. Further, contributing articles to industry publications or being cited for thought leadership can be an additional boost to your spokespeople’s reputations as experts.

Leverage Your Social Media Channels

Using social media allows for a direct connection between a brand and its consumers and paves the wave for establishing trust with your audience. According to a 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer special report, “four in 10 consumers say they are unlikely to become emotionally attached to a brand unless they are interacting via social media.” Being active and present on social media can show an attentiveness toward customers’ concerns, and allow a brand to boost its perceived authenticity which, in turn, fosters trust.

Build Social Proof

Social proof refers to the tendency of people to look to the opinions of others to guide their actions and beliefs. Social proof is vital to public relations because people’s judgments are shaped by others when they’re uncertain of how to feel about a new product or brand. There are several ways to build social proof that will resonate with your target audience.

For instance, positive reviews from past customers serve to confirm the quality and reliability of your products or services for prospective customers. Likewise, testimonials from existing clients or relevant influencers are useful for building trust among a shared target audience. Recent research has even found that celebrity trust in a company can significantly impact brand credibility.

Evaluate Your Strategy

Brand credibility takes time to develop, and some tactics may work better than others. Monitoring the impact of your spokesperson coverage, social proof, and influencer strategies on the portrayal of your company in earned media coverage can indicate whether your PR outputs are resonating with your target audience.

Build a media measurement program that tracks the metrics and industry topics that matter most to your reputation for data to guide your messaging and approach. By tracking your company’s earned media coverage, you can evaluate the impact of your campaigns on your brand credibility and learn from your competitors to inform your communications strategy.

Measuring Brand Credibility

Brand credibility is an essential facet of brand health. It cements a company and its representatives as reputable, allowing it greater longevity. Being mindful of the factors that contribute to perceptions of trust and expertise is crucial for PR teams looking to build or improve credibility.

With our unique human-AI hybrid approach to media measurement, PublicRelay can help your team benchmark your brand against competitors and gauge your impact in obtaining high brand credibility. Start measuring your earned media coverage now!

TYSONS CORNER, Va., Sept. 20, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — PublicRelay, the leading global provider of media insights and analytics to brands and enterprises, announced a strategic growth investment from Tritium Partners and the appointment of seasoned executive Mark Parise to its board as Executive Chairman. The investment will accelerate the company’s plans to launch new analytics and insights products along with AI applications to provide unmatched predictive capabilities to its clients with unparalleled speed and accuracy.

Founded in 2008, PublicRelay is trusted by over 100 of the world’s most respected brands and has established itself as the leading provider of data-driven media monitoring and analytical insights. As highlighted by its tremendous customer loyalty, PublicRelay is an essential partner, delivering powerful real-time feedback and insights that are critical for communication and marketing executives, CEOs, and corporate boards in today’s fast-paced, digital and social world. 

“PublicRelay is on a mission to give communications executives the data and insights they need to drive their teams forward more efficiently and effectively, to measure and prove their impact, and to tie their efforts to the company’s goals,” said Eric Koefoot, founder and CEO of PublicRelay. “With Mark’s extensive expertise in building world-class information and insight businesses along with Tritium’s proven experience in building market-leading analytics companies, PublicRelay’s future has never been brighter.”

Advising PublicRelay on its growth strategy and expansion plans is Mark Parise, who recently joined as Executive Chairman of the company’s board. Mr. Parise is a seasoned senior executive with a proven track record of scaling information and analytics companies and creating significant value for their clients and investors. Most recently, he was the CEO of First Advantage, the global leader in background-screening information and insights. Prior to First Advantage, Mr. Parise was the President of IRI, the global information and market research leader that provides business intelligence to consumer-packaged goods, retail, beverage and healthcare companies. Notably, during his tenures at both First Advantage and IRI, Mr. Parise substantially grew the revenue of each business while driving new product enhancements and innovation. He also served as President of Experian Marketing Services, where he led consumer-marketing information, technology, and analytics.

“I am incredibly impressed with how PublicRelay’s differentiated use of advanced technology paired with its high-quality information and analyst team has created a unique, market-leading approach that is solving key brand management challenges and delivering value in ways the competition cannot,” said Mr. Parise. “I am thrilled to be joining PublicRelay and playing an active role in the company’s next phase of growth. We are laser focused on making continuous investments in our team and the innovations that will further enable us to deliver the highest quality and the most effective information for forward-looking, prescriptive and predictive insights.”  

“PublicRelay is on an exciting growth trajectory and is poised to be a huge disrupting force in an industry hungry for innovation and superior, actionable intelligence,” added James Maxfield, partner of Tritium Partners. “We are excited to partner with Eric, Mark and the PublicRelay team as they focus on building and delivering even more real-time insights and predictive analytics solutions to the world’s leading brands and their communications teams.”

About PublicRelay
PublicRelay turns language into insight as the most trusted media analytics solution for many of the world’s largest brands and companies. PublicRelay’s clients confidently use its media analyses to plan and measure influencer engagement, reputation management, the competitive landscape, and message pull-through – all while tying them back to key business objectives. Known for continual innovation, superior data quality, and actionable insights, PublicRelay delivers accurate answers to the most pressing strategic business questions surrounding media. For more information, please visit www.publicrelay.com.

