In a digital day and age where crisis can strike a brand in a moment’s notice and spiral into a viral nightmare, command centers or crisis “war rooms” have increased in popularity in recent years. But these insight centers shouldn’t just be reserved for issue management. Whether a command center takes the shape of a multi-screen nerve center or a single screen view for a desktop or mobile device, a central hub of media analysis can provide communicators a 360-degree view of their brand. Consistent access to data about the brand’s traditional and social coverage, industry and competitor news, and spokespeople can help avoid crises in addition to managing them.

Successful Command Centers Help Communicators Track Their Entire Competitive Landscape and How Their Brand Measures Up Against It

So what types of data should you pull into your command center? The following types of metrics will ensure your brand has an ongoing 360-degree view of your brand health and campaign success.

SOV for Brand and Reputational Drivers

Does your company want to be known as a thought leader? A diverse employer? An innovative company? To achieve such goals, your team needs to track metrics about how your communication efforts are translating to these business objectives. Being able to quickly spot where your brand is excelling or struggling from a reputational perspective helps your PR team best evaluate where to allocate resources.

Competitor and Peer Coverage

This intelligence gives you a read of your market or industry in multiple ways. Messaging and media relations are two of the most actionable areas for using this analysis. Who is writing about you and/or your competitors? Which messages are pulling through for each of you? How are they writing (tone) about your brands or industry? Furthermore, insights from competitive intelligence can be shared with other business divisions like Product Development and Marketing.

Influencer Engagement

Whether your brand engages with authors, outlets, or third-party influencers like pundits or academics or celebrities, you want to see your relationships pay off with positive coverage. You can visualize your progress in a command center dashboard and always be in the know.

Traditional Media Trending

A trending score tells you how your traditional media coverage is performing (or not) on social media channels. Consistently analyzing this data over time may reveal patterns that will help you leverage each channel for maximum impact. Do your CSR stories tend to perform better on Facebook? Do stories featuring your CEO spark sharing on LinkedIn? Do certain authors inspire retweets on Twitter? Understanding these data points will also help you spot anomalies quickly so you dive into why they are happening.

Messages and Campaigns

Lastly, to understand your brand and the impact of your strategies you need to know whether or not your campaigns and their messages are pulling through in your earned media. Tracking which messages are resonating the most with your target demographics, allows you to better allocate resources to areas where your messaging needs amplification or a revamp.

Incorporating these five key metrics into a live communications command center, will help your brand’s PR function consistently make better, smarter and faster decisions. Learn more about PublicRelay’s Communications Insights Center Here.

Establishing and acting on a well-defined corporate Purpose was an important trend in 2018 and discussed widely in the communications field. But as former Shell Head of Communications Bjorn Edlund points out in his blog for the Arthur W. Page society called, “Welcome to the Purpose Wars,” some are becoming skeptical of its role in business, dismissing corporate purpose as an empty promise, rather than a source of social good.

As we move into 2019, it’s worth questioning what is the purpose of Purpose and where does it fit into business?

Purpose as a Compass

Edlund advocates Purpose as a leadership mechanism – a tool that guides decision-making and inspires stakeholders. Indeed, employees and consumers increasingly expect their corporations to act on social issues.

In the 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, 73% of respondents agreed companies can take actions that both increase profits and improve the economic and social conditions in which they operate. 76% said CEOs should take the lead on social change rather than waiting for the government to impose it and 67% expect prospective employers to join them in social action.

It’s clear that corporations must have some guiding purpose, mission, or values to live up to these expectations, but how can they ensure they act on their purpose authentically and earn the trust of their stakeholders?

Use Data to Strengthen Purpose

Companies need to develop a system to measure Purpose because as Edlund writes, “you can only manage what you can measure.”

Developing this framework is an important opportunity for communicators as the gatekeepers of brand reputation. If Purpose is a guiding force behind business decisions, communicators have the opportunity to bring valuable data to their CEO and other executive leaders – data that they probably have never seen before.

In order to measure Purpose, break it down into core values or topics and measure the pull-through of these topics in the media. Your values will most likely be nebulous, hard-to-define topics so communicators must make sure their measurement system takes into account the context of an article, not just keywords. This kind of in-depth analysis will yield accurate and actionable insights to be used across the business.

Contextual media analysis will reveal the public perception of your values – which ones you are living up to and perhaps more importantly, which ones you are not. This is valuable information for not only the communications department to focus their efforts, but for leaders across all business units to use when making decisions. Living up to your company’s purpose should be a company-wide goal and the measurement and sharing of data behind Purpose is another way communicators can integrate the business, break down silos, and become strategic partners to the business.

