Recently, a Business Insider article caught my attention when it sought to quantify the brand boosts that Intel, Under Armour and Merck experienced when their CEOs resigned from the White House Manufacturing Advisory Council. To measure the impact of the walkouts, the piece relied on mentions and tonality data provided by a well-known social analytics tool.

The quote that stuck out was about Merck and their very high percentage of negative tone. The provider clarified by stating “the only reason it is negative is because people are criticizing Trump for singling out Merck and Frazier and not the other CEOs, and the algorithm can’t decipher that context.”

Here’s the problem: algorithms can mine data well and even analyze its tone using keywords, but only a human can interpret the results in the context of current events. But what happens when you ask bigger questions? Such as what was the negativity in the social data referring to? This is where our approach gives the insights that machines can’t.

Because the overall tone of a post is not an accurate measure for effect on reputation and brand, our analysis focuses on getting to the “so what?” answers. And these are the answers we uncovered when the context of the Merck posts were analyzed for our test:

• What was the overall sentiment toward Merck? Mostly positive – less than 30% of the posts were negative about the brand – a sharp contrast to the statistic pulled by an algorithm in the Business Insider.
• Were the posts about any of the brand drivers that the business cares about? (see chart) Yes – and the tone of each subtopic was analyzed for more clarity.
• Did traditional media have any impact on social? Traditional media sharing activity concentrated largely on positive coverage. A Los Angeles Times editorial praising Ken Frazier for his courage was among the most shared articles, generating over a quarter of a million Facebook shares.This is exactly the type of insight communicators can use to bring the right perspective to their executive teams.

Reporting on counts and tonality in social media can be a starting point. But to deliver true value to your organization, you need to uncover context. Pairing human analysis with technology gets you the story behind the story. Communicators need specific, timely, and trustworthy conclusions to track their company’s brand and reputation when a major (or any) event occurs.

We are in a new world of public relations management where missing out on a story or tweet from an influencer can potentially cause your brand a disaster.  As communicators, it is essential to perform ongoing media monitoring and social listening for mentions of your brand and key topics that you’re tracking. This can be especially daunting when your brand has a name that is cited thousands of times a day in social and traditional media. Picture how difficult it is to sift through all that information.

On average, we’ve found that less than 20% of all social media data analyzed for clients is relevant to their brand and key messages. A lot of the irrelevant data is generated because brands have common names.

Take Chipotle, for instance, whose brand name is also a common dictionary word for a type of sauce or pepper. How can Chipotle’s communications team monitor thousands of tweets and news articles that use the word ‘chipotle’ and isolate when they are referring only to the brand? Merely using keywords to track online mentions is not enough.

Most media monitoring solutions encourage users to use Boolean logic to pare down the volume of data collected, but applying too many filters puts brands at risk of missing valuable information. For instance: what if a tweet discusses a bad batch of chipotle peppers used at a Chipotle location? If you are filtering out “pepper”, you would have likely omitted this result.

Tide is another example of a brand that deals with common name issues. How can Tide’s communications team focus on articles about the Tide brand and not changes in sea levels or Roll Tide Bama or any number of uses? A typical media monitoring solution would suggest that you solve this problem by filtering out articles that contain keywords like ‘tide’ and ‘ocean’ together. But, that could still cause you to miss essential coverage such as an article claiming that Tide detergent is causing water pollution.

The bottom line is that simply automating keyword tracking and pairing it with Boolean logic is not a strong enough media monitoring solution. You need to pair automated media monitoring with high-quality human analysis to ensure that you are working with data that you can trust.

Pushing an organization’s key messages is a priority for communications professionals. Yet effectively promoting that messaging can be daunting, especially in a noisy industry with many different players and trending stories. Strategizing a messaging campaign requires quickly identifying the influencers and media channels surrounding an important topic.

A Fortune 500 telecommunications company wanted to better understand the media landscape for a hot-button industry topic, data privacy. The company particularly cared about how influencers framed that topic in relation to top telecom companies. They needed specific, tailored data for their industry, but they were uncertain where to start.

