Every communicator knows when a big story is published, every minute matters. Yet many earned media articles leave little impact – while a few pieces drive the entire conversation. But what if you could know in advance which stories will catch fire?

With PublicRelay’s Predictive Alerts, you can. This feature gives your team an email alert that a particular story is likely to take off over social media – hours before it actually does. You and your team gain valuable time with which to craft the perfect response or engage key advocates to amplify the coverage.

The Details

Predictive Alerts uses industry-leading AI to predict whether an article will go viral on social media. If an article is likely to be widely shared, we deliver an email alert straight to your inbox. This gives you time to craft the appropriate media strategy.

The alert operates within a set of search terms defined by you and your analyst, depending on the topic of interest. The scope is completely up to you – search terms are not limited to tracked themes and brand drivers. Your team can keep an eye on important company announcements, key influencers, or monitor major articles on industry topics more broadly.

Strategic Value

Social sharing is a crucial gauge on which topics, outlets, authors, and stories garner the most attention. Knowing about these news hits in advance, your team can:

• Enhance positive news by engaging company advocates and employees to share the story.
• Get ahead of negative coverage with a clear, compelling media response.
• Calm worried executives by demonstrating a disagreeable piece is unlikely to receive much attention.
• Keep track of what’s generating real buzz for competitors or peer companies.

Earned Media in the Social Age

Social media has become a cornerstone of the brand landscape. In a surprising twist, however, this shift to social has only increased the importance of viral earned media. Only half of consumers say they trust paid advertisements – but 92% trust earned media. This trust, coupled with the fact that a majority of social sharing is generated by only a few earned articles, makes identifying viral earned media paramount to staying ahead in brand awareness. Predictive Alerts are the best way to glimpse into your media future – what will you do with the extra time?

TYSONS CORNER, Va., (September 9, 2020) – PublicRelay, the premier provider of PR and business analytics, announced its latest innovation in media monitoring: Predictive Alerts. 

This new capability gives leading communicators a way to see into the future: As soon as a news story is published, advanced AI and machine learning technology evaluates the content and predicts if it will be highly shared across social media.  When a story is predicted to catch fire, the communications team is instantly alerted, giving them valuable hours in which to amplify positive coverage – or prepare a clear response to negative news – before the story has taken off. 

“Communicators are more and more reliant on data to make strategic decisions. But even the best data reflects what has already happened,” said Eric Koefoot, CEO of PublicRelay. “Predictive Alerts allows our clients to look into the future and know what’s coming.  We are flagging the stories now that will truly matter to them tomorrow.” 

PublicRelay’s Media Analytics solution utilizes powerful machine learning technology paired with trained analysts to deliver trusted data and actionable insights.  Clients leverage this quality data to enhance strategies and tactics, align themselves with the broader business goals, and boost collaboration across the entire organization. Predictive Alerts is one of many capabilities PublicRelay offers across the earned social media space. 

About PublicRelay: 

PublicRelay turns language into insight as the most trusted media analytics solution for many of the world’s largest brands.  PublicRelay’s clients confidently use its media analysis 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.

An Era of Change is Upon Us

Most people have heard the saying “the only constant in life is change.” Change comes at us from all directions, and it is relentlessly driven by the many events and factors that swirl around and impact us every day. 

The communications profession certainly is not immune to the forces of change.

In fact, because of the coronavirus pandemic, many organizations are seeing unprecedented levels of change to their business models. Every department is being asked to adjust and innovate to weather the next 12-24 months until the world (we hope) passes through the pandemic. As a communicator, if you already have not been asked, it is likely you soon will be challenged to find a way to do business smarter, faster, and more efficiently. Unfortunately, efficiency is often sought out by trying to do the same work with fewer people who end up working longer hours. 

But such a challenge also creates the perfect opportunity and motivation to rethink what you do and how you do it. 

Times of transition are strenuous, but I love them. They are an opportunity to purge, rethink priorities, and be intentional about new habits. We can make our new normal any way we want. 