Today’s modern communications teams are responsible for protecting more than a company’s reputation, they are tasked with communicating their brand position on key issues, influencing target audiences, and even working with the public affairs department to track policy issues and lobby for its interests. To do the job well, professionals need a method of understanding the media landscape and gauging whether key corporate messages around legislative issues are pulling through.

Yet, many busy communicators find issue tracking to be such a daunting task that it is a nonstarter. This is because it is difficult to fully track complex, policy issues that are not summarized by a simple keyword search like: online data security, online content responsibility or immigration reform. Media monitoring tools simply can’t handle such complex topics.

Breakdown the Issues and Find Coverage with Human-Assisted AI Topic Analysis

The key to understanding highly complex coverage is to break it down into topics and subtopics that matter to your business and your stakeholders. For instance, if you work for a major bank and want to track the topic of Regulation, begin by breaking it down into subtopics like:

• Access to capital
• Suspicious activity reporting
• Trump administration regulatory reform
• Compliance reporting
• Financial crimes

Public affairs and public relations teams need to harness human-assisted AI to quickly cull through the slew of media content collected and focus on the coverage that matters to their key stakeholders.

Once they do that, they can start analyzing coverage against subtopics to see which are getting the most positive and negative coverage. Determining the frequency of earned coverage, its tonality, the amount of social sharing this coverage receives, and on which social channels, helps pinpoint where you need to focus your efforts. When done right, it will also show you what to do next. For instance, if one or more of your key messages around certain topics are very successful but others are lagging, you could reallocate resources and budget to others that need more attention.

Find Media and Third-Party Influencers to Target

By analyzing media intelligence over time, you will start understanding key figures in your industry like authors, outlets, and third-party influencers. Topical media analysis will make your team more effective and efficient at reaching the right authors to amplify your message. This is where you answer questions like, “who is writing negative articles about banks needing more compliance regulation and are also gaining traction on social media?” or “are there new authors covering the importance of growing rural access to capital?”

These answers will not only help your team keep an accurate pulse on policy issues but inform communications strategy around media relations. Use insights to tailor a media outreach strategy that gets results.

When companies can hyper focus on the coverage that matters most, they can also zoom in on identifying powerful third-party influencers. Third-party influencers such as political organizations, regulatory groups, industry experts and NGO’s have significant clout in their fields and gathering data on the way they shape media coverage is a growing trend for communications professionals.

Through analysis of the significant third-party influencers hidden in the context of their coverage, companies can restructure their key messaging to better address concerns of third-party groups and/or further ally themselves with those who have similar views.

Move the Needle on Policy Goals

Tracking policy issues over time and whether your key corporate messages around these topics are resonating with third-party and media influencers allows you to demonstrate to your executives that your team is moving the needle on key legislative goals. This way, your team can show that it is helping shape policy favorable for your company and all its stakeholders. Helping to ultimately prevent or pass legislation that affects your organization by influencing public opinion is just one way communicators can have a direct impact on the bottom line.

With the rise of artificial intelligence and ensuing hype, many companies in the media intelligence industry and beyond began touting their use of AI. But the story often stops there without further explanation.

Communicators don’t have to be data scientists, but it is worth asking your media intelligence provider how they employ AI. In the world of textual media analytics, there are best practices as in any other industry. If your provider is not following them, it could have serious consequences for the accuracy of your communications data.

Media Analytics Best Practices

Use Ongoing Supervised Machine Learning

Cultural conversation changes quickly. The meaning and connotation of words are situational and evolve over time. This is why several studies have found artificial intelligence employed in the media analytics space must be supervised. One study from communications experts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Georgia found, “the combination of computational processing power with human intelligence ensures high levels of reliability and validity for the analysis of latent content.” Another from researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and Northwestern University found that unsupervised machine learning, “does not perform well in picking up themes that may be buried within discussions of different topics” and therefore missed several mentions of the topic they were tracking of economic inequality. The concept of inequality, whether in the economy or in the workplace, might very well be something a communicator would want to track – and certainly other nebulous concepts like it.

Computers can improve at processing language, but they need to be told what’s right and wrong. A computer cannot tell when the use of sarcasm in an article contradicts the normal sentiment of a word it has already learned to label positive, so it will continue incorrectly analyzing your content until it is corrected.

