Pushing key messages rooted in larger reputational goals is one of the most effective ways to contribute to company-wide objectives and demonstrate the communications team’s value to the business in a quantifiable way. Getting your messages picked up though, is easier said than done.
Using data to be more strategic in the tasks you already perform every day to execute your messaging and campaign strategies will allow you to amplify your messages while using your time more efficiently.
Follow these three tips to amplify key messages without increasing the time spent on messaging strategy:
Target the right authors and outlets
Use data to target the authors and outlets that have a wide reach in your industry space, receive high social sharing, and are interested in the topic you want push. Within your earned media data are authors that have written about your competitors, but not you, or ones that don’t write about your industry as frequently, but receive an outsized amount of social sharing when they do. Narrowing down the authors you pitch will be more effective than mass outreach. You will hone in on the audience you want to reach.
You should also use historical data to personalize your pitches to these authors, increasing the likelihood that your message will resonate with them. Understand how they have written on the topic in the past, reference that in your pitch, and why they should be interested in your organization’s take on the topic.
Creating personalized pitches for a targeted list of authors both increases the likelihood that your message gets picked up and ensures the largest amount of your target audience sees your message.
Harness the power of social media amplification
Analyzing the social sharing of your traditional coverage reveals important trends that can help you quickly amplify key messages. Knowing that your CSR efforts are typically highly shared on Facebook, while financial performance news is shared more often on Twitter is important for pushing your messages to the right channels. You’ll also uncover other valuable insights like when one leading healthcare company found out stories that quoted executives received 6X the social sharing of stories that did not.
Collaborate with third-party influencers
Third party influencers like industry thought leaders, legislative coalitions, and academics are the experts that authors consult with and quote when writing about industry topics that your brand cares about. Building relationships with these influencers is a powerful way to lend credibility to your organization’s stance on an issue and amplify key messages.
Some of these influencers are known to you, but others will come to light as they appear in the context of your brand and industry coverage over time. Measure the topics they most often weigh in on and the sentiment of those comments to understand how they align with the message you want to push and reach out from there. In addition, you may also uncover new conversations that you should be participating in based on the topics these influencers are part of.
A third-party influencer doesn’t have to mention your brand by name. The more they espouse your organization’s stance on a policy or industry issue that’s important to your brand, your message gets amplified and your team moves the needle on an important company goal.
To learn more about what data-driven messaging strategies can do for your team, like informing resource allocation and crisis management strategies, check out our e-guide: Make the Most of Your Messaging and Campaigns Data
Data-driven media relations strategies have many benefits. Primarily, it will amplify your key messages most effectively and efficiently, giving you time back in your day.
Use data to prioritize and customize your media outreach:
Prioritization
Use data to first prioritize your outreach to the authors and outlets who have demonstrated interest in the topic you want to push, have a wide audience reach, and are most likely to receive high social sharing.
Customization
Authors are stretched thinner and their inboxes are more full than ever before. Mass, impersonal pitches won’t cut it to truly increase coverage of a message and move the needle on your reputational goals. Use historical data to customize an attention-grabbing pitch that you know the influencer is more likely to pick up based on the way they’ve written about the topic in the past.
For more about the benefits of data-driven media relations and steps to target authors and outlets, watch the video below.
Using competitive media intelligence to understand your competitive landscape is almost as important as managing your own brand. As we witnessed first-hand with the Equifax data breach, the entire industry was dragged into brand crisis mode. While you may not have a line of sight into a crisis this extreme, having a good grasp on the key players in your industry helps you manage your own brand better.
For instance, today, many companies are proactively taking stances on key social issues and making pushes to improve on diversity and inclusion, lessen their footprint on the environment and much more. And for publicly traded companies, the ESG (environmental, social, and governance) movement has become an important pillar of investing. Competitive media intelligence is key here to understand the position your peers are taking or not taking on these issues. You also need to know how your key audiences are reacting to your messages for these key issues.
Regardless of what industry you are in, you need specifics to really understand your position in the market and find where you stand vis-à-vis your competitors. The insights you will glean from competitive media intelligence will help you build or revise your strategy and take advantage of weaknesses in your competitor’s positioning and messaging.
