The global pandemic of 2020 overtook and overwhelmed many companies’ best communications efforts. With communications teams assuming greater responsibility for effective messaging amid an influx of fake news across the media, their companies have faced tremendous pressures both in battling the pandemic and ensuring their brand stays intact.

Long-term Changes

The impact of 2020’s pandemic has become part of a seismic shift in the way companies collaborate and communicate. As we roll into a new year, many companies will find that these changes will carry forward into 2021, even as the pandemic itself fades.

Here are a few ways in which the events of 2020 will affect the communications function in 2021:

• What we saw in 2020: A massive lift in the value of the Communications function. 

Almost every company had to up their game in communications skills and the intensity of their outreach. 2020 saw pressures not just on external messaging, but also on internal communications. Out of nowhere, companies were forced to massively increase their conversations with employees about critical topics like workplace safety, remote work standards, and even the viability of the business itself.

What to expect in 2021: Expect this trend to continue in 2021 as companies position themselves to transition out of the pandemic.

Themes of corporate and social responsibility, including the concepts of social as well as economic justice, are likely to return to the forefront after having been sidelined by a worsening pandemic. Watch for an increase in conversations about broader shareholder responsibilities far beyond stock price.

• What we saw in 2020: A move towards putting employees first.

Finally. Many companies realized that employees were really what mattered when the chips were down. When you have to reinvent your business model in real time, you need an engaged workforce that feels like a partner in the business. In many cases, the companies that survived 2020 were those that had the most engaged and dedicated employees.

What to expect in 2021: This trend will continue as employers negotiate the terms of the post-pandemic employment relationship with employees.

Expect more employee input on work conditions, benefits, and even employers’ positions on social issues.

• What we saw in 2020: A shift to remote work.

Historically a perk for a subset of employees that was only implemented by a small number of organizations, remote work became commonplace in 2020, with many companies forced to make their entire staff remote. After some initial glitches, it was largely a successful transformation of the workplace across industries. Technologies improved, home offices were upgraded, and every function innovated to make it all work.

What to expect in 2021: Where possible, remote work or partial in-office work weeks (like 3-2-2), will become a long-term fixture for many jobs.

Expect a major impact on the size of office spaces leased by companies, and a corresponding hit to commercial real estate that will continue for many years. Secondary effects, like lower public transportation usage (a problem), and lower traffic congestion (a blessing), will have negative secondary impacts on businesses like coffee shops, gas stations, and even commercial construction. 

• What we saw in 2020: True adoption of video conferencing.

Using video calls for business used to be rare, but now even basic calls have shifted over to video. Social protocols for video calls were quickly developed, and every function in the organization figured out how best to make it work. As a result, in 2020 many businesses improved their ability to build better relationships with customers and vendors across the spectrum. In addition, businesses that used to sell 100% in-person found out that video sales worked, saving them substantial time (and money), all while making sales professionals particularly efficient.

What to expect in 2021: The big unknown in the future is its impact on business travel – how much travel is truly required to build and maintain effective relationships with customers?

Will the sales function migrate back to in-person calls, or will the massive efficiencies of virtual meetings remain so compelling that the days of in-person calls are numbered? Expect the answer to be a blend: some activities will remain virtual, while high-end sales will return to travel because in-person sales work best.

• What we saw in 2020: The entrenchment of fake news as an art.

The election year (and its aftermath) showed the power of aggressively using traditional and social media to spin and control a message, even if that message was patently false. Many communications professionals (and politicians) were forced to reckon with baseless claims against their companies and brands, while countering them became more difficult as news sources and social media polarized and fragmented in 2020.

What to expect in 2021: This problem is not going away.

Fragmented sources of information will continue to allow fringe conspiracy theories and fabricated news to reach receptive ears. Business and government leadership will need to improve their communications efforts – both the accuracy and the frequency of communications – and they will need to employ trusted voices to rise above the clutter. There is no end in sight for this battle since any regulation of “facts” goes directly against the constitutionally protected concept of free speech.