About Tritium Partners
Founded in 2013, Tritium Partners is a private equity firm focused on technology and services companies with exceptional growth potential. With ~$800 million of assets under management, Tritium actively partners with talented founders and executives to build market-leading companies through high-growth strategies, while maintaining capital efficiency. Tritium’s approach emphasizes creating long-term value through both strategic growth initiatives and acquisitions, with specialized expertise in FinTech and financial services, Internet marketplaces, software data and analytics, supply chain and logistics, and tech-enabled business services. For more information, please visit www.tritiumpartners.com.

Contact
Caroline Luz
Lambert & Co.
203-656-2829
cluz@lambert.com

SOURCE PublicRelay

Environmental, social, and governance concerns are becoming increasingly pressing and attracting the attention of both corporations and consumers. According to PwC, consumers and employees now expect businesses to invest in “making sustainable improvements to the environment and society, not just comply with regulations.” In fact, they found that overwhelming majorities (over 75%) of both consumers and employees are more likely to buy from or work for companies that share their values across the various dimensions of ESG.

As the importance of ESG grows, it plays an even more significant role in companies’ brand reputations. For this reason, it’s vital to strengthen your ESG communications strategy to shape and manage your company narrative.

What is ESG?

ESG (Environmental, Social, and [Corporate] Governance) is a framework for assessing a company’s sustainability and conscientiousness across three categories of interest for “socially responsible investors,” according to the Corporate Finance Institute. While it has been a prominent topic in the world of investing for a while, companies are becoming more concerned with their overall ESG practices and initiatives as a brand. These issues broadly fall under the blanket term “business ethics” – a company’s morals and values, which they may express through their policies, statements, and actions. While social responsibility may not seem as vital or urgent as financial performance to the success of a business, it can make or break a company’s reputation. Most reputation management crises can be classified under one or more of the three dimensions.

Why is ESG Important?

ESG is important because it helps guide companies’ business approaches by considering the values of the next generation of consumers. According to FirstInsight, Generation Z consumers, in particular, are making even more purchase decisions based on sustainable retail practices. SmallBusiness also points out that companies with a strong ethical identity tend to maintain a higher degree of stakeholder satisfaction, in turn leading to greater financial results. Furthermore, ESG best practices help to maintain a good reputation in the public eye, making consumers more likely to purchase from and remain loyal to a company.

ESG Framework

Each of ESG’s three components includes a set of criteria that businesses can be evaluated by:

Environmental

Environmental criteria involve a company’s attitude and actions on climate change issues. The use of renewable energy sources, waste management programs, and environmental protection fall under this category.

For example, there has been increasing pressure on corporations to lower their consumption of single-use plastics. The Plastic Waste Makers Index recently found that twenty companies are the source of more than half of all single-use plastic thrown away globally. Environmental initiatives like the one undertaken by Coca-Cola – which aims to have its packaging comprised of 50% recycled material by 2030 – signal to consumers that a company is taking ownership of its eco-footprint and takes ESG concerns seriously.

Not only can environmentally-conscious practices help businesses save money – complying with environmental regulations avoids costly tariffs – but going green can also boost sales with 78% of people more likely to purchase a product that is clearly labeled as environmentally friendly. Overall, businesses can maximize profits and improve their brand identity by appealing to modern, environmentally conscious consumers.

Social

Social criteria refer to a company’s relationships with its various stakeholders, including employees, customers, investors, and local communities. For instance, employer brand has been highlighted as a significant aspect of company reputation, especially since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Evidence showed that companies that were respectful, understanding, and flexible towards employees during this time were more likely to have favorable ESG rankings among consumers.

Social criteria also consider businesses’ role in social issues, with 60% of the U.S. population saying that how a brand responds to racial justice protests would influence whether they buy or boycott the brand in the future. Further, consumers want to see companies take a stance on prominent social issues and back up their views with concrete actions. For example, during the Black Lives Matter movement, the public paid close attention to which corporations were coming out in support of people of color. Not only that, but a study by YPulse found the younger generation of consumers expected brands to follow up on any social media statements in support of the Black Lives Matter movement with donations or by changing their business practices.

Governance

Corporate governance criteria describe how a corporation is managed from the top-down. In other words, how key decision-makers respond to crises while protecting the rights of their stakeholders.

Governance encompasses financial and accounting transparency, as well as workplace practices. For instance, the MeToo movement shown a light on companies’ corporate governance, with many forced to examine whether they had enforced policies and practices that ensured a safe working environment for women.

Neglecting or failing to follow healthy corporate governance standards can be detrimental to business and can have lasting ramifications not only for a company’s financial performance but also for its brand reputation.

How to Improve Your ESG Communications Strategy

Given how impactful implementing an ESG strategy can be on business performance, it will continue to play an important role in public relations for years to come.