So how do you get started? Here are 4 steps to help you glean intelligence about your competitors:
Define your competitors
List out your competitors and define what insight you want to learn about them. It is very important that you perform your comparison analysis on key data points that you also gather for your own brand. For example, if you analyze your own coverage for topics that include Innovation, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Workplace Environment, you would gather the same data about your competitors.
Measure to set your baselines
You’ll want to answer questions like these: Are there topics where you are dominating the conversation? What is the sentiment used when discussing your brand versus competing brands? Are there authors writing about your competition but not you? And are there differences in the quality of outlets covering companies or issues, the amount of social sharing of content, or the syndication and reach of the coverage?
Implement a data-driven strategy
Now that you are collecting the right information, it’s time to assess your weaknesses and opportunities on a regular basis. Are your competitors getting more influencer pick up for their CSR initiatives? Are they growing positive SOV for their customer service? Use data to direct resources toward strategies that will bolster under-performing brand drivers. Alternatively, continue to boost categories that are doing well if you still want to make gains in your SOV.
Use insights to drive decisions
Over time you can become more predicative about your messaging. You will be able to see trends in your coverage and that of your competitors. This will help you quickly identify anomalies. You can then dig deeper into the data to see the underlying causes that might help you take advantage of competitor weakness.
Today’s communications leaders are increasingly feeling the pressure to prove their department’s value to executive leadership. Some assume this means attributing revenue, but the business impact of PR does not have to equate to a dollar amount.
One of the ways communicators can have the most impact is by becoming an integrator across the business. This theme was brought up repeatedly in a recent CommPRO webcast in which three expert communicators from PNC, Zoetis, and Strategic Profiles Management discussed their success stories from the field.
PR & communications is in a unique position within an organization to contribute to several company-wide goals. Comms works across departments, raising awareness of their colleagues’ work, enhancing brand reputation, and contributing to each goal they touch. It’s one of the only functions to know what’s going on in all other departments, making it a natural integrator.
Below are three ways top communicators integrated their organizations and increased the business impact of PR:
Enterprise Reporting
Former Chief Communications Officer at PNC, David Chamberlin, provided a simple, but important example of the communications department integrating the business. After David arrived at PNC, his team sent out a newsletter that reported on upcoming events, press releases, and issues for the company. The newsletter made people aware of the happenings around the company at an enterprise-level for the first time. It also showcased the ways in which corporate communications could support other departments’ initiatives. The positive feedback was immediate. People wanted to get communications involved in their own efforts. They now saw the department as a strategic player and someone who could help them do their jobs better. Once your colleagues see your team as essential to doing their job, the business impact of PR becomes immense.
But to have this kind of impact, you must build trust with other departments by aligning communications objectives to the objectives of the business.
Establish Common Goals
When creating a communications strategy for the 5 year anniversary of their IPO, Zoetis’ VP of Communications Bill Price created alignment right from the outset. He had discussions across departments and with his CEO to understand what everyone wanted to get from the company milestone. Bill and his team then leveraged the event to achieve the desired outcomes. This built trust in the comms function to help executive leadership and other departments achieve their goals.
Become a Trusted Advisor
Graeme Harris, CEO of Strategic Profiles Management, shared a similar story of building trust with his executive team. We always say that communications must be aligned with the business, but Graham flipped this on its head. He instead offered that the business align with comms. Graham convinced his executive committee to require execs to engage in a number of media activities per quarter, using data to prove the impact of spokesperson activities on the brand. The communications team became invaluable to the c-suite because their advice and expertise directly affected executives’ job performance. With continued success of the program, trust grew between the executives and comms team. This eventually lead to the communications department taking over the execs’ social media feeds with little editorial review.
In each of these success stories, accurate measurement and analysis enabled them to define strategy and demonstrate their accomplishments. Tying your media measurement to your business goals will enable the integrator role and increase the business impact of PR.
With the communications landscape changing, the required talent is also changing. Now, communications executives must hire people with skill sets, that three years ago, were not necessary. People who understand – How AI is impacting communications. Business in general, including how to read a balance sheet. How fake news is impacting businesses. Even the role of a CCO is modernizing. It’s no longer enough for the role to be foundational. Instead, they must be an integrator across the business to create cross functional collaboration. And they need to use data-driven insights to make their organization more agile.
This topic was discussed in a recent CommPRO webinar by top communications executives. Here are five key skills for next generation communicators.