The Future Has Been Thrust Upon Us

The changes driven by the global pandemic are not going away any time soon. In fact, the fundamental shifts in communications, collaboration, and messaging that were forced upon companies in 2020 will remain with us in 2021, with some of them settling in our daily lives for the long term.

Media monitoring involves tracking the output of traditional, social, and broadcast media outlets and authors. While it can be utilized by countless groups – from political think tanks to PR executives – communications teams can use it to gain a better understanding of the effectiveness of their various strategies and campaigns. Media monitoring is more than simply searching for every single mention of a company over time; it is the compilation of relevant mentions based on personalized and structured search parameters. An effective strategy can highlight the most relevant content on a day-to-day basis, while also providing a structured breakdown of media coverage broken into predetermined categories, such as competitor stories and industry updates.  

Why is Media Monitoring Important?

Media monitoring is important because it helps communications teams stay informed of relevant breaking news, the latest industry developments, communications crises, and their company’s representation in the media. Though strategies and objectives vary from company to company, a clearly focused approach can yield a more in-depth analysis. Amidst an abundance of media coverage, an effective monitoring strategy can cut through the noise and help home in on the most significant, most shared, and most widely syndicated pieces.

Its value can be applied to numerous company departments, with the potential to offer teams data-driven insights to guide their individual objectives.

For instance, immediate updates on company mentions can help PR and marketing teams respond to breaking news, while regular alerts and updates can inform crisis management strategies. Teams can also pinpoint widely shared stories and quickly identify the percentage of stories featuring quotes from company representatives. The more information a PR team has on hand, the easier it is it for them to implement an effective crisis response and track its success.

Keeping abreast of media coverage that mentions your company is vital, as is being informed of the latest industry news and updates. Marketing strategies can take advantage of hot industry topics that receive unprecedented levels of coverage and social engagement. By capitalizing on trending industry topics, you can increase your company’s mentions across key industry outlets.

Furthermore, monitoring enables sales teams to understand what has their competitors’ products attracting unrivaled media attention or scrutiny. Sales departments can capitalize on the insights gained from identifying the drivers of both positive and negative competitor media coverage related to products or services to further distinguish their brand from rivals’ in a meaningful way.

The ability to make informed decisions based on contextualized data analytics is the key benefit that links each of these departments. By pairing regular media updates with an understanding of the topics and circumstances that drive mentions, coverage, sentiment, and sharing, a strategic media plan can provide company-wide benefits.

Key Media Monitoring Metrics

The sheer volume of available metrics can make it difficult to distinguish the most significant from the least. While different metrics may appeal to various teams across a company, there are a few key metrics that can build a foundation to inform multiple business strategies.

Reputation Management

Charting the prevalence of specific topics over time yields one of the fundamental metrics that can provide crucial context to weekly, quarterly, or annual media coverage. While spikes in coverage may be caused by specific events, certain subtopics may be gaining more media coverage than others within these spikes. Tracking this data can aid communications teams in understanding the topics that garner the most media pickup and traction with their audiences.

For instance, perhaps articles about CEO comments drove Q2 coverage, or the second half of the year saw workplace-related discussions double. Tracking the volume and tone of reputational drivers can help communications teams to identify what drove company mentions, positive and negative sentiment, and social sharing, and provide useful information to guide their communications strategies going forward.

Competitive Intelligence

Using metrics to track your own campaigns and initiatives can help your communications team to understand both what went well and what they can improve upon. Tracking competitor coverage, on the other hand, can help communications teams to inform strategies to outmaneuver key competitors by distinguishing the good from the bad of their PR efforts.

Studying competitor media coverage will allow you to identify the drivers of competitors’ negative coverage, and to learn from the effectiveness of competitors’ media campaigns and crises response.