PR teams must effectively communicate their company’s ESG goals and the actions they’re taking to achieve them. By setting and publicizing targets, businesses allow their employees and the public to hold them accountable to their goals, garnering more trust in the process.

Here are a few ways to improve your ESG communications strategy:

Know Your Audience

Understanding the values of your audience is a vital step in strengthening your ESG strategy. By examining survey and polling data, you can assess which elements of ESG are most important to your target audience. This will make it easier to cater your ESG communications approach to each demographic. Market research allows you to prioritize coverage of the issues your target audience cares about most, whether that’s your company’s contribution to the racial justice movement or efforts to reduce its carbon footprint. You should also evaluate the best way to reach each demographic. For instance, regularly updating social media platforms may be a great tool to engage younger consumers in your socially responsible accomplishments. Likewise, a monthly newsletter in the inboxes of employees can be a fantastic way to keep them involved.

Define Your Narrative

Understanding your purpose as a company and what you can contribute to society is inextricably linked to ESG performance. Set clear and achievable goals and ensure that you have internal buy-in. In doing so, you are setting the standard for a united ESG strategy with the support of your stakeholders. The next step is to communicate those goals to relevant stakeholders through a cohesive narrative. A memorable ESG mission statement is a simple but effective way to get a message across. A perfect example is Starbucks’s sustainability initiative, Shared Planet, which they describe as a “commitment to do business in ways that are good for people and the planet.”

Promote your company’s ESG goals by sharing success stories, converting ESG data and outcomes into infographics, publishing employee testimonials, and writing press releases. Develop strategies for getting your company’s ESG experts cited on key topics and share relevant content with publications to increase your company’s visibility. Decide what your key messages are and make sure they are being heard.

Evaluate Your Strategy

As you continue to spread your chosen ESG narrative, it’s essential to track earned media coverage and note which communications efforts are most effective. Incorporating media monitoring and analytics will put the efficacy of your ESG communications strategy to the test. By understanding key message penetration and sentiment around your ESG initiatives, you can adjust your communications strategy accordingly. You can also glean insights from your industry and competitors’ earned media coverage. By gauging what is or isn’t working for them and your shared audience, you can carve out your unique brand voice. Measuring different forms of engagement, such as social sharing, can also be a very useful tool in determining the success of your strategy. After all, what use is a fantastic press release showcasing your ESG initiatives if nobody reads it? Media monitoring can gauge whether the right messages are reaching the right people.

Build a Better Strategy

A strong ESG communications strategy is essential to PR teams’ ability to manage their company reputation. With an in-depth analysis of your company’s earned media coverage, your team can craft campaigns in line with your stakeholder’s values as they evolve. Understanding how your company and your key competitors are performing on the various dimensions of ESG will provide you with a clear path towards achieving your communications goals. The ability to accurately discern sentiment, context, and nuance has never been more relevant, which is why PublicRelay’s human-AI hybrid approach to media monitoring is even better for analyzing ESG topics than a purely automated tool. Click here to learn more now!

Communications teams have the incredible responsibility of managing their company reputation across all forms of media. What may appear to be a simple task spans a seemingly infinite number of online outlets, print publications, and social sites with constantly changing discussions. Not only that, but conversations around your brand can quickly become cacophonous and make it difficult to decipher how your brand is represented.

What is Reputation Management?

Reputation management is the act of influencing or controlling public perceptions of a company. With the increasing shift towards digital media, the practice requires consideration of traditional, online, broadcast, and social media.

Managing your reputation is both active and reactive and is shaped by three types of coverage: earned, paid, and owned media. Paid media relates to advertising, earned media encompasses traditional media coverage and social discussions, and owned media refers to content published by your organization, like your company website, blog, and social media.

Why is Reputation Management Important?

Reputation management is important because it can help your company build trust and brand loyalty in an era when consumers are more informed, demanding, and skeptical than ever. As younger generations amass more buying power, monitoring your brand can also help ensure your company stays relevant in a highly competitive market. For instance, Gen Z favors authenticity, fun, and tech when they consider brands – do you know how your company is performing in those areas?

The factors influencing how a brand is perceived expand far beyond the scope of typical business operations: they now encompass social and environmental responsibility, corporate governance, and community relations. PR teams are even developing practices around CEO activism to maintain a reputation that connects with today’s consumers. Investing in reputation management can help your company make sure it is represented favorably by the media and that its portrayal stays relevant.

Steps to Build a Reputation Management Strategy

Building a reputation management strategy begins with identifying your reputational drivers: the key aspects that construct your brand’s identity. After determining the topics that drive your brand’s coverage, implement a data-based media strategy to track your key messages and develop strategies to correct divergences from your desired brand. Monitoring competitor coverage can also help your team to predict trends and develop internal strategies for crisis response.

Identify Your Reputational Drivers

Start by identifying the key factors that drive your company’s reputation, also known as reputational drivers. At PublicRelay, we have developed a framework of seven essential reputation drivers that can be applied or adapted to any company: products and services, business strategy, workplace, leadership, corporate social responsibility, financial performance, and government relations.