That’s why media intelligence providers cannot take a “set it and forget it” approach to AI. A constant feedback loop is required to educate the computer in the nuances of language. If the data set remains static, it will make your analysis inaccurate and irrelevant.

Target Analysis Specifically to Your Company and Your Perspective

The most accurate communications analysis comes from ongoing supervised machine learning targeted specifically to your business. Every organization has different goals, challenges, and perspectives on the world. Two companies can read the same news article or social post and analyze it completely differently based on their point of view. A solar energy company and electric utility company would categorize and tone the same article about energy regulation very differently. If you use the same data set across clients, you run into the same problem again in that the computer will continue analyzing content as it originally learned, not accounting for the context of what a specific organization cares about.

At PublicRelay, we perform client specific media analysis leveraging ongoing supervised machine learning to ensure that our clients are getting the most accurate data possible. This accurate, contextual analysis tailored to their business goals enables them to not only understand what they’ve done, but yields insights that tell them what to do next.

Crisis strikes in the blink of an eye and can erupt into a full media catastrophe overnight. Even when a crisis is done, if it is not dealt with successfully, the aftermath can translate into long term financial loss, not to mention a destruction of public trust.

To top it off, brand turmoil can be a make or break moment for your career. Because every shred of time is important during a crisis, you need to use data to make agile, strategic decisions.

The following questions will help you get off on the right foot:

How Bad is the Situation?

How do you even know when you’re in a crisis? This is when you refer to your historical data. Not every negative article is a death sentence for your brand, although your executives might not agree. First off, determine if this is a real coverage spike. Comparing coverage trends overtime can help you measure the magnitude of the story pickup. If there is a legitimate uptick in coverage, it is time to hyper-dissect the issue.

An effective reputation management strategy starts with identifying your key brand drivers. Analyzing these drivers over time allows your company to develop a baseline which will make obvious any deviations from that baseline. These deviations are indications that the issue is starting to hurt your brand.

You cannot put together a response strategy without fully evaluating the scope of the situation. Your team needs to answer things like who is talking about the issue? Are these my key publics? What influencers are picking up the story? Is it getting heavily shared on social? What audiences are sharing the article and across what channels? Without this information, it will be impossible to quickly target the right people with your key messages in your response strategy.

Are You Connected with the Right Audiences to Fix It?

Once you’ve assessed the damage and determined the messages you need to push, you need to find the right influencers to engage. If you don’t spend time building relationships when things are going well, you’re left out to dry when things go bad. 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.

How Effective Are Your Spokespeople?

Not only are spokespersons needed for media communications, but in a crisis, they are essential. You need to know which of them will most effectively resonate with your target audiences and which work best when “under fire.” Data from past crises or from previous campaigns must be harnessed to select and coach your top spokespeople.

Are Your Messages Pulling Through?

Communicators should determine what outcomes they are trying to accomplish with their messaging and measure campaigns accordingly. For instance, are you trying to improve customer perceptions against a faulty product, strengthen investor relations in light of a crisis, or demonstrate a united company front? Collecting accurate data from both traditional and social media is an important first step in determining if coverage is improving in your favor and if it contains the key messages you are pushing in your crisis plan. To understand your effectiveness, ask questions like, are influencers or our spokespeople conveying the right message? Is it resonating? Or, do we need to adjust our strategy and reallocate resources if it is not working? Even with limited resources and time during a crisis, using data to adjust allocation helps your communications team stay agile and effective.

Can I Prove that My Strategy is Working?

Once your strategy starts to take hold and the conflict is dying down, it is time to loop in your C-suite. 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.

Help the C-suite truly understand that negative coverage around the event has stopped by comparing coverage to the past. Your data should show that the positive coverage has increased dramatically or that it is back to neutral levels.

The cornerstone of every crisis response strategy is accurate data. Good media intelligence not only brings potential PR crises to your attention early but provides a road map on how to assess, manage and defuse the situation. It is important to always track your customers, brand drivers, your industry, and your competitors – you need to make sure that nothing is spreading once it is contained.

In December, I spoke at the PR News Media Relations Conference about the importance of aligning your media relations KPI’s to the goals of the C-suite. Often in communications analytics, people get bogged down counting keywords – or worse, relying on largely discredited AVE’s.  But basing your media relations strategies on these metrics are misleading and do not show your executives how your team contributes to the goals of the business.