Messaging and Campaigns

Armed with media insights, communications teams can plan future media strategies, initiatives, and campaigns to boost their positive media coverage. This information can also highlight why past initiatives may not have succeeded. Media monitoring will also allow you to track and understand rates of press release pickup, and whether recent spokesperson quotes or executive interviews are driving coverage.

Likewise, when combined with sentiment metrics, teams can dive into understanding the specific drivers of both positive and negative coverage for a period relative to previous quarters. The success of new product launches can be tracked with both sentiment statistics and sharing figures. Pinpointing emerging trends and topical engagement can help communications teams plan future campaigns to improve social media engagement. By understanding how topics resonate with readers and influencers, you can develop an informed media campaign.  

Influencers

When tracked correctly, influencer metrics are also highly informative to a communications strategy. A good media campaign will know which outlets and authors to target for maximum impact. For the best results, your team must be aware of both the experts in the field and the influencers that can capture your target audience, generate the most relevant coverage, and earn the most social engagement across relevant social platforms.

Likewise, diving into influencer metrics can provide clarity on coverage that may be receiving more social media momentum than normal, as well as recent coverage that is trending more negatively compared to previous weeks. Knowing which authors or outlets cover industry issues more critically than others, as well as those that do more to promote their work on social media platforms, can provide an important level of context to monitored media.

Insights into Data-Driven Strategies

Media monitoring can provide a wealth of benefits to communications teams, from regular updates of media mentions to in-depth statistical information based on coverage over time. Examining the factors that drive media coverage can help teams to make data-driven communications decisions. When employed correctly, media metrics can provide context to coverage trends, ultimately enabling communications teams to formulate successful strategies.

At PublicRelay, we offer media monitoring and analytics programs that help our clients to identify relevant media mentions and compile thorough metrics-based reports. Click here to turn your media monitoring into media intelligence!

As the communications industry continues to become more sophisticated, it’s vital that your messages reach and resonate with your target audience. While crafting a strong narrative, writing attention-grabbing press releases, and publishing your own content are all important aspects of engaging your audience, these methods are not enough on their own. Today’s public relations leaders must understand how to partner with influencers to effectively deliver their message to the intended audience. In fact, Edelman found that 63% of consumers in a global survey trust what influencers say about a brand more than they trust the brand’s advertisements.

Types of Influencers

Influencers are individuals with established audiences – often in niche areas – that have built trust and authenticity with their audience. By understanding how to engage with each group and how they can impact the reach of your message, you can get the most out of your communications efforts.

There are three common types:

Social Media

Social media influencers are people who engage with your social media content and share your company’s news coverage, ultimately extending your message to their followers.

Reporters

Reporters with established expertise in your industry often have a dedicated following that trusts their endorsements. Further, they have access to publishing platforms which can broadcast your messages to their readers.

Third-Party

Third-party influencers are recognized experts in their field and are frequently cited by the media as an authoritative source. Though they are not affiliated with your company or the media, associating with this type of influencer can lend credibility to your brand messaging.

Why are Influencers Important?

Influencers are important because they increase the reach and impact of your messages by improving their visibility and credibility. By extension, you can improve awareness of and trust in your brand within your industry space.

Visibility

By routing your messages through people with established audiences, their visibility can be significantly increased. You can also target people more directly based on their location, interests, or demographic profile. For example, if Floridians are your target audience, a reporter from a local publication, like the Miami Herald, is more likely to reach that audience than a national publication, such as the Los Angeles Times, despite the latter’s larger readership.

Credibility

Reaching your target audience with your message is only effective if they also trust the source. For this reason, it’s essential to consider the credibility and reputation of the influencer you choose to engage with. For example, if your story is about a scientific discovery, a reporter with National Geographic would lend more credibility than a reporter from ESPN.

How to Find the Right Influencer

Determining the right individual to share your message is dependent on your communications strategy. However, we recommend partnering with those who can best persuade your target audience, rather than reaching out to dozens of people who are not aligned with your goals. In other words, opt for a targeted approach rather than a wide net. To find the right partnership, ask yourself four questions:

Who does your audience hear from and trust?