Reputational drivers work together to help paint a cohesive picture of the public perception of your brand and should be tailored to represent your company and industry. Maybe your company has reworked its communications themes for 2021, and emphasis on diversity is crucial. After all, a growing number of consumers are changing their consumption habits to frequent more diverse businesses. Using the reputational drivers “workplace” and “corporate social responsibility” you can track sub-categories such as “diversity” and “DEI initiatives” to accurately assess your performance on specific facets of your reputational goals.

Your team may not yet know the full breadth of the drivers that comprise your corporate reputation. Tracking key industry competitors or launching a whitespace program to monitor PR strategies and discussions in your sector are excellent, in-depth starting points to understand the reputational drivers of both close competitors and larger organizations.

Monitor Your Coverage Using Real-Time Data Analytics

One of the most effective methods for ensuring that your messaging and earned media are consistent with your reputational goals is using real-time analytics. Tracking the volume, tone, and sharing of media output that mentions your company can help you determine how often your key messages are discussed, the sentiment surrounding them, and how readers engage with your coverage.

Using real-time analytics also allows you to pivot and adapt your brand messaging in response to public interests, political activity, and global events. For example, environmental, social, and governance topics have exploded over the last 12 months, with global standard-setters announcing new ways to comprehensively measure and track businesses’ ESG initiatives.

However, be wary of fully automated real-time data analysis solutions – AI and Machine Learning can only accomplish so much when analyzing articles for sentiment, significance, and social context. Alternatively, if humans analyze your data, you can access a richness of reputation analysis that allows for a more useful data set. For example, how can AI determine how ethical your brand appears in earned media? According to McKinsey, ethics are a key aspect influencing decision-making for Gen Z, and human analysis will ensure your coverage is accurately evaluated for such nuanced social issues.   

Develop Data-Based Strategies for Crises That Threaten Reputation

Tracking your company messages and those of your peers can also help shape your approach to crisis communications. When negative publicity threatens your brand’s reputation, you can use data from the experiences of competitors faced with similar crises in the past to inform your response. Whether the move is to remain quiet as coverage passes or issue a carefully worded statement, competitive tracking can give you the foresight to deftly maneuver potential challenges.

Identify the Threats Worth Addressing

Negative articles about your brand will inevitably be published from time to time, but not all bad press is worth addressing. Coverage that threatens your desired brand may be worthy of a response if published by a high-reach outlet or if it garners significant social sharing, as both factors could snowball into additional negative coverage or even result in a communications crisis. Social engagement is especially important, as sharing spreads articles across websites, amplifying their reach exponentially.

Predictive analytics can help your team to see around the corner when it comes to topics with high potential virality, allowing you to know before an article goes viral if it constitutes a potential threat to your brand reputation.  This mechanism can also help you anticipate positive coverage, enabling your team to capitalize on sharing trends.

Start Managing Your Reputation Today

Reputation management is one of the greatest responsibilities of PR and communications teams. While paid and owned media are internally controlled, earned media relies on both a proactive and reactive management strategy best implemented with reputational driver analysis as they appear in the media. With real-time data analysis, your communications team can track how your brand messages are portrayed across earned media, how social users engage your campaigns, and how peer messages appear in the press. A comparative analysis can also allow your company a representative insight into the market, identifying how your reputation stands against peers and what you can learn from their mistakes.

PublicRelay can help your team reactively and proactively track topics that might throw a wrench in your brand management plans. Our new predictive momentum score allows our clients to see the likelihood of an article will going viral on social media. To know if a topic is trending enough to warrant a crisis management-level response, we also offer predictive alerts to notify your team hours in advance of an article that might go viral so you can begin strategizing. To learn more about how PublicRelay can help to manage your brand, click here.

Media monitoring is the process by which a company keeps track of its media coverage. This practice benefits PR and communications teams in many ways. Most notably, a good monitoring program allows a company to more effectively manage its reputation, one of the greatest assets of any business.

Tracking media coverage has become an increasingly essential part of companies’ PR strategies. With the introduction of social and digital media, coupled with media content that is readily available to people on smart devices, a successful monitoring program is crucial to staying on top of your company’s public image.

Why is Media Monitoring Important?

Media monitoring is important because it helps you stay up-to-date on the latest trends in your industry and provides your PR team with the opportunity to proactively manage your brand. Having a strong monitoring system in place allows your team to listen to and take note of what is going on in your industry and how your business is perceived on a day-to-day basis.

If you want to increase your brand awareness and demonstrate your team’s impact, media monitoring will support your PR team with these goals.

The Best Metrics for Media Monitoring

Many metrics can be used when monitoring media. Selecting the correct metrics when establishing your monitoring program will provide your team with the data necessary to inform your strategy and reach your communications objectives.