CEO’s and the rest of the C-suite care about outcomes, not outputs. Outcomes are results that move the business forward, while outputs are the tasks media relations pros execute everyday like press releases, pitches, and social media promotion. Outputs are important to your team and necessary to achieve those business outcomes, but your CEO does not need to know the tactics executed to get there. When determining your media relations KPI’s, you should base them on the business outcomes you want to achieve. If your organization’s goal is to be known as an innovator or thought leader in the industry, these goals become the basis of your metrics.

Two important areas that media relations can create business outcomes are message penetration and influencer conversion.

Message Penetration

Amplifying key messages is one of the most important ways communicators can contribute to the reputational goals your C-suite cares about. Measuring which topics are pulling through in your coverage and their sentiment in relation to your brand or position is very important to measure progress on your reputational goals. Knowing which messages resonate with your top tier authors and outlets, as well as how certain messages perform on each social platform is also key to maximize message penetration. Repositioning your brand, changing opinions, or even affecting stock price are business outcomes your CEO will care about that result from increasing positive key message penetration.

Measuring message penetration can also mean identifying gaps in industry coverage, or whitespace opportunities. Industry whitespace is a great opportunity for your brand to establish thought leadership and own a new conversation, again creating a measurable business outcome.

Influencer Conversion

Engaging the right influencers will amplify your messages and lend credibility to your brand. But what makes an influencer right for your brand and how can you identify them?

Understanding an influencer by topic, sentiment, audience, and social reach will help you identify your top influencers for a particular message. It’s not just about the “beat” that they cover. Instead of sending a mass email, target your outreach to influencers who you know have written about your topic favorably in the past. Understanding an author’s social profile and reach will also help you refine your pitch. Do they have more sharing on a specific platform when their stories are positive about a topic or negative? . This will dramatically increase the chances they engage with your message. In fact, a large professional services client successfully and positively engaged 81% of their top 50 influencers with targeted outreach based on researched data points.

Incorporating third-party influencers into your influencer strategy also lends credible, unbiased support to your brand message or position. Third-party influencers like academics, industry experts, and political pundits are important brand allies. Strategic engagement will yield measurable outcomes that your CEO and board truly care about.

Build Credibility with Measurement

Setting your media relations KPI’s based on business outcomes will make your efforts measurable from the start. Use data to optimize your strategies throughout campaigns to achieve the desired outcomes, then use it again to demonstrate the business impact of your efforts to the C-suite. Delivering consistent, measured results will build your credibility and ensure you’re seen as a strategic partner to the business.

In today’s busy 24-hour news cycle, it’s essential to have a media presence and ensure that your coverage is high-quality. In other words, are your brand messages represented in your earned coverage and by outlets that reach your target audience?

But knowing which campaigns successfully generated high-quality coverage can feel like it’s up to chance. That’s why it’s important to measure the impact of your campaigns using message pull-through, so you can determine the effectiveness of your PR work and identify the communications methods that successfully cut through the noise.

What Is Message Pull-Through?

Message pull-through is when your PR campaign key messages appear in your earned coverage, indicating that it successfully resonated with the media. For example, if you are consistently promoting the sustainability of your brand and an article uses your language or touches on the same key points to describe your company, you’ve achieved message pull-through. In short, it is the through-line that shows the effectiveness of a PR and communications team via earned media coverage.

Why Is Message Pull-Through Important?

Message pull-through is important because it is a measure of your PR team’s effectiveness in promoting the values and messages your brand wants to be known for. It also means your messages are more likely to reach your target audience and boost brand awareness. Measuring the impact of your campaigns is also necessary to demonstrate a return on investment to company executives. Not only can this metric demonstrate your campaign’s effectiveness, but it can also inform your strategy for future campaigns based on what worked and what didn’t.

How to Measure Message Pull-Through

According to Invoca, message pull-through is fundamental to understanding your brand awareness and sentiment. This is because it showcases the volume with which your company is mentioned using your preferred language as well as the quality of the outlets discussing you.

To measure message pull-through, you must analyze your earned media coverage in relation to your campaign. Essential metrics include the media’s use of your brand’s language, outlet audience and reach, and the sentiment expressed when discussing your brand.

Here are the core steps for measuring your message pull-through:

Identify Your Key Messages

You must first identify your key messages, which are the main points you want your target audience to remember about your brand. For communications teams, key messages go beyond the  “what” and the “how” of what you do and include your company’s values, desired reputation, and the other elements that make you different from competitors. According to Forbes, you should pick three messages per campaign and track coverage for adherence to the key points and tone. They can be concrete or conceptual, which is why human analysis is crucial to effective media measurement of your message penetration.