Don’t Miss: “How Third-Party Influencers Can Shape Your Media Strategy“

Working with their media analytics team, they quickly pulled together a year’s worth of data about authors and publications writing about the topic. The team had already been cataloging these concepts and their connections to the company and its top competitors. This accurate data enabled them to easily visualize the dominant players in these critical conversations.

The data provided other valuable insights for the company. They had details about the authors who wrote positively or negatively towards each telecom companies’ stance on privacy. They also could see which authors’ articles tended to go viral on different social media channels.

Equipped with this analysis, the company efficiently and effectively created a messaging plan around data privacy. They cultivated relationships with top authors who write positively about data privacy and were able to reach wider audiences. The company was also able to predict the influencers that would most likely cover their privacy practices unfavorably and respond to that negative messaging in traditional and social channels. With access to rich, curated data, the company continues to stay informed and remains a part of the data privacy dialogue.

This blog was written by Azhar Unwala, SVP of Insights & Analytics at PublicRelay.

If you’ve ever done PR work for a telecommunications company, you know that special events matter. In an industry where customers are always shopping for the next best deal, the media buzz around a new product launch, data plan, or ad campaign can make or break the company’s bottom line.

With all this fast-breaking news, understanding an event’s success in near-real time can be difficult. Here are 5 questions our top telecom clients ask during a special event:

• What is the general sentiment towards the event? Distinguishing the positive and negative coverage by authors and outlets can help you strategize in real time. You should be able to quickly locate and share the favorable and unfavorable reporting from your organization’s point-of-view.
• What does our media audience look like? Identifying the reach of publications writing about you and the stories going viral on social media can ensure you stay informed about top influencers. Use advanced analytics to marry the impact of traditional and social media on your event.
• Are our key messages pulling through? Drilling down to the messaging of your event news can help you measure the effect on your overall brand. Having a dedicated human analyst ensures that even the tiniest details about your media coverage are recognized correctly – including concepts and topics that do not appear in text.
• Is our CEO or other key executives mentioned? Knowing how the news cycle relates the event to its top decision-makers can help you deliver valuable media feedback to your leadership. Discover how an event’s coverage can affect your CEO’s reputation or whether executive mentions can influence a story’s pick-up.
• How does this event stack up to previous events? Use past performance analysis to be proactive in your event strategy and set more informed goals. Then quickly debrief on your current efforts – from message pull-through to social amplification and author tonality to share of voice.

Getting to the big answers behind these event questions takes more than traditional media intelligence solutions can deliver on their own. When the best technology is paired with human analysis you get the most accurate and timely answers that drive smarter business decisions.

Read Next: “6 Steps to Measure PR At Your Next Event“

This blog was written by Azhar Unwala, SVP of Insights & Analytics at PublicRelay.

Company crises can be deal-makers (or breakers) in the career of a PR or Communications professional. C-suite execs want proof that a crisis strategy is working, both during and after the event. How can teams prove that their handling of an event is sufficient, and that it results in a return to business as usual as quick as possible?

When a major safety hazard threatened a pioneering tech company, a PR exec encountered a media firestorm. New to the company and the role, the communicator pushed an unexplored strategy to manage the story. In doing so, he needed to prove that the change in direction was worthwhile.

His strategy for doing so? A focus on strong analytical data. However, prior to his arrival, the Communications team had never provided measurement data to the Executive team.

With a lack of historic media analytics, he couldn’t see if his leadership brought the company back to business as usual faster than in previous crises. He turned to a new measurement method: technology plus human media analysis. Utilizing skilled analysts who could analyze months of data within the context of the current situation allowed him to compare the current crisis messaging to that of past incidents.

Analysts worked round the clock to track coverage across media platforms, isolating the impact in real time and providing visuals that could help the C-suite truly understand this event by comparing it to the past.

As the public debated the company’s safety and future, the robust data gathered by the intelligence team made one thing clear: the communicator’s strategy had worked. The positivity of coverage increased dramatically compared to a prior, identical incident. Social media of the coverage was triple the volume of the past event. And the negative coverage decreased significantly.