Several essential metrics that can provide your PR team with an overarching view of your company’s and your competitors’ media coverage are:

• Volume and tone of company mentions
• Key message penetration
• Top authors and outlets
• Competitor and industry coverage
• Social media coverage and engagement
• Sentiment of coverage
• Potential impressions

Why Media Monitoring Should Be a Part of Your PR Strategy

Here are a few of the ways media monitoring can support your PR team:

Manage Corporate Reputation

By following the topic and tone of and engagement with your company’s media coverage, you are better prepared to build or adjust your communications strategy accordingly.

With the ability to track what is said about your business, your PR team can quickly react to negative coverage and respond to such stories or mentions constructively, therefore mitigating potential PR crises. It also allows your PR team to identify opportunities to capitalize on positive coverage or trending topics in your industry.

Track Your Key Messages

Key message penetration is an excellent indicator of your brand awareness and the effectiveness of your messaging campaigns. With a media monitoring program that can detect keywords, concepts, and topics related to your campaigns, you can assess the extent to which your key messages have been picked up by the media. You can also determine the sentiment of that coverage, how many people were potentially exposed to it, and the level of social engagement it has received. This level of depth and insight will allow you to evaluate your existing strategy and inform future campaigns.

Know Your Industry and Competition

Beyond your company’s coverage, the coverage of your competitors and industry holds many insights.

Competitive intelligence is a simple way to stay on top of the latest industry developments and trends and to determine your company’s share of voice within your industry. Share of voice gives your team the chance to see how your company is faring directly against your competition. Monitoring your competitors also allows you to identify the topics driving their positive and negative coverage, and that which generates the most social engagement.

Measure the Effectiveness of Your Communications

Media monitoring is a great tool that allows your team to measure and improve the effectiveness of your communications. The insights gained can help you to determine whether you understand your target audience, you are reaching your target audience, and if you’re getting the type of engagement that you are striving for.

With a monitoring tool or service in place, the data is collected automatically, allowing you to perform an ongoing evaluation of your approach. Quality data from monitoring your media can reliably inform decision-making and accurately measure the impact of your communications.

How Does Media Monitoring Work?

Planning and correctly implementing a monitoring program is vital to ensuring the tool’s success for your PR team. If your team doesn’t do the appropriate planning, it’s likely your monitoring program won’t deliver the full extent of its value. A successful planning process will ensure that the program your team develops provides advantages from the beginning.

There are three core steps necessary to make the most of your program:  

Set Objectives

The first stage of planning your monitoring strategy is setting your objectives. What do you want to learn from your media coverage? Knowing this will help you to figure out the type of metrics you need to measure. As a starting point, monitor your company coverage fully, as this will provide a base-level knowledge of your brand. It will also allow your team to measure the impact of your communications over time and compare coverage to previous periods.

Establish Reputational Drivers

Perhaps the most important step is determining the drivers of your corporate reputation. Reputational drivers are the factors that contribute to the overall public perception of a company. Defining and capturing these brand elements will help your team to understand and manage your corporate reputation.

At PublicRelay, we use a framework of essential drivers to guide the planning of your monitoring program. Several core drivers that can apply to most businesses include workplace, leadership, financial performance, and government relations. These drivers, which are mutually exclusive and capture every facet of your company, offer a clearer picture of what is shaping public perceptions of your company.

Gather and Interpret the Data

After collecting initial media data, you can gather and interpret your metrics. The interpretation of the data is what aids you in understanding your business, your competitors, and your industry. As your team interprets the collected data, you can now make changes to your campaigns as needed. With this information, your team can see what works, where you can improve, and which of your key messages are captured by the media. 

With sufficient planning and accurate data collection, your team can draw actionable insights and improve your PR and communications strategies.

Elevate Your Media Monitoring Program

Media monitoring is essential to helping your PR team understand how well your current strategies are working and how your team can continue to plot a path towards future success. To take your strategy to the next level, consider incorporating media analytics into your communications process.

At PublicRelay, we offer clients accurate and in-depth analyses of their media coverage. With our media monitoring solution, we can help you to build a foundation of nuanced, high-quality data to assess the effectiveness of your messaging campaigns. Demonstrate the success of your communications strategy and start tracking your earned media now!

While PR teams used to rely on press releases and media outlets to connect with their target audiences, social media’s integration into people’s daily lives has made the public more accessible than ever before.

Georgetown University’s Center for Social Impact Communication notes that “as both PR and social media are used to build and maintain trust in the company and their products, it is only natural that the two must be in sync.” Unsurprisingly, social platforms have become valuable tools that are essential to communications teams’ ability to increase brand awareness and perceived authenticity with their target audience.

Why is Social Media Important for Public Relations?

Social media is an important tool for PR because it allows you to reach audiences that previously may have been difficult to interact with. With social media, the world is quite literally at your fingertips. Among this population, industry influencers are an indispensable resource that can help your team communicate key messages and lend weight to them, whether via reach or credibility. In addition, social measurement tools can help you assess the impact of your campaigns and fine-tune your strategy.