Implement a Media Measurement Program

Once your key messages are established, you must set up the proper tools to measure their pull-through. With comprehensive media analytics, you can measure how an outlet discusses your brand and if it is in language that aligns with the message your team put out, as well as the tone of that coverage. Start measuring your media coverage before you launch your campaign to gather benchmark data. This allows you to compare the quality of your coverage before and after the campaign to demonstrate its impact.

Launch Your Messaging Campaign

Create your campaign, publish a press release, and reach out to your media contacts. Once your campaign is launched, your team can begin to measure its performance and analyze your coverage. When assessing press pick-up of your campaign, consider any commentary, opinions, or third-party perspectives journalists add to their coverage of your brand. It’s also important to note outlet reach and the article’s social media sharing, as this clues your team into how many people are receiving and engaging with your messaging.

Analyze Your Results

At the end of your campaign period, assess your media coverage by examining the volume of content for each key message, its sentiment, and social sharing by tone.

Be sure to dive into the authors and outlets that covered your key messages, with insights on the tone, outlet reach, and social engagement. Next, compare your results with the benchmark data collected before you launched your campaign.

In addition to determining whether your messages successfully penetrated your media coverage, these insights can also highlight opportunities for influencer partnerships with journalists that favorably covered your brand and accurately interpreted your key messages.

Increase Your Message Pull-Through

Effectively communicating your company’s brand messages is essential to reputation management and promoting brand awareness. Message pull-through is an often overlooked but important tool for analyzing the success of your PR team’s campaigns in breaking through earned media coverage with your messages.

At PublicRelay, we use human-augmented technology to accurately measure your earned media coverage for the metrics that demonstrate the impact and value of your communications.

Click here to learn more!

Patient experience is the cornerstone of brand reputation and patient loyalty. And with the move to value-based healthcare, it directly affects the bottom line. Acquisition and retention of customers is now everyone’s priority. Healthcare communicators have an important responsibility and opportunity to improve patient experience and strengthen their organization’s mission by listening to patient feedback, particularly on social media.

Social media is a key growth opportunity for healthcare communicators and, most importantly, it’s not just about paid marketing. Patients want to know what other patients are saying about their care, not advertisers. This patient-to-patient trust is especially evident with the rise of online patient communities. At a recent PR News Healthcare Social Media Summit, it was noted that patients now find content provided by healthcare companies more credible than healthcare news reported by the media (2018 Edelman Trust Barometer), putting healthcare companies “in the optimal position of building relationships with their patients, many of whom seek information about their conditions and community through social channels.”

If patients are looking at social media activity before choosing a healthcare provider, how can healthcare communicators turn these posts into insights that they can act on?

Listen, Don’t Monitor

It starts with truly listening to patients on social media. Many social listening tools monitor chatter on social media and are helpful to catch extremely negative or irregular activity to which you might need to respond. But to incorporate patient experience feedback into strategic communication decisions, social media conversation must be consistently analyzed for the topics that are important to your organization.

Social media feedback can be analyzed for a myriad of data that is relevant to improving the patient experience. Posts can be broken down by topics like service lines, geographic areas, specific facilities, employee interactions, quality of care, care environment, and care costs. These topics can be further broken down by subtopics that show which type of employee the patient interacted with, if that interaction was professional, friendly, or knowledgeable, if the patient spoke positively or negatively to the safety and comfort of their care, or about facility appearance, wait times, and operations.

Analysis of these data points (see chart below) allow healthcare communicators to pinpoint any deficiencies or highlights in patient experience, down to the region, facility, or employee type. The data can be used to inform future campaigns and understand the impact of those campaigns over time. This capability is invaluable for large healthcare systems that span several regions or states and need to ensure consistently excellent patient experience across the organization.

When talking about media monitoring and media analysis, many people use the terms interchangeably. However, there is an important distinction between the two. While media monitoring reveals information about a moment in time, media analysis enables the ability to analyze key performance indicators over time. Consistently analyzing this data not only helps you understand how well you are performing today but will also help you understand what to do in the future. Both media monitoring and analysis have their place in the life of a PR professional and facilitate different outcomes.

Media Monitoring

Media monitoring is great for a snapshot of coverage volumes at a specific moment in time and provides a gut check for which way the wind is blowing for your brand. Monitoring can be useful for one-off tasks, like when an executive asks you about the coverage of a certain story on the fly or in crisis when you’re blindsided by a negative article and need to know its pickup in real time. These are day-to-day situations in which 100% accuracy of the data is not essential to make a quick decision.