Storytelling with Data
Many communicators chose their profession to avoid having to deal with data and numbers. They tend to have very high EQs (Emotional Quotients) and great storytelling skills. And often feel that they are not as adept at the more data-driven business skills found in branches such as finance or legal. David Chamberlain, former VP of Corporate Communications at PNC, explains that these are actually essential skills for next generation communicators because they need to analyze and use media data insights to make better decisions. Media data allows you to answer questions like: are our CSR campaigns working to garner more positive SOV? Do we need to reallocate resources to messages that are not pulling through? Are our spokespeople staying on message?
Communicators can apply their storytelling skills to explain the insights that their analysis provides. Charts and graphs aren’t very interesting without the narrative to explain what someone is looking at and why they should care. Insights from your analysis should ultimately answer the question “what do we do next?”
Agility
Bill Price, VP of Communications at Zoetis notes that having a playbook mentality with only one way of thinking will not make you a successful business partner. Instead, he explains that, “you have to be adaptable to the strengths of leadership and their priorities and what works for them”. Instead of being a coach that makes players adapt to a system, be a coach that understands the talent and build success with that talent. Being able to recognize priorities and adapt to them is an important skill to create great business partnerships.
Chamberlain also adds that it is important to pivot and find alternate solutions. Being a critical observer will make you a well-rounded teammate and help lead situations to a preferred outcome.
Empathy
Having a level of empathy allows you to interpret signals and better understand others’ motivations. This is especially important when trying to understand signals the CEO is sending you, so that you can properly assess their concerns and come up with a solution. Graeme Harris, CEO of Strategic Profiles Management adds that “having that empathy and being able to decipher is a skill that you learn over time dealing with people. For some people its innate and easy, but others need to learn it”.
Persuasion
Unlike newer skills for next generation communicators, like focusing on data and analytics, the art of persuasion is still a core skill that they must possess. Data will help your influence and support your strategy, but you need the soft skills to fully persuade audiences. Harris notes that “if you’re not able to impact and influence within your organization on behalf of your function, you are going to come up short as a communicator”. There are strategic ways to impact and influence your organization, but it takes creativity and strategic thinking.
Networking and Diplomacy
Bill Price mentions that “you must be able to understand the allies you need to make before a meeting, who you need to pre-brief and how to manage egos to get people behind an idea when you are not the final decision maker.”
To accomplish this, get better at networking and have a good sense of your internal network. Who are the people that can get things done? Who is going to teach you gaps in your own knowledge of the business? Build your network to get this insight because it’s not included in your orientation kit when you first join a company. Price suggests that you build relationships over constant communication, meetings, phone calls, etc. Over time, this allows you to understand the team, the culture and how to get things done within your organization.
While it’s important to have a great internal network, next gen communicators should expand even further. It’s easy to become internally focused when working at a large company, but this blocks out such valuable information from the outside. Stay externally focused to research best practices and even look across industries. Don’t get bogged down in your day-to-day to do list.
- Attend webinars, read books and even follow social feeds of other companies or executives.
- If your company uses an outside firm, consult them and ask what their other clients are doing.
- Build your network and consider creating a group of people you trust, who are in similar roles, to occasionally talk and learn from one another.
For more executive insights on How to Be a Next Gen Communicator >>
The role of the Chief Communications Officer and the communications function is changing rapidly. Communications has been elevated to a proactive function that is increasingly providing value across the organization. This topic was discussed in a recent CommPRO webinar by top communications executives. Here are 5 ways the communications function is changing:
You Need to Be a Business Person
You may have turned to communications because you weren’t a math person, but gone are the days where communicators can shy away from understanding broader business numbers. The next generation of CCOs are using business data to earn themselves a seat at the decision-making table.
Bill Price, VP of Communications at Zoetis, explained that having that clear line of strategy across the business is essential to achieving goals. But to play the game, you must speak the language. David Chamberlain, former VP of Corporate Communications at PNC, adds that “we have to be business people who are communications experts, that are socially engaged.” He adds that “what I mean by business people, is that we’ve first got to be able to have a discussion about the business on the businesses’ terms, not just as a communications expert, for us to be able to move with them”.