How to Use Social Media to Support Your PR Strategy

To effectively use social media to support your PR strategy, you must define your goals. Start broad by first determining your overarching objective. Then develop questions such as:

• What niche do you occupy in your industry?
• How can you distinguish yourself from your peers and competitors?
• Who is your target audience?
• Which platforms does your target audience engage with most?
• What kinds of content does your target audience interact with most?

Delving into these questions and defining clear answers will help you to build a solid foundation to work from. The answers to these questions provide a guideline that you can use to ensure you are working towards your overarching goals as you explore the minutiae of how to do so.

Understand Your Target Audience

While having a large target audience may seem beneficial, it’s more effective to have a narrow and specific description of your target audience. Creating a buyer persona – a detailed profile of your ideal consumer – is one way to do this. Referring to a buyer persona helps to map out the platforms and content that will be most effective in attracting your desired audience. The best way to collect this information is with reliable data and social media analytics. As Business News Daily suggests, “use data to learn about and target your customers based on characteristics such as location, language, and interests.”

Having a focused understanding of your target audience prevents the potential pitfall of spreading your resources too thin or having juxtaposed messaging intending to appeal to various groups of people. The latter of which can appear inconsistent to audiences and confuse your brand messages.

Engage with Influencers

Before the rise of social media, communications teams would have to call media outlets to pitch a story. Now, social media influencers have become a driving force in transmitting messages to target audiences, with research showing that 63% of consumers trust influencers over a brand’s in-house advertisers. In addition to the benefit of effectively reaching audiences that would otherwise be difficult to reach, they also lend authority to messages. Third-party influencers add to message credibility because they are often deemed as subject matter experts by the media.  

Engage with Journalists

Regularly engaging with influencers, especially journalists, can help create genuine relationships that will continue to aid you over time. As Michelle Mekky of Mekky Media Relations explains, Twitter is an excellent tool to use for reaching out to journalists because they “are online for the sole purpose of interacting with the public.”

When identifying journalists, dig into specifics that will help you increase your chances of a beneficial partnership. Decide which outlets fit best with your brand and the journalists from those outlets who regularly write about topics relevant to your industry. You can also scan their Twitter feeds for an indication of the types of stories they engage with to gauge whether you are on the right path.

With this information, you can cater to their interests when reaching out. If your goals and interests appear to align, write a concise message to grab their attention. As Twitter consists of short, fast-paced Tweets, it’s best to comply with those expectations even when messaging someone.

Create a Brand Guideline

Consistency when building brand awareness is the key to establishing familiarity with your audience. Posting social content on a regular schedule and communicating in ways that encapsulate your brand are crucial steps for increasing that brand awareness. Create a brand guideline to help define your brand and establish a point of reference to ensure you have a consistent tone of voice across your social media activity, the nuances of which may differ depending on which platform you are posting. Remember that consistency is what ultimately reinforces your brand. 

Fine-Tuning Your Strategy

Social media is an ever-changing landscape, and you can expect trial-and-error as you find your footing. Knowing what doesn’t work can be just as helpful as knowing what does, and so it’s important to be objectively aware of every failure and success. Using reliable data is essential to assess the impact of your strategy and can help you achieve objectivity. 

At PublicRelay, we can help PR teams assess the impact of their strategy for improving brand sentiment and awareness. With our unique human-AI hybrid approach, we analyze your social, traditional, and broadcast media coverage and provide you with actionable insights to inform your PR strategy. In addition to pinpointing key industry influencers and highlighting the discussions circling your brand, PublicRelay can provide you with both a bird’s-eye-view and an up-close examination of the details. Click here to learn more. 

Press releases are an important tool for public relations professionals when communicating with the media. They allow PR teams to share company news, take positions on important issues and events, and manage their company brand. There are multiple types of press statements designed to suit various situations, each with a different tone and motivation.

What is a Press Release?

A press release is a brief news story, official statement, or announcement written by a PR professional on behalf of a company and distributed to the media. They generally adhere to a specific format, are written in the third person, and address the who/what/when/where/why of a story. According to The Balance, their primary purpose is to publicize something significant and specific in a straightforward and concise manner. Each announcement should be newsworthy and pique the interest of the press while containing all the essential information a journalist needs to produce a story. A successful press statement will achieve three marketing and publicity objectives:

• Inform the media of a critical event or development, with the hopes that it will be widely publicized.
• Distribute noteworthy company news to the press so that journalists can broadcast stories to a wider audience.
• Promote your company’s unique brand and online presence through blogs, websites, and social media.

In short, a good story will earn media coverage and attract your stakeholders’ and target audience’s attention.

Why are Press Releases Important?

Press releases are important because they can increase your company’s brand awareness, improve your media relations, and build consumer trust.

Disseminating company statements to the press can boost your brand awareness by promoting your key messages across a wider range of outlets, thus reaching a larger audience.

Further, as the value of online marketing grows, press releases offer new advantages.

Although they may be considered outdated in a world with social media, Forbes Magazine explains that press statements are an important component of your PR strategy, even if they don’t get much media pickup. Considering “SEO and which keywords and search terms you want people to use to find you,” when drafting your statement will work to drive organic traffic to your website.