– Kristin Armstrong, Three-Time Olympic Gold Medalist

Taking what some call a “zero-base approach” to your work can be a lifesaver. Zero-base planning means rethinking from scratch how you do your job, where you invest your resources, and how you make your team more focused and effective together. And frequently zero-base changes deliver a cathartic moment that pays huge dividends.

Fortunately, in the past few years things have changed in the world of media monitoring and analytics that make this approach to planning particularly effective right now.

Things Have Changed

In recent years, many of the world’s most sophisticated brands and their communications teams have chosen to embrace a new approach to communications analytics. Instead of relying on the approach from the early 2000’s – throwing technology blindly at the problem – they have moved forward to a new, proven method that utilizes the best that technology has to offer while respecting the unique abilities that humans have to interpret complex human communications. 

Companies like Merck, Berkshire Hathaway, Exelon Energy, and many others – all with reputations for using the world’s best talent and technologies – have embraced this new approach. They have found through robust testing that it consistently generates more reliable analytics and much richer insights that make them smarter, more effective, and more efficient.

In short, people paired with technology delivered the exact improvements they were seeking.

The Evolution

So how did we get here? The evolution of media monitoring and analytics has moved through three distinct phases over the past decades:

Phase 1: Big Books (1950-2000)

The world moved slower in these times, and so did communications. Monitoring was done manually, usually with thick clip books filled with physical copies of media coverage. It was not uncommon to wait weeks or months for metrics, and communications impact often was measured simply as the thickness of the clip book. 

Often communications teams claimed success simply by talking about the stories that were written about the company and its executives. While that approach created great presentation theatrics, it rarely reflected the overall success of the communications effort accurately.

Some organizations also relied on (the now-discredited) Ad Value Equivalent, or AVE, a misguided attempt to equate news coverage with the value of ads that ran on those same pages or in the same broadcast segment.

But technology marched on, and scissors and tape no longer did the job.

Phase 2: Technology Cure-All (2000-2018)

This is the era that gave us the exponential growth of digital communications; during these years, email, text, and social media all came of age. Communications teams gained access to digital streams of any news content they desired, all delivered in an instant via the Internet. 

Communicators jumped on the idea of instant analytics, and metrics became (sometimes obsessively) focused on counting mentions and impressions, regardless of the quality, context, or sentiment. Often with this model a headline story in the Wall Street Journal was counted the same as an irrelevant mention by a hobby blogger with 30 followers, and a keyword mention was considered equivalent to a complex message pickup by an influential writer. 

On top of that, the endless pursuit of increasing impressions created a “hamster wheel” environment in communications teams, where the obsession to generate clips of any kind dominated what should have been a focus on strategic messaging and guiding public opinion. Compensation plans sometimes included counts of mentions as a key component for bonuses, leading communicators to push for stories of any kind regardless of messaging strategy and business impact.

Another approach favored by this automated model is so-called Attribution analytics. The problems with this automated attribution approach have been well-documented. In a nutshell, these attribution models use technology to connect dots in ways that do not hold up to the scrutiny of even a high school statistics class.

Over time there became an increasing awareness and acknowledgement of the severe limits of this all-tech approach. Technology was not delivering on its promise to reliably understand complex concepts and sentiment – both of which were (and are) absolutely critical to the communications function. Irrelevant articles were picked up, sentiment was frequently wrong, and complex concepts (like Innovation and Trust) were often completely missed, so the resultant data was bad.

“I don’t know what circle of hell bad data may be, perhaps it’s the third or fourth, but no matter what, who wants to live like that? No one.”

Steve Molis, Renowned Development Guru, Salesforce.com

In fact, multiple disciplines came to the same conclusion at the same time as corporate communicators, including software companies, self-driving trucks, delivery robots, medical diagnostics, and investment services. The conclusion was simple yet powerful: augmenting great technology with talented human resources was a killer application that consistently delivered the best balance of fast data and valuable, reliable insights.

Phase 3: Expert-Guided Tech (2018-    )

We are now in the third generation of media monitoring and analytics – one that has moved to recognize the limitations of technology and that has embraced the value of human-technology collaboration. Industry after industry has embraced the marriage of fast technology paired with the unique creative, analytical, and introspective nature of human experts.