CCOs Must Align Comms to the Business through Data-Driven Strategies
All-star communication teams are characterized by a close alignment of communication targets and business goals. However, current metrics commonly employed by PR teams fail to live up to modern standards.
David Chamberlain adds: “How we take in all that data and make sense of it and turn it into the insights that are actually actionable, to me, is something that most communications teams that I’ve seen struggle with …But as our social media and our traditional media evolve and new forms of media give us greater ability to measure and see analytics, I think that this type of interpretation and insight is probably going to be one of the critical skills that we all need to develop and strengthen going forward.”
Far too many departments are still struggling to understand data, let alone capture accurate metrics around tone, share of voice, or brand reputation. Next generation CCOs and their departments need to show their impact on business goals and the key is to tame the data wilderness by focusing on harnessing it for actionable insights.
Leads Must Modernize and Keep Up with the Times due to the Competitive Landscape
According to Arthur Page Society, the environment in which enterprises operate is fraught with emergent challenges from new competitors reinventing traditional business models to new modes of work, regulatory and socioeconomic factors. This has transformed how individuals communicate with one another and engage more actively with organizations.
Communicators are responsible for keeping pace with these times and advising their senior leaders on how to keep up. The communicator of the future harnesses media intelligence to understand their market and share findings with other parts of the organization like the C-Suite, IR, marketing and product development.
CEO of Strategic Profiles Management, Graeme Harris echoed this when he explained that during his past tenure as SVP of Communications at Manulife, it was his job to track key technological innovations. He added that this was essential information to help advise the senior executives on how their institution was keeping pace with the industry.
The Communications Function is Breaking Down Silos and Elevating itself
Communications leaders must communicate both internally – bringing together data and, externally – bringing voices from across the entire organization.
In many organizations such as PNC, communications is playing the role of breaking down organizational silos. For instance, David Chamberlain has taken the role of not just reporting on his team, but also sharing the results of the entire organization across the board. He adds that playing this new role as an integrator within his organization “has helped give Corporate Comms a halo, not only as an integrator, but as a strategic player and someone that people want to involve.”
Strategic Planning is a Much More Integrated Process
In addition to serving as a corporate integrator, communications itself has expanded tactically. Bill Price recounts “I can remember years ago when you developed communications plans and social media was an add-on at the end, or it was all about the press release…the way we approach everything now is much more integrated.”
Today, modern communications plans often encompass a mass array of tactical plans from media relations, to digital communications and even customer engagement. With all these different activities, teams need to find a way to pull in different sources of data from traditional and social media and measure them in a consistent matter that tracks your impact on the bottom line: specifically, quantifying brand reputation and impact on corporate goals.
For more executive insights on staying relevant as a communicator and the evolution of the communications function watch our CommPRO Webinar: How to Stay Relevant in 2020
Last week, I spoke at the annual NIRI conference addressing the changing nature of activist investing and how the IR function needs to evolve to keep up with these changes. As the rise of activists continues, so must strategies to monitor and engage across the media landscape and proactively manage brand (and investor) perceptions. A critical piece of being prepared for a brand crisis is building consistent and accurate data about your brand and reputation before a problem arises.
The Landscape Has Shifted – Social Media Has Made Leading the News Cycle Very Important – Albeit More Difficult
The Trump Era has ushered in a period where leading the news cycle with a narrative and message can commandeer the perception of truth. This “direct narrative of the truth” is often driven or amplified by direct communication on social media.
There can be many indications that an activist is targeting a stock – a regulatory filing, a phone call from the fund manager, or a newspaper headline. However, indications can also include questions from a junior analyst at a fund, a private meeting request or now increasingly a rumor on social media. Today, it is imperative that IR teams are aware of the impact of unregulated social activities in addition to all online conversions so that they can get in front of that “truth narrative”.
IR is no longer about surveillance and is now quickly shifting to proactive management. You need to not only understand how things are spreading on both traditional and social media, but more importantly, understand the entire media landscape and its key players to quickly react.
Activists Are Now Using Sophisticated PR Strategies to Engage the Shareholder Base – and So Should You.
The growth of passive shareholders has given companies more stable shareholder bases and made them accountable for delivering results, hence the need for proactive marketing and messaging. The need is further enhanced with the rise of Activist Investor movements and fast-moving market volatility. To carry out this proactive engagement, a richer partnership is required between IR and PR.