They are also an invaluable tool for improving your media relations. As you develop relationships with key members of the press, they may come to trust your brand and provide you with more coverage as a result.

Finally, press releases are important to building consumer trust. Even in the event of a PR crisis, releases provide companies with the opportunity to be transparent with their target audience. Because authenticity is at the core of consumer trust – a key driver of consumers’ purchasing decisions – using press statements to address both positive and negative company news alike will increase your credibility among your target audience.

Types of Press Release

Understanding the different types of press releases and under what circumstances to use them will maximize media pickup and impact. When drafting your statement, consider the target audience and stakeholders affected by the story, and how you can best incorporate the relevant key messages your company wishes to promote.

Five common types are:

• Product Launch
• Event
• New hire
• Partnership
• Crisis management

Product Launch

New product announcements are beneficial in creating awareness and excitement around a new product or service. These should be written with your target audience in mind. Highlight any modern features and how it’s an improvement from existing products of its kind. Announcing the exciting aspects of a new product allows you to set the tone and establish a unique brand that sets you apart from your competitors. Effective product announcements not only increase brand awareness but can also increase product sales and influence the success of a new product launch. Furthermore, it can result in earned media coverage and, in the case of product launch coverage, cost-efficient advertising.

Event

Promotion, promotion, promotion. The goal of this type of announcement is to inform members of the public of an event you are hosting, attending, or sponsoring. Additionally, it must entice members of the media to attend and cover your event to raise brand recognition. Essentially, it acts as an invitation to the media, stakeholders, or even potential consumers, depending on the occasion. Along with the logistics, your release should offer a compelling incentive to draw people to the event. Will the event raise money for charity or benefit the local community? Will attendees have the opportunity to win something, get the first look at a new product or feature, or be offered exclusive deals? Emphasizing the value of an event is what drives attendance and media coverage.

New Hire

A new hire announcement can act as a formal notification to customers, investors, and the public of a new member of staff. Generally, these are reserved for executive or leadership hires, particularly those who could be considered a ‘big win’ for company stakeholders. To ensure a new hire is newsworthy, consider how they strengthen your industry position. Incorporate engaging information on what makes this person stand out among other candidates, such as their work history, accomplishments, or unique qualifications. Moreover, demonstrate how they will assist your company to achieve specific goals, like developing an inclusion program or reducing your carbon footprint. Use this as an opportunity to reinforce your company values and explain how this new hire demonstrates your commitment to living up to them.

Partnership

Partnerships allow your company to amalgamate your customer base with another organization. Use your public statement announcing the partnership to appeal to both audiences and highlight your companies’ shared values and the positive outcomes of the alliance. Setting expectations and outlining any changes the partnership may mean for your company can eliminate any fears that may arise among stakeholders, particularly employees. Communicate the reasons behind the decision, what will be changing, and why your company and consumers should be enthusiastic about it. Explain what challenges this relationship will address and how it will help the brand’s growth, such as through product diversification or access to emerging technology. A successful statement should reassure the target audience that this collaboration will be a success.

Crisis management

Press releases can be an effective form of reputation management during a PR crisis. They provide an opportunity to issue an official company statement on the situation and get ahead of the story. Ensure you outline what happened, take responsibility for your role, and explain how your company plans to provide redress to those affected. The tone of your statement and method of recourse will depend on the nature of the crisis and how much responsibility the company wants to bear for the situation. Transparency via an official company stance halts further speculation and ensures people can look to your organization as a trustworthy source of information. Ultimately, defining the crisis and outlining a roadmap for mitigation will help to restore stakeholder faith in your brand.

Measuring the Success of a Press Release

From building brand awareness to increasing consumer trust, effective press releases can have a measurable influence on your company’s corporate reputation. Media monitoring allows PR teams to measure press pickup and evaluate their impact.

At PublicRelay, we offer bespoke media monitoring programs designed to help your public relations team understand and reach your communications goals. Build your custom media monitoring program now!

In today’s competitive marketplace, brand awareness matters more for companies than ever before. Social media platforms not only provide a means to boost your brand, but they also generate data that, when used correctly, can steer your PR campaigns towards success.

Read: The Role of Social Media in Public Relations

What is Brand Awareness?

Brand awareness is the level of consumer familiarity with a particular brand’s products, services, or image. Familiarity is what motivates consumers to choose Coca-Cola over other soft drinks. It is the economic moat that wards off competition and ensures customers remain loyal. This is the first stage of the marketing funnel and the key to promoting new products, establishing loyalties, and reviving old brands.

When developing branding campaigns, companies must consider their values, reputation, and the levels of engagement their key messages receive on social platforms. Beyond engagement, brand boosts are about establishing positive relations between a company and its target audience.

Why is Brand Awareness Important?

Brand awareness is important because consumers rely on research and social proof to inform their purchasing decisions. In his TED talk, “The Post-Crisis Consumer,” John Gerzerma labels this phenomenon the “rise of the mindful consumer.” With an abundance of information at their fingertips, consumers can now sift through online reviews and compare influencer testimonials on social media before every purchase. In fact, 67% of the consumer journey now occurs digitally.