With this hybrid approach and the resultant quality data and deep insights, these professionals are able to make much better decisions, focus their resources, and achieve consistently better results. With this now proven superior capability and insight, Expert-Guided Tech has become the fastest-growing segment in the media monitoring and analytics sector.

As an aside, technologists still look to software to reduce human effort and cost whenever possible. Will technology ever replace humans in these roles and understand relevance, context, sarcasm, and underlying sentiment? These challenges may well be solved someday, but despite the claims of some bold marketers, the consensus among experts is that the General Artificial Intelligence to achieve this is at best decades away.

How far are we from general A.I.? I don’t think we even know enough to estimate. We would need dozens of big breakthroughs to get there, when the field of A.I. has seen only one true breakthrough in 60 years.

Kai-Fu Lee, Former President, Google China and Author of ‘AI Superpowers’

Going Forward

So what have we learned? Fundamentally, the model of the past 15 years – fully-automated, human-free measurement – did not deliver on its promise. And like in many other industries, the approach is being tossed aside by many of the smartest minds in corporate communications. These experts have also realized that chasing mentions, keywords, and impressions is not the best use of their time and talent: every year the team was tasked to lift these (largely meaningless) counts even higher; no matter how hard they ran, they were just going nowhere fast.

Now is the time to turn over a new leaf. Things have changed, and you need to make the choice to evaluate moving to Expert-Guided Tech and seeking higher-quality data and analytics. 

Quality data is cited regularly by its proponents as being more focused, less stressful, and more efficient with limited resources. They also regularly brag about newfound strength in measuring their impact, being more competitive, and proving their worth in the organization. The approach gives Communications an equal seat at the table with more data-driven disciplines like Marketing, Sales, and Technology.

As an added bonus, this approach, when all resources are measured, is frequently less expensive than the Technology Cure-All approach. In short, reliable tech-human analytics has provided a more effective communications strategy, better measurement of impact, and a leaner, higher-performing team.

Do something today that your future self will thank you for.

Anonymous

How Does Expert-Guided Tech Change My World?

Many aspects of the communications function take on new characteristics of precision and focus when the power of technology is paired with the ability of humans to understand and interpret communications.

The efforts of your PR team can decide whether your company’s actions make a real impact by appearing in top media. Some companies underestimate the importance of public relations and assume the media will write about their company’s actions even without input from their communications team. While this does happen at times, what these leaders fail to understand is that their competitors are fighting for the same column inches and space on top websites.

In 2019, developments in the U.S. banking industry provided a clear example of how a more significant effort from a communications team can make a huge impact on the company’s coverage.

Background: Divestments from Private Prisons

Banks provided lines of credit to major operators of private prisons and detention facilities for decades, but that mostly came to an end in 2019. Following controversy surrounding the conditions at immigrant detention facilities, private prison companies drew further scrutiny and it became clear that they depended on funds from major banks for survival. This led to protests against the banks involved through late 2018 and much of 2019. Eventually, most major banks bowed to activist pressure and divested from the private prison industry. Since they’d been getting bad press around their policies for a long time, these banks drew largely positive reactions from the decision to divest. Presumably, the banks all wanted to promote their new practices to benefit from the positive media coverage.

Differing Approaches to Communication

While this movement impacted the entire industry, we focused our analysis on coverage of three of the largest banks: JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo. All three changed their policies in the first half of 2019 and they had varied methods of publicizing the decision:

Bank of America’s team set up an interview with Bloomberg for bank Vice Chair Anne Finucane, who discussed the decision as well as the bank’s decision-making process.

JPMorgan Chase had a communications leader send email a statement to the press highlighting the decision.

Wells Fargo included a small note in their annual Business Standards Report but didn’t highlight this change during the promotion of the report, in other press releases, or public statements.

Measuring the Impact of Policy Decisions

PublicRelay gathered and analyzed media coverage from top publications and Twitter to assess the impact of these decisions. We found that the differing approaches led to significantly different results, with the greatest effort yielding the best results:

Bank of America saw more than double the media coverage of JPMorgan Chase and more than three times their Twitter mentions in the month following the Bloomberg interview they set up.