The verdict? The communicator’s strategy had worked. His crisis strategy was better, and he had reliable data to prove it. To the C-level execs at this numbers-driven tech giant, the data was convincing.  Not only did reliable media intelligence enable him to establish a measurement standard, it also earned him a seat at the table at a crucial moment and moving forward.

By now most everyone has seen the LifeLock commercials poking fun at monitoring your credit versus doing something about the fraud that’s found. That shift in terminology and mindset is happening across all industries, moving from “reporting on” things to giving you “actionable intelligence”.

The Public Relations and Communications space is no different, moving from using solutions for media monitoring to media analysis and media intelligence. Now that we’re calling it intelligence, can I do anything different with the output I’ll get or is it more of the same?

Media solutions are technically easy to replace so if you are not happy with the one you have, you simply choose another vendor and hope the experience is better. But what if the issue isn’t that your solution doesn’t have great charts or an intuitive interface, but that the output must be cleaned up just to get the story that you are comfortable taking to your CEO or Board? Can you draw market conclusions or make decisions on what you are receiving directly from your vendor?

While this list is not exhaustive, I think these nine questions will help you uncover the quality and accuracy of the intelligence you can expect to receive from the solutions you are evaluating.

9 Questions to As Your Media Analysis Partner

1. Do you extract sentiment from a social posting? Can you handle sarcasm? How?  Can you distinguish between acronyms with multiple meanings (SMH = “Shaking my Head” and “So Much Hate” or more obscure abbreviations)?
2. Can you exclude trivial mentions of products (like “Let’s carpool and meet in the lot next to the Exxon station”)? How?
3. How do you extract out concepts like Social Responsibility and Technical Innovation if the words are not used in any manner in the post? If you cannot, how would we work around it?
4. Historically, what percent of search result postings that you provide are relevant to the brand and product team? (versus those that are peripheral postings that triggered a keyword but were not really relevant and/or actionable for our efforts?)  How do you know?
5. How do you determine who is influential? Is it keyword hits plus attributes like reach, likes, and retweets?  Can you take into account whether the tone and substance of their postings align specifically with our brand’s values and philosophy?
6. Can you show the actual results for our business live in your system right now?
7. Can you tell me the authors and outlets that are covering three of my seven competitors and five of the topics (not keywords) I am interested in but have not yet written about my company?
8. After the account is set up in your system, who maintains evolving keywords, brands and hashtags?
9. With imagery analysis, how do you capture the overall feeling that an image is conveying (cool, exciting, pensive, tranquil, apprehensive)?

These are questions any communicator with a complex brand or intense competition should be asking.  The answers will help tell you how sophisticated and truly insightful your potential provider is.  And if nothing else, this list might provide you with some new ideas and inspiration for additional metrics that you are not looking at today – but should be.

As you dissect the landscape of media monitoring and analytics solutions available to your team, it’s important to understand how best-in-class Communications professionals are tying measurement to business outcomes.

In our last blog post, we shared the results of an MIT study testing how untrained machines fare when it comes to measuring a brand’s key messages, identifying appropriate sentiment, and determining customer experience. The findings were less than stellar at 9% correct for key messages, 20% on sentiment and 33% on customer experience.

The focus in that post was on human vs. machine, but what happens when you pair the two together?

A hybrid approach to media analysis, one where a highly-trained human analyst utilizes top technology to track and monitor your media coverage and then correlates that data back to the stated business goals, produces exponentially better results.

The outcomes outlined below are achieved with a partnership of top technology and a level of human analysis that understands the context and nuances of media coverage specific to each unique company.

• Identify a new competitor– The C-Suite at a manufacturing corporation was specifically concerned about their coverage in high-stature industry publications, especially as it pertained to competitors. Although they were initially monitoring for a predetermined list of competing companies, a dedicated Analyst noticed that a young and untracked company was emerging, taking over a share of attention from important outlets. Proactively tracking that young company allowed the C-Suite to immediately pull powerful SOV reports and keep an eye on the new business, keeping them in the know on what was most impacting their business before it was too late.
• Stay in the know in a volatile market – A major telecommunications provider frequently needs timely media insights and reporting regarding product announcements, competitive announcements, or for ad-hoc internal presentations. They do not have the time to rework “directionally correct” data to get to the coverage analysis they need. Utilizing a dedicated media analyst with access to state-of-the-art reporting allows the team to be responsive and deliver their CEO the analytics they trust to make important decisions in the moment.