Here are some things you need to be thinking about now:
- Different investors will react to various types of information and weigh various reputational aspects of a brand uniquely. It is important to determine how your brand drivers are resonating with key audiences. How are these key elements being captured in the media and in social conversations? Where is there a need for improvement?
- Brands need to identify their weaknesses and their comparative advantages versus the competition at all times. Then you need to build the right messages to correct misguided perceptions with investors.
- It is critical to understand your “influencers” – those that drive the perception of your stock as a place to invest. Not all influencers are created equally; it is not just about the Wall Street Analysts anymore. You need to know who the right influencers are, be it a government regulator, money manager, journalist, or simply an influential blogger, and engage those that matter.
Generic Tracking of the Media Conversation will no Longer Protect you – Go Deep to Get Smart.
Analyzing media is extremely important because media sentiment has been proven to be correlated with stock price. But, you need to go beyond simple keyword tracking to get accurate and actionable data – the “why”.
For media analysis to be successful, you can no longer rely on simply tracking your company name, executives and focusing on financial sites. Old-school keyword-driven tracking and analytics will likely leave you blindsided. Instead, it’s time to understand the “reputational conversation”. Reputational data can help you break down your public perception and understand what is driving it. You can also know how to pitch content that will positively impact your image it by identifying authors and outlets that are pushing certain messages and receiving a lot of social traction. Benchmarking your reputational data can pinpoint areas for targeted, effective message improvement.
The World has Moved to Data-driven Decisions. Don’t Get Left Behind.
When making decisions, a simple opinion does not cut it. You need to work with numbers now – fight fire with fire – and get savvy fast. Interestingly, the best defense is a good offense. Hedge funds have huge data capabilities, but IR often does not. So you need to ask yourself: are your technologies and data analytics giving you an advantage versus your adversary?
You need to make sure you have the proper resources working reliably to generate quality data to back up your decisions. And should a crisis hit, use that data to move smartly, quickly and in a proactive manner instead of chasing the issue.
Speed of AI is Increasing, but AI Still Struggles with Accuracy and Can Lead us Astray.
Use of artificial intelligence (AI) in IR is growing at a rapid pace. Enterprise IR solutions (Bloomberg CMi2i, Q4 Activism Alarm, Nasdaq IR, and others) apply machine learning to big financial data sets to predict vulnerable companies, investor trends and behavior, and overall investor sentiment towards specific industry sectors.
This information is useful as a baseline for a company to understand investors and identify when their company is being viewed as vulnerable. But repeated studies continue to prove that unsupervised machine learning is still missing the mark with media analysis. Changing zeitgeist, linguistic nuances, sarcasm, and a variety of company perspectives and priorities greatly limit the effectiveness and accuracy of machine-only solutions.
In addition, automated story-writing on company earnings has taken off. In 2014, Associated Press started to publish automated earnings stories. In Q1 of 2014, 300 of these stories were published. Fast forward to Q1 of 2018 and 4,700 stories were published. Clearly, the speed of AI is increasing, but at what cost? Neil Hershberg, SVP at Business Wire states, “While they certainly provide greater visibility to small and mid-sized companies that were previously excluded from editorial coverage, the template format of these reports can often result in material information being left out of stories.”
So if you are responsible for investor relations, your world is changing fast. Social media, data analytics, artificial intelligence, and a rapidly changing investor landscape seem to have conspired to make your job more difficult. So how are you going to regain control?
Written by Eric Koefoot, PublicRelay Founder & Strategic Advisor.
The Department of Treasury had an organization-wide goal to move towards online communications. To better engage their users and improve their operational excellence, they began surveying the constituents that came to their site.
The survey was a mix of “closed” (yes/no) questions and open-ended responses. While open-ended or freeform text answers are invaluable, they are often more challenging to analyze for trends. Now, couple this with the fact that most people who completed the questionnaires routinely didn’t answer the questions that were being asked– they answer different questions entirely – the information became very difficult to categorize for insight.
Discover how PublicRelay’s analysis allowed the Department of Treasury’s Online Services to improve usage and enhance satisfaction across the site, as well as ensure the on-going success of their push towards more modern, online communications.