JPMorgan Chase generated more than 20 articles about their decision in the month following their statement and received more than eight times the posts on social media that Wells Fargo did.

Wells Fargo received no media coverage about their decision in top publications in the month following the release of their report but did see some minor traction on social media with just over 100 tweets on the topic.

An interview was the most effective strategy and required a significant amount of effort and strong connections with contacts at Bloomberg. The next most effective strategy was sending out an email to the media. While emailing is less intensive than setting up an interview, it still requires knowing who to reach out to and careful message crafting. On the other hand, the least effective strategy, implemented by Wells Fargo, was one that cut the PR professionals out of the process. This strategy resulted in no media coverage and low social media traffic.

What does this Mean for Me?

In a time when communicators feel pressure to prove their impact, it’s important to keep in mind that the actions of a skilled communicator can make a significant impact on the visibility of important company activities. To show your leadership the impact that your communications is making, make sure to carefully track and analyze your media coverage. For a small company, this might be a simple process to handle internally, but if your company appears in multiple articles each day and you’re interested in bench-marking against competitors, you would be best served by working with a company that specializes in media analysis. If you’re interested in learning more about how PublicRelay can help your team show its value, you can get in touch here!

October 22^nd 2019- Cavan – PublicRelay, a leading US media monitoring and analytics firm, announced today plans to establish a new office in Cavan, creating 20 new jobs over the next two years.  Cavan was selected as the location for a second office in Ireland based on the strong pool of educated talent available in the region and the innovative nature of Cavan’s newly opened Digital Hub where the company initially will be based. PublicRelay Ireland, Ltd. is currently looking to hire its initial team of associate analysts and a manager to begin work before the end of this year.

The project is supported by the Irish Government through IDA Ireland.

“We are excited to announce the opening of our new office in Cavan.  The educated, friendly workforce and proximity to our Dublin office make Cavan an ideal location to expand our presence in Ireland”, said Eric Koefoot, CEO of PublicRelay.  He then added, “We look forward to investing further in the country and building on our strong partnership with IDA Ireland.”

Speaking on the eve of the announcement, Minister for Business, Enterprise & Innovation, Heather Humphreys TD said: “I am delighted that PublicRelay are opening a new office in Cavan with the creation of 20 new jobs. I met with Eric Koefoot CEO and Ruth Wiederecht, Vice President of Operations, on my recent trade mission to New York and told them about the rich pool of talent in the local area. I would like to congratulate them on this milestone and wish them every success with their new office. I know that they will be pleased with their decision. Without a doubt, the announcement will come as a boost to Cavan town and the surrounding area. It will also provide more local jobs for people who want to work where they live.”

IDA CEO Martin Shanahan welcomed the announcement, saying:

“This investment by PublicRelay is in line with IDA Ireland’s strategy of winning impactful investments in regional locations and on working with companies to develop second sites in regional locations. It will showcase the region for other high growth tech companies and will be an excellent reference client in the region. The jobs being created will benefit Cavan and the wider county and region. I wish the company continued success as they expand their operations here.”

About PublicRelay:

Founded in 2008, PublicRelay is the most trusted media analytics solution for communications and marketing professionals at many of the world’s largest brands. PublicRelay’s clients confidently use its analysis to plan and measure influencer engagement, reputation management, the competitive landscape, and message pull-through – and tie them back to business objectives.  Known for its innovation, superior data quality, and actionable insights, PublicRelay uses proprietary technology and trained analysts to deliver accurate answers to the most pressing strategic brand questions.

A company can build up a great brand reputation one day, only to have an unforeseen PR crisis tarnish its brand the next day. Effective crisis management can not only mitigate the negative impact that such an event causes, but also has the potential to build up a company’s brand reputation in the long run. Organizations will inevitably face crises, so they must prepare for the unexpected and know when and how to respond under pressure.  

We recently spoke with Choice Hotels VP of External Communications and Public Relations, Lorri Christou and Prudential Financial VP of Global Communications, Allyson Hugley about the essentials of top-notch crisis and risk management. Our guests shared valuable insights on how to plan proactively, how to determine the impact of a crisis, and how to respond appropriately. 