A thought leader’s visibility and credibility can go a long way in reaching and building trust with your target audience. By researching your target audience and determining their demographic and psychographic profiles, you can more effectively identify their trusted sources of information.

Who generates engagement with media coverage?

Reaching your audience is only the first step. For the best results, they need to engage with your message to build your brand. You can measure metrics, such as social sharing of media coverage, to pinpoint the topics and stories your audience care about most. This method will also allow you to identify the influencers associated with the highest levels of social sharing.

Who covers the right topics?                               

The most effective way to locate reporters who cover topics relevant to your target audience is to monitor coverage of your company, industry, and competitors. You can also find third-party experts in your field by tracking industry news, as well as making note of individuals or sources who are frequently cited or quoted.

Who portrays your company in a positive light?

Focus your resources on individuals who will act as ambassadors of your brand by portraying it positively, rather than those who will neutrally mention it. You can maximize the return on your outreach by tracking the sentiment of various influencers’ coverage of your company and your industry to identify those who will be supportive of your message.

How to Reach Out to Influencers

Once you’ve found the partnerships you’d like to foster, personalize your outreach to ensure each engagement is unique. There are a host of in-depth resources on engagement to guide personalization, from honing your pitch to authors to working with social content creators.

Avoid the automated, semi-personalized emails that only require swapping out names and key details. Personalizing your strategy starts with ensuring your pitch is aligned with the influencer’s interests and expertise. This method will help your message to resonate with their values and build a strong campaign that meets your communications goals.

Measuring Influencer Impact

As you begin including key thought leaders in your communications strategy, ensure you have a media measurement program in place. Not only will media measurement help you develop outreach targets, but it will also allow you to evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy.

At PublicRelay, we create custom media monitoring and analytics programs to help each client identify the influencers most valuable to their brand. Launch and measure your influencer strategy today!

A crisis communication plan has three phases that consist of planning for, responding to, and assessing methods. It is a strategy for companies’ communications teams to respond to events that attract negative media attention. Media crises that may impact a company’s reputation and require an immediate response from communications teams can range from criticisms of a company’s products or services to executive scandals.

Why is a Crisis Communication Plan Important?

A crisis communication plan is important because it can enable the effective flow of information between a company and its stakeholders. It can also provide direction for the communications team in responding to negative media coverage. The communications department plays an integral role in managing a company’s image when a crisis has occurred and operating from a predetermined plan can improve your team’s response time.

Elements of a Crisis Communication Plan

Each phase has important steps when developing a plan that can promote trust between you and your stakeholders and reduce reputational damage to your company. It also makes it easier for the communications team to remedy any situation that may have a negative impact on the organization’s reputation or brand.

1. Build your crisis communications team
2. Develop scenario-specific strategies
3. Develop and deliver your message
4. Monitor the impact of your message
5. Evaluate your methods
6. Continue to monitor the industry 

Pre-Crisis: Planning Phase

The planning phase is an in-depth preparation to consider all the logistics involved in a communications crisis. If the foundation of your plan is not established, the repercussions could be significant. For example, without a plan in place, your communications team’s response could be delayed, thus there may be more negative press accumulating while the team formulates a plan of action. During this phase, building a crisis communications team and developing scenario-specific strategies are important parts to ensure your team is sufficiently prepared.

Build Your Crisis Communications Team

The team should have representatives from various departments across the company. By building a team with representatives from multiple departments – such as finance, sales, legal, and customer service – you can ensure that your plan will address every aspect of company operation that could be impacted. Though some departments may not be affected, their representatives can offer insight to help mitigate damage and develop a response that addresses the full spectrum of stakeholder needs.