Ultimately, the power of pairing human with technology when it comes to media analysis is that it gets to the story behind the story, giving you the specific, timely, and trustworthy conclusions you need to be a brand hero with your C-suite.

Measuring media coverage is a complicated task. It’s a no-brainer for your team to want both accuracy and efficiency at the forefront of any monitoring and analysis solution, but it can be difficult to find a tool that succeeds at both.

With a plethora of different options to choose from, including many automated solutions that use technology alone to provide media metrics, it’s important to ask – is this analysis something we can trust?

The Problem with Data

For many leading companies, accurate analysis of text remains a problem yet to be solved. IBM has estimated that one-third of business leaders don’t trust their own data, and even more staggering, that $3.1 trillion of America’s GDP is lost due to bad data.

Researching Humans v. Machines

Considering this high risk that inaccurate data has across industries, a recent collaboration with Toyota Motor NA Energy & Environmental Research Group, PublicRelay and students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management (MIT Sloan) Analytics Lab set out to find an answer to the question “can computers analyze media coverage as well as humans?”

After a series of analytical tests against social media postings conducted over the course of 3 months, it was determined that the machine-based analysis could only detect 9% of key messages, identify 20% of appropriate sentiment, and determine 33% of the customer experience.

Conducting the Study

In order to conduct their research, the MIT Sloan Analytics Lab tested various technologies to:

• Understand which topics car enthusiasts are discussing in relation to Toyota’s alternate-fuel vehicles on Twitter;
  and
• Identify “significant” tweets based on topic inference from above.

The goal was to improve the Toyota team’s understanding of consumer behavior, to improve consumer perceptions and sentiments, identify tweets that demand further tracking or direct engagement, and formulate messaging that Toyota might use to drive social media conversations themselves.

Answering the Data Question

Rather than accurately providing the analysis itself, the students found that the technology was most useful for eliminating irrelevant posts before humans analyze them.

The results of this student project showed that rapidly emerging issues or breaking news were slow to be reflected in the automated technology model—since the machines had to “learn” how to categorize it and this took a fair amount of time. The results also showed that 80% of the machine-learning work was purely data clean-up.

These days, data and analytics are critical to decision making in every business function, and Communications and PR is no exception.   But teams need to select solutions that don’t just provide data, rather they provide quality data.  And based on the MIT/Toyota study, it seems that computers are not yet up to that task.

Click here to learn more about PublicRelay’s partnership with Toyota and MIT regarding machine analysis.

The best part about a company special event is that you know it’s coming – in the unpredictable world of Communications, that alone is a gift.

The worst part is that an influx of coverage can mean an influx of bad data – unless your team has a strategic plan in place to draw actionable insights from the media attention you gain.

Setting your team up for success in advance of your next product announcement, trade show, conference, or earnings release is perhaps the most important step of managing PR surrounding an event.

Without that strategic plan, you’ll end up chasing huge volumes of noise and miss out on actionable insights that speak to the issues you care about. Here’s how some of our clients have successfully tackled media analytics surrounding large events.

Look at the Past

At the early stages of planning your media strategy, ensure a solid understanding of how your company has tackled similar event situations in the past.  If you’ve consistently done well with specific tactics, make sure those are repeated and communicated to your team.  If there were unexpected challenges and areas of weakness in your last event, you can focus on those now.

At the onset of a huge tradeshow, one of our clients analyzed how they performed at a similar event several months prior. Historically, data showed that they should expect more than double the readership of the next largest trade event of its kind, and that tonality was over 80% positive.  Here are some of the other items they reviewed before game planning a new strategy:

• How much coverage they received and from which target media outlets
• Tonality of coverage from the last event, including sentiment analysis of key event messages
• Which influencers drove the conversation
• Impact of executive spokespeople
• How coverage was shared on Social Media and which topics drove the most engagement

Bonus: Right after the chaos dies down from the upcoming event, don’t forget to document what went well and what didn’t.  This will help with Step 1 in the future.