Make an Actionable Game Plan

No matter the industry, company size, or business model, every organization must have protocol set in stone in case of a crisis. Christou found herself amidst a crisis soon after she had started working at Choice, and on a Saturday no less. Upon realizing that the company’s crisis plan was outdated, unactionable, and impractical, Christou set out to better prepare the organization moving forward.

Starting from scratch to develop an actionable crisis plan, Christou created an enterprise-wide crisis management response team (CMRT), which ensures that the right people are in the right places to provide fast and seamless responses. Furthermore, she recommends training the CMRT appropriately and implementing a call platform, so that when the time comes, there are people throughout the organization that know what to do and how to contact one another. Annual tabletop drills, which test and improve defined processes, are also conducted to ensure that the crisis plan works and does so efficiently. 

Leverage Internal and External Expertise

While it is essential for all businesses to have an actionable crisis plan, reputation management doesn’t mean an organization should act on every disgruntled customer’s complaint. How do you figure out when to respond, or equally importantly, when not to respond?

Hugley recommends leveraging partners both inside and outside your organization for a comprehensive understanding of a potential crisis and its impact. In order to develop a response strategy, it is necessary to have designated risk management personnel who are asking the right questions and are thinking through suitable frameworks to assess reputation impact.

Coupling internal assessments with external resources, from entities responsible for understanding the potential for risk and reputation events, will properly inform your company’s response strategies. By seeking out and working with different types of partners, your organization can make the most effective decisions around when and how to react.

Use Data Analytics for Message Optimization

Understanding the scope of a crisis event goes hand in hand with crafting an appropriate and effective message. In addition to knowing when to respond, it is just as important to know how to respond and who to prioritize in that response.

Data analytics plays a significant role throughout this process by measuring the reputation damage and guiding the messaging strategy. For example, Christou suggests that sometimes there is more emotion in a crisis issue than there really is reputation damage. In other words, people may be interacting with the brand in a very emotional manner, but it doesn’t translate to altered buying patterns. By utilizing data analytics to detect this, a proper response can be formulated to manage the situation.

In any case, internal teams must be very mindful of what their statements say or don’t say. A nuance in wording, Christou emphasizes, can really change the meaning of a message and potentially inflict further damage. Thus, a well-executed message must be crafted using a data-driven response strategy.

AVEs – or Advertising Value Equivalent – are on their way out. Thanks to the efforts of the “Say No To AVEs” campaign that AMEC has been running for the past 2 years, fewer PR pros are using AVEs to measure anything. But the question that sometimes still lingers is what are the alternatives to AVEs? What can we use instead to fill the role that AVEs held?

You’ve probably been using AVEs because “my CEO understands dollars more than data”. And while that statement is true, it doesn’t actually help your team establish its true value to the business. Attributing your work to many points of the business will make you a respected strategic partner.

Topical Share of Voice

Rather than asking for an arbitrary dollar amount, a better metric to seek out is where you stand in relation to your peers for your key messages. Identify which topics are reputation drivers for your business, and analyze the sentiment and volume against your peers over time. This allows you to quickly understand which programs are working and where you need to make adjustments. This type of information allows you to show executives that you are on top of what is happening in your market AND your organization is agile enough to take advantage of gaps or change direction and close them.

Conversions/Attribution

In order to do this at all, you must understand what your executive team values. Then you must be certain that the data you are gathering is both relevant and accurate. From there you will be able point to revenue, donations, memberships, website visits or sign ups that are directly attributable to your PR work. Understanding your business goals, and then correlating how your PR work impacts that is far more meaningful than simply looking at how much money your one article is worth.

Earned Media’s Social Media Impact

If part of your PR strategy is to establish thought leadership, you know that great content and earned media will get shared on social media. This is a very effective way to immediately tell both whether your brand has established thought leadership, and whether the article you wrote is worth reading. However, this can be more difficult than it initially sounds. Automated social media listening tools look for key phrases or specific URLs – if a social post doesn’t include either of these things it may be missed. With a comprehensive earned media measurement program in place you will already know the key data points about the articles (like key messages and the sentiment around those messages) before you incorporate social sharing information. Now you can start to benchmark whether negative financial news gets shared less or more than positive workplace environment news. Is there an impact when your spokespeople are quoted? Which ones?  