In today’s 24/7 news cycle, staying on top of what’s going on is a Sisyphean task for companies, non-profit organizations, and industry groups (not to mention private citizens). Issue tracking is a nonstarter for many busy professionals — especially in fast-paced industries like tech. What about tracking policy issues and concepts that aren’t summarized by a quick three-word Google search, like “online content responsibility?” The bigger the players involved and the more complex an issue, the more time-consuming and tricky it is just to keep up. The minute you’ve got a handle on the conversation, it transforms into something unrecognizable. Back to the drawing board.
Finding influencers who write about these issues can also feel like nailing Jell-O to a tree. Who’s writing about my complicated topics? Which of their articles is getting traction on social media? Who has a bone to pick with my industry? What authors write favorably about my topics and might be interested in my pitch? These questions are tough enough to answer when your topic is niche. What if your industry is “tech” and your topic is “who’s responsible for content posted on social media?” Tracking big policy areas like these (and the people with influence) takes time and resources and we know how scarce both of those are. That’s why analyzing industry/topic-related news to locate influencers is something few companies have the bandwidth to do well — despite the potential rewards.
Wading through the melee is possible, though — with a plan. Recently, PublicRelay and a leading tech industry advisory group picked five hot technology-related topics and set out to get an idea of what was being written about them and who was doing the writing:
- The effects of AI on job creation/destruction
- Who is responsible for content posted online?
- Use of the internet by terrorist/extremist groups
- Hacking/online security breaches
- Antitrust issues in the tech sector
Finding relevant articles to analyze is the first step. These topics are not simple, and cannot be summarized by a word or string of words. Human-assisted AI helps to quickly cull through the slew of media content published about the tech industry and isolate the most important coverage.
Next is the analysis of the coverage. This is where you answer questions like “who is writing negative articles about anti-trust law in the tech industry that are gaining traction on social media” or “are there new authors covering the effects of AI on job creation?”.
These answers not only help the association keep an accurate pulse on policy issues their members turn to them for but also inform their communications strategy. Insights around key media conversations that impact consumer and legislative stakeholder perceptions help them tailor an advocacy and influencer outreach strategy that gets results. These takeaways help bolster the association’s ongoing efforts to develop essential standards and ensure its members are heard on the Hill.
Read Next: “How Third-Party Influencers Can Shape Your Media Strategy“
No matter what terminology you prefer – driverless car, autonomous vehicle, autonomous driving, self-driving car or something else – the future of human and non-human driving is a hot topic. And we kicked off 2018 with two major consumer events that had the media abuzz about it. PublicRelay analyzed traditional and social media around autonomous vehicles at both events and here are some of the interesting nuggets that we uncovered.
Read Next: “6 Steps for Measuring PR at Your Next Event“
CES hands down “wins” for sheer volume of coverage at 7X the number of articles written on the subject. Autonomous drive was among the top five products discussed at CES 2018, along with gaming products, computers, and smart home technology. At the Detroit Auto Show it placed in the top four with vehicle infotainment systems and electric cars.
Social sharing of autonomous driving articles also put CES in the lead by 8X – Detroit Auto Show articles were shared 19,416 times across Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and CES articles were shared 151,662 times. The topic as a percentage of traditional coverage for each show was much closer – the topic appeared in 13% of total CES event coverage, and in 11% of Detroit Auto Show coverage. The chart below outlines the top topics by percentage for both events.
The most obvious reason is that CES is first on the calendar. But more probable is that CES’ focus on technology is a perfect platform for showing exactly HOW these vehicles are coming to market. The CES audience is extremely interested in technology and innovation that they can use today or in the future. How a car can drive itself certainly fits that bill.
The self-driving topic appeared in more than half [54%] of Nvidia’s traditional coverage at CES. They released a new platform for self-driving vehicles, and announced partnerships with VW and Uber. At a press conference, Nvidia’s CEO stated, “the complexity of future cars is incredible.”
While autonomous driving was covered at the Detroit Auto Show, the show focus is on what is available today for consumers. For instance, articles about self-driving features within traditional cars, rather than fully autonomous vehicles were popular.
A hot self-driving sub-topic in Detroit was government regulations and guidelines, with many articles citing quotes from U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and other legislators. Chao appeared in 16% of the Detroit Auto Show’s autonomous driving coverage.
Learn more about PublicRelay’s coverage of CES: Understanding the Success of CES.