Set Goals

Now that you’ve reviewed the past and understand how your team has performed historically, you’re prepared to set goals for the upcoming special event.  These goals are crucial for bench-marking after the event is over and will provide unified direction in the moment.

A few great goals our clients have set before special events:

• Connect with influencers in new, unique ways (providing greater access to new products than before, for example)
• Refine messages to supporters and critics based on reception last year
• Shift tone to positive or neutral on specific topics that played predominantly negative last year
• Set a list of targeted, influential authors to engage with who haven’t driven coverage historically
• Employ spokespeople in a more effective way (greater readership from certain spokespeople)

Bonus: It’s good to have goals that are realistic, but be sure to set one or two “reach goals” that you can encourage your team to shoot for – this will provide motivation, and your team may even surprise themselves.

Make Sure You’ve Got the Tools

Without the right tools, you’ll have wasted time reflecting and game planning without the means to execute. The right resources will give your goal legs and hopefully protect you and your team from feeling overwhelmed and defeated during an event.

There are several tools and resource allocation opportunities your team may consider, including:

• Training your team on new responsibilities and divvying up tasks in advance
• Working with existing vendors or hiring new ones to help
• Utilizing measurement tools and software that cut through irrelevant mentions (without you doing the work)

One solution our clients have found is to lean on outside help to keep them updated.  Our client at the trade show partnered with a PublicRelay media analyst to update their team periodically as coverage streamed in – they even had him come to the event. This extra set of eyes in the coverage allowed the team to move quickly without getting bogged down or overwhelmed.

Additionally, the focused analysis from outside resources kept the client from drowning in details and getting distracted by having to curate every piece of information coming in.

Bonus: Ensure that if you do invest in new tools and software to track an event, you do your homework before contracting. Make a list of what is most important to you and seek advice from peers on which tools have worked best in the past.

Recognize You Can’t Do It All

The biggest challenge our clients have faced in previous events was the sheer amount of information thrown at them. For our client organizing the trade show, we analyzed 3,500 unique articles on the event – and those were only the relevant stories! The company received tens of thousands of media mentions during the week of the show, a large portion of which was simply noise.
We’ve seen the following plans help our clients tackle the most important aspects of an event:

• Identifying a concentrated list of outlets they want to monitor in real time
• Committing to reviewing only the most important subset of tweets from influential accounts
• Circulating twice daily updates on coverage, as well as an end-of-day comprehensive summary

Bonus: Recognizing you can’t do it all is helpful in effectively reporting to CEO’s on the progress of your event.  Your CEO will only need summarized updates on coverage, not an overwhelming amount of information.

Evaluate as it Happens

Monitoring coverage in real time may seem like an obvious step, but it’s important to plan how your team will succeed in this aspect – without a plan, you risk missing actionable metrics due to the flood of news coming at you in the moment (see Step 4).

During their real-time evaluations, our clients have found it helpful to:

• Make expectations clear across the team – internally and with CEO’s. Everyone should know what information they should be expecting to receive, such as twice daily media updates or end-of-day charts/graphs that expose actionable data.
• Schedule frequent check-ins with the team scouring through the media
• Set a plan for reviewing all the 2^nd priority coverage from the event after the dust settles (or not even bother with it at all)

Our media analyst who attended the large trade show alerted our client that an exhibitor was thrown out of their event – something he saw in the press before they knew it had happened.  Their team was able to speak with the reporters who had started tweeting and publishing negative coverage on the incident and positively shifted the conversation through the rest of the trade show.

Bonus: This is your moment to benchmark against goals – be sure they are clearly accessible either in a shared document or in an interactive document that compares key metrics. This will allow for either real-time correction of course or real-time celebration.

To learn more about what to consider during an event, read “What PR Data Pros Ask About Event Coverage“

Report on the Event   

Once the dust has settled and initial evaluation has been done, compile your findings into a presentation that can be used to educate the team and report up to Executives. This is the time to call out your successes and identify shortcomings.