What all these alternatives to AVEs have in common is that they allow you to show a deep relation to broader business goals. It is increasingly important for communicators to illustrate that they understand and align to the goals that the rest of the company is working toward. As an added benefit, the Communications team gets further exposure to different groups within the business – extending their worth as a strategic partner. And finally, more comprehensive and actionable measurement also shows that your team is agile – ready and willing to pivot as business needs evolve.  

Many communicators struggle with shrinking budgets and funding new initiatives. We see it all the time, especially when it comes to measurement. While not as exciting as launching a new campaign, investing in PR measurement is essential to your communications strategy.

PR Measurement is Your Infrastructure

In a recent webcast called “Shaping Communications at First Data Using a World Class Measurement Strategy,” Vice President of Communications at First Data Corporation, Michael Schneider, described PR measurement as a communicator’s “infrastructure.” It is an essential, upfront investment that lays the foundation for the rest of your work. Schneider says, “if you’re spending every dollar on activation and then putting yourself in a position where somebody comes, knocks on your office door, and says, “How did that work out?” and you then have that deer-in-the-headlights type of look… you probably need to set up your infrastructure first.”

Once your measurement system is in place, you will know how campaigns and tactics perform, how your competitors are performing in those areas, where you can improve, and how to allocate resources. Measurement allows you to make data-driven decisions, rather than relying on your gut.

Earn More Budget and Become a More Strategic Business Partner

It might be daunting to direct your resources to a quality measurement strategy and leave less money for activation (perhaps with an already limited budget), but without a system in place to measure results, you’ll never be able to prove what is successful. And if you can’t prove what’s successful, you won’t be able to make a case for why your department deserves a bigger budget.

Schneider points out that business leaders across different functions would agree that spending money on activation without a system in place to measure results isn’t the right order. CEOs and executive leaders want to see success in terms of data and analysis. CEOs are asking the business to make data-driven decisions and their teams are stepping up to the challenge. Implementing a quality PR measurement system will only help make your boss and your peers see you and your department as a strategic partner to the business.

Watch the full on-demand recording of “Shaping Communications at First Data Using a World Class Measurement Strategy.”

Accurate and regularly updated data has become a driving force in the business world. Having in depth knowledge of exactly how everything is performing is no longer a differentiator for your business, it is now a must-have. One effective way of monitoring key data and helping you plan your next move is with a communications dashboard. Communications dashboards display the most important and up to date metrics that a modern business requires.

A good communications dashboard can help a company stay on top of ever-changing news cycles, plan a new PR campaign, monitor an impending crisis or help give a detailed overview of their industry.

Here are three examples of dashboards that have helped PR professionals address their needs, plan strategies and satisfy their curiosity.

Know yourself with an Overview Dashboard

In a world where countless metrics can be tracked, a good business needs to be able to identify what specifically will be the most applicable statistics to track for the goals they are looking to accomplish. The best PR teams need to know how their business is performing, what are its currents strengths and what areas require improvement, so your Overview Dashboard should quickly and easily display the few key data points that answer the question “how are we doing?”.

Whether it’s volume and tone of coverage, social sharing broken down by platform or an-in depth view of key topics, you can gain immediate insights into your principal concerns. By taking the time to tailor this dashboard to your specific needs, you may save valuable time that can be put towards planning how best to use this data to be more agile. 

Know your competition with a Competitive Dashboard

A good Competitive Dashboard can be key to gathering a clear and concise overview of just how you stack up to your main competition. Keeping a close eye on one’s peers can help ensure communicators identify areas for improvement as well as points of strength within their own company.

PR and communications teams may require a side by side comparison of themselves and their foremost competitor, or perhaps they need to expand their view and keep track of all their main competition at once. The ability, not only to monitor competitor metrics, but also to accurately compare and contrast their own performance with others, can help teams answer the question “how are we doing in relation to others?”.

Know your path forward with an Issues Matrix

Last week’s hot topic is often this week’s old news. Modern industries have dynamic news cycles and it pays to stay ahead of the curve on matters both big and small. An Issues Matrix Dashboard can help companies monitor key topics within their industry as well as current news trends.