For this reason, companies need to use social media channels to build brand awareness positively influence their target audience’s consumer journey in their favor.

Social Media Metrics to Measure Brand Awareness

PR professionals’ branding strategies are most effective when informed by reliable data. Social media provides companies with access to a wealth of information on consumer engagement with and awareness of new campaigns, and influencer pick-up of key messages. With approximately 501 million tweets sent per day, companies are confronted with both a goldmine and a headache when it comes to analyzing the available data. MGP head of digital Eamonn Carey explains, “you can almost get data overload: the challenge is picking out the metrics that matter[…] The smarter brands are taking a step back from the tsunami of data.” 

Amid such large quantities of data, PublicRelay has witnessed an explosion of AI-based tools that help track the key metrics used to measure brand awareness. These metrics can be broken down into four standardized categories:

Exposure and Potential Reach

Exposure and potential reach, which tell the possible number of unique viewers a post may have, are the first data points to consider when attempting to improve your brand recognition across social media platforms.

However, exposure and potential reach should be utilized as baseline metrics as they do not provide enough insight on their own to help steer a PR strategy. For instance, a post could have high impressions, but also receive low or negative engagement. Using exposure and potential reach in conjunction with other metrics, such as engagement, will help you glean more insight from the data at hand.

Engagement

Put simply, engagement is the number of users who interact with a campaign and the degree of that interaction over time. Extrapolating engagement can be done in multiple ways. Often, data analytics tools will create a metric that is a combination of likes, retweets, comments, and shares.

High levels of positive engagement often indicate a healthy relationship with your target audience and a successful branding campaign. However, these metrics also need to be understood within their context. For instance, a post may receive a high number of likes and shares but relatively few comments, indicating that the topic doesn’t stimulate discussion. On the other hand, the motivations for sharing or retweeting your company’s coverage may be negative. For this reason, engagement metrics are just one part of a wide range of data points that need to be taken into consideration.

Impact

Measuring impact on social media refers to the overall changes in consumer behavior and sentiment towards your brand as the result of your PR campaigns. Often companies will compare their initial rates of engagement and exposure to those during and after a campaign. In this case, social media analytics can provide a useful benchmark to inform your next steps.

Further, social media platforms are data treasure troves when it comes to evaluating your brand awareness relative to your rivals. A key goal for any awareness strategy should be about establishing your brand as the central player among competitors.  

Advocacy

In every campaign, influencers are vital to swaying opinions and increasing awareness. Strategists must understand industry influencers’ topical interests and the degree of engagement they can generate.

The appropriate metrics can reveal the extent to which influencers promoted your key messages and help your team to identify the major influencers in the industry. Ultimately, boosting your brand recognition is about intelligent engagement. Find the right influencers and you can reach the audiences that truly matter.

Ensuring Accurate Assessment and Intelligent Engagement

PR teams that engage with this standardized model lay a strong analytical foundation upon which to develop their brand awareness strategies. As Neil Kleiner, former head of social media at Golin argues, “exposure, engagement, impact, [and] advocacy are important, and there are demographic elements to it as well: it’s about reaching 10,000 of the right people, not ten million.” 

Indeed, PR strategists should be looking for intelligent engagement when improving their brands and that means going beyond base-level metrics that are supplied by AI. Although AI is useful for processing large amounts of data, it encounters issues with accuracy and meaning when it comes to nuance and developing insights that matter, and especially when gauging sentiment. 

How is Sentiment Analysis Used for Brand Management?

Sentiment analysis is crucial to brand management when staging a brand awareness campaign. Applying sentiment to the four-baseline metrics is the final element in a PR strategist’s information armory. Receiving high volumes of mentions, retweets, and influencer traction are all signs of growth. However, without an awareness of the sentiment of social engagement, your campaign assessment may be deceptive. 

Sentiment refers to the tone or emotion attached to social media posts or engagement. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence, many products are appearing on the market that offer sentiment analysis with unlimited data pools.

While the tone of your coverage is important, sentiment also extends to social media coverage of your company values and reputational drivers. However, AI cannot accurately identify reputational drivers and value systems that human analysts can. By understanding the kinds of reputational drivers and values that have emerged during a campaign combined with tone, PR strategists can understand how their brand awareness strategies are having a real-time impact. Applying sentiment to the four-baseline metrics through a synthesis of human intelligence and AI tools allows PR teams to pinpoint the positives and negatives of their campaigns to increase brand awareness. 

Using Social Media Analytics the Right Way

When measuring boosts in brand awareness using social media analytics, employing a variety of baseline metrics paired with accurate sentiment analysis will yield the most reliable results.

At PublicRelay, we utilize the four-baseline metrics for a holistic approach that compliments AI systems with purposeful, human-generated insights. Our human-AI hybrid approach focuses on intelligent engagement, whereby we filter out the noise and pinpoint the most valuable insights to help you increase your brand awareness. Click here to learn more.