Creating useful visuals, especially ones that incorporate comparison between industry events, are often the best way of sharing media intelligence with an internal or C-Level team.

Bonus:  Take slides from each individual event and compile an end-of-year report that gathers comprehensive metrics over 12 months. This will give a useful bird’s-eye view as you enter a new year filled with even more media opportunities.

Use Case: Analyzing autonomous vehicle news at trade shows

If you had a dollar for every time your Communications team has uttered the phrase “Thought Leadership”, you’d probably be able to buy your dream vacation home.

In nearly every industry, being recognized as an expert on the issues relating to your products and services is an aspirational goal. As such, some of our clients invest a lot in their PR Thought Leadership programs – they build in-depth reports around strategic topics, mobilize spokespeople to share their messaging, and otherwise invest substantial time and resources into becoming a company the industry looks to for new thinking.

However, despite the importance these programs can play in building a brand and creating media success, we’ve found that some companies have invested a lot in their Thought Leadership initiatives without a reliable way to track how they perform.

A strong Thought Leadership strategy is characterized by sustained media coverage, reader engagement, and influencer pick-up. Metrics addressing these aspects of your program can go a long way toward gauging how successful it is.

Can your team answer the 3 crucial Thought Leadership questions below?

Is our Thought Leadership generating sustained coverage by the media?

One of our clients in the Business Services industry chooses to track individual reports over time. This analysis gives their team the ability to compare reports to one another, providing insight into which topics seem to be working best. The ability to examine trends in specific reports and topics has helped the client to sharpen their publishing strategies.

Secondary Questions to Answer:
• Which report has the media reacted to most favorably this past year?
• When does our Thought Leadership coverage ultimately die out, on average?
• How frequently (and how sustainably) do top-tier outlets cover us compared to lower-stature outlets?

The following chart displays the daily potential impressions for coverage pertaining to three Thought Leadership reports, all released by our client around the same time.

How do readers engage with our Thought Leadership coverage on Social Media?

Understanding how readers react to your Thought Leadership releases is an important data point for Communications teams.  Measuring how much your audience is engaging with your content (and on which social platforms) can help you improve your strategy for future releases.

Secondary Questions to Answer:
• Which social platforms show upward trends in engagement over time?
• Which social platforms historically do not trend well with our Thought Leadership content?
• Are there specific influencers in social media who help our content gain positive attention? Or negative attention?

Doing this analysis has revealed interesting data for many of our clients. Some have discovered that their content doesn’t become popular on Facebook until a few weeks after a Thought Leadership release, or that Twitter coverage is strong initially and then dies quickly. These pieces of information can help your team develop aspirational and well-informed plans to engage audiences when and where it will be most effective for your team.

Are the right authors picking up our Thought Leadership content at the right times?

It’s likely there’s a group of top influencers your company hopes to build a relationship within relation to Thought Leadership initiatives. By gathering metrics on frequency of pick up by key Thought Leadership influencers, your team can assess how often it’s getting content in front of the right audiences and look for opportunities to make pitching more effective.

Secondary Questions to Answer:
• What caused us to meet our pitching goals in certain months?
• Which pitching strategies provided results and which didn’t?
• How much penetration do we achieve with our key authors compared to our competitors?

Pulling this data for our Business Services client revealed some interesting insights. After identifying the top reporters they hoped to gain attention from, our metrics revealed that a majority of coverage pertaining to Thought Leadership wasn’t generated by that influential group. This data drove home the need to make a change in strategy and refocus on the set of influencers offering the best audience for the client’s ideas.

Investing time and resources into Thought Leadership can lead to huge wins for your team. But these rewards may prove elusive unless you are also tracking metrics that will help you optimize the performance of your content.

Measuring coverage sustainability, how readers react to your Thought Leadership, and the relative impact of different authors will give you the data you need to get the most from your Thought Leadership investment

This blog was written by Eric Koefoot, Founder of and Strategic Advisor at PublicRelay.