With this dashboard, PR pros can easily determine what aspects of their industry have been trending negatively, which have been trending positively as well as which matters have been the most talked about.

For teams that need to keep abreast of topical industry news, or for those that are interested in how their industry is portrayed in the media, this dashboard can be an invaluable tool. This dynamic dashboard is perfect for an ever-changing industry and can help answer the question “how is our industry doing?”.

The best dashboards are those with the highest engagement levels and teams that take the time to build these dashboards to their specific requirements certainly reap the benefits that these hubs of information can provide. No two companies are the same and those that cater their dashboards to their individual needs stay informed and ahead of the curve.

With the rise of activist and ESG investing, corporate brand reputation is more important than ever to strategic investor relations teams. Your team needs to understand the media narrative around your company – and try to guide it. To do this, IR teams must now proactively monitor and engage the media landscape to manage brand reputation and investor perception.

You need access to accurate media analysis around brand reputation that will allow you to identify looming issues early, engage your shareholder base, guide the narrative on the Street, and optimize strategies.

Here are 5 ways media analysis can be a game changer for strategic investor relations teams:

• Proactively Manage Issues

Indications that activist investors are targeting a stock can now come from a variety of sources including unregulated activities. Red flags might come in the form of a question from a junior analyst at a fund, a private meeting request, or increasingly – social media rumors. It’s important that your team proactively manages these conversations and is aware of the impact of unregulated social activity and all online conversations to stay ahead of the narrative. In an era when leading the news cycle often commandeers the perception of truth, proactive issue management is vital.

• Engage Your Shareholder Base

The growth of passive shareholders has given companies a more stable shareholder base, but made them accountable for delivering results, hence the need for proactive marketing and messaging. The need is exasperated as Activists are savvy and using sophisticated PR strategies to sway your shareholder base.

To proactively engage your shareholders, a richer partnership is required between IR and PR.

Different investors have their own priorities and will react to news uniquely, weighing various aspects of your brand reputation more heavily. It’s important to understand how your messages resonate with key audiences.

Measuring the pull-through of your messages in the media, the tone towards them, and their social media pick up will show you which messages are resonating and where you need to focus your efforts to better influence the conversation.

• Glean Deep Reputational Insights that Guide Strategic Investor Relations Decisions

Media sentiment has been proven to be correlated with stock price. But you must move beyond keyword tracking to get actionable data and understand what people are saying about your stock.

Don’t rely on simply tracking your company name, executives, and focusing on financial sites.  Keyword tracking only will likely leave you blindsided. You need to understand the “reputational conversation.”

Reputational data will help you break down public perception and understand what is driving it. If analysts and the media raise a concern that your company is not innovating for the future, build a plan to change that perception. Benchmarking your reputational data can pinpoint areas for targeted, effective message improvement.

• Identify Influencers that Drive Investor Perceptions

It’s critical to understand your “influencers” – those that drive the perception of your stock as a place to invest. But not all influencers are created equal. Wall Street Analysts aren’t the only ones with authority anymore. You need to know who the right influencers are, whether it’s a government regulator, money manager, journalist, or simply an influential blogger, and engage those that matter most.

Media analysis breaks down influencers by topics they’ve written about or been quoted on in the past, their social media pick up, and audience reach to prioritize your outreach. When trying to highlight your ESG initiatives or correcting a misguided perception put out there by an Activist, reach out to your top influencers to create the most impact.

• Play on the Same Field as the Rest of the Company with Data-Driven Decisions

When making decisions, a simple opinion doesn’t cut it. Other departments are using data to defend their decisions – from finance and legal to HR and marketing. Your C-suite has come to expect this kind of data-driven decision making and you can bet activists investors and other critics will leverage data in their arguments. Hedge funds have powerful data capabilities, but IR often does not. Ask yourself: do you have the technology and data analytics to give you an advantage over the critics?

Ensure you have the right systems in place to generate quality data to back up your decisions. And if an issue arises, use data to move smartly, agilely, and proactively instead of trailing the issue.