When a team is built, a single member acts as the designated spokesperson responsible for disseminating the company’s key messages. The most effective spokesperson is often a high-ranking member of the department who demonstrates likeability and professionalism and is skilled at building trust. The spokesperson should be provided with relevant training during the planning phase to ensure they are prepared to act once a crisis occurs. 

Develop Scenario-Specific Strategies

Having multiple responses ready that are specific to a variety of scenarios is crucial during preparation. For instance, an executive scandal would likely require a different communications response from a product recall. 

In 2019, McDonald’s responded to the scandal implicating their former CEO, Steve Easterbrook, by severing ties with the executive and issuing public statements that condoned his behavior. However, this response does not apply to all communications crises as some will implicate the company rather than a single individual. For this reason, you will benefit from having alternative, scenario-specific strategies prepared. 

One of the most effective methods for developing situation-appropriate responses is to look to the experiences of your competitors. By actively researching and analyzing your competitors’ media coverage and response impact, companies can create data-driven response plans.

During the Crisis: Response Phase

It is not always possible to predict when a communications crisis will occur, but with proper planning your team is always ready to respond. Your team knows their roles and you have strategies for the most likely scenarios; Implementation is the most appropriate plan of action and designing a message to address the issue at hand. 

Develop and Deliver Your Message

Developing and disseminating an appropriate message helps responding in a timely manner. Your response should be one of the earliest messages out there, or else you risk losing control of the narrative. Get your team together, evaluate the facts that are available to you at the time, and decide how your company will respond. Deliver a single, unified message, as conflicting messages can lead to doubts about the credibility of your message and spokespeople. 

Once you have decided on your message, nominated a spokesperson, and issued a press release, begin reaching out to the authors and media outlets that have positively covered your company in the past. By utilizing media influencers, you can amplify your company’s message and reach a larger audience.

Monitor the Impact of Your Message

Monitoring the performance and impact on the crisis narrative of your message is key. Some metrics to consider measuring are:

1. Key message penetration: track the volume of your company’s media coverage related to the situation to evaluate the impact of your messaging.
2. Outlets: track to see if your message is being picked up by media outlets or journalists that are important to your brand
3. Social media sharing: monitor how far both the initial crisis is being shared and how much your response is being seen.
4. Sentiment: assess whether a spike in coverage is positive or negative to determine whether your message is changing minds.

Tracking all these together will give you a holistic view of how your message is performing, allowing you to assess and adjust accordingly.

After the Crisis: Assessment Phase

By evaluating and continuously monitoring your industry, you can better prepare for the future and improve your company response.

Evaluate Your Methods

Review your response and its impact. Identifying what worked as well as areas for improvement will pay dividends for the future. For example, Chipotle was the center of a major E. coli outbreak in 2015. They responded defensively, by outlining the company’s improvements to food safety protocol and explaining that the real number of E. coli cases was marginally lower than the number reported. However, this did not stop their reputation and stock price from falling significantly. 

Since their response was poorly received, they examined their internal process and adjusted their approach to a later crisis. In 2018, one Chipotle location was reported for selling contaminated food. This time, however, the company closed the offending location, extended a promotion to all other locations world-wide, and announced a number of new menu items. As a result, Chipotle’s stock prices rose, and the E. coli incident flew under the radar for many consumers.

Continue to Monitor the Industry

Continuing to track your industry and cultural changes over time can impact the effectiveness of your response. Crisis communication planning is a cycle, and should be routinely reassessed, evaluated, and modified according to the industry and social climate. 

Develop a Data-Driven Strategy

A crisis communication plan should be part of your wider communications strategy to safeguard your company’s reputation in the face of public relations crises. By monitoring industry trends, measuring your campaigns, and tracking competitors, you can develop a data-driven strategy that will prepare you for any communications crisis.

At PublicRelay, we use a combination of artificial intelligence and human analysis to draw actionable insights from your media coverage. Click here to elevate your media monitoring into media intelligence today!

The editorial team at PublicRelay contributed to writing this blog.

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?

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!

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.”