Media Analysis

On the other hand, media analysis is consistent measurement of the same metrics over time that facilitate strategic decisions and long-term outcomes. Proving the impact of PR and communications depends on knowing where you started and showing how your team has moved the needle on your company’s reputational goals. In these cases, accurate sentiment and tone of not only the article itself, but of key messages within the article, are paramount to prove your contribution and yield deeper insights that you can act on to optimize strategy. Where monitoring can give you a gut check or help make decisions on the fly, insights from analysis facilitate well-informed, strategic decisions that help you move that needle.

Media analysis allows you to look back over time to understand what strategies and tactics worked and what did not work to inform future decisions. It allows you to understand where you made gains on message pull-through or SOV against your competitors and which messages or campaigns need more resources and focus.

This access to historical analysis is also invaluable to not only help identify a potential crisis but also help guide crisis response. It allows your team to easily identify deviations from your coverage baselines, a signal that you need to dig deeper into about what is being said about your brand that day. These baselines also work in reverse and allow you to extinguish fires when an executive comes to you with a negative story insisting that it requires a response. If the data shows that your coverage volumes are in line and social sharing is not above average, you have hard data that prevents your brand from responding unnecessarily.

If an issue is an actual crisis and does require a response, use historical analysis to inform your messaging and media relations strategies. Quickly determine which authors and outlets to target to most efficiently reach your key stakeholders.

Consistent, Not Static

Measuring consistently over time is not to say that your measurement program can’t be fluid. Measurement around industry events and company initiatives can be added, especially when known about beforehand. Analyzing coverage of these special events from the outset reveals the true impact on your brand and is much more useful and efficient than trying to track them after the fact.

Media Monitoring and Analysis in Harmony

Media monitoring and analysis are natural complements to each other. When you launch a new campaign or product, monitoring will give you a sense of how it’s performing initially, then analysis will reveal the impact on your brand. It will give insights into what went well and what did not to inform your next campaign strategy, making your team more efficient and your budget go further.

With communications budgets growing tighter and tighter, investing part of that budget in media analysis is well worth it to be able to prove your team’s contribution to company-wide goals and become an even more strategic partner to the business.

I recently spoke at the PRSA 2018 International Conference in Austin, TX on why data-driven communications team are more agile and efficient.  In a nutshell, quality data and analysis facilitate timely, informed strategic decision making, allowing teams to pivot strategies and resources when necessary, and demonstrate when a crisis response is needed.

All too often quality data and analysis goes by the wayside due to budget concerns, day to day priorities, or just not knowing where to begin. However, in today’s business world, the price of not having quality data and analysis to support decision making is higher than the investment it requires. In fact, a 2018 KPMG study found that a top CEO goal is to make sure any decision or solution is justified and measurable through data they can trust.

So what is meant by quality data and analysis? It starts with metrics tied to the macro goals of the business and highly accurate analysis of the data. It ends with data-driven insights, or windows into your business that reveal the story behind the numbers – a story you can use to to drive strategic decision making.

Here are three of the most important points I made during the presentation:

The communications function must be aligned with business objectives

Business objectives are goals that the entire company works towards, not just the communications department. For example, wanting to be known as an innovative company is a business goal to which all departments from Operations and Finance to Human Resources and Communications must contribute.

Metrics like mentions, impressions, and AVEs usually are not rooted in the goals of the business and do not yield data-driven insights that tell you what to do next. If you aren’t sure about your company’s business goals, have a conversation about the topic with your executive leadership. They will appreciate that you want to make data-driven decisions and that you are seeking to align your department with the business.

Reputation is the core of our profession

Measuring your company’s reputational health on a regular basis will ensure the communications department contributes to the macro objectives of the business.  You will be making data-driven, justifiable decisions that your CEO will respect. Your organization’s high-level reputational goals should be translated into communications metrics that we call reputational drivers.

Reputational drivers are conceptual values like innovation or workplace environment that your company wants to be known for. These concepts can’t be captured by a few keywords and they require accurate sentiment and contextual analysis to get a true picture of brand health. Though more time-consuming to measure accurately than something simplistic like impressions, they form the backbone of quality analysis that will power your messaging, media relations, and influencer strategies.

Microtargeting and personalization is the world we live in

Use data to ensure your key messages are amplified and reaching the right audiences. Understand influencers by the topics they write about it, their sentiment towards those topics in the past, the social sharing they receive, and their audience demographics. The aggregate of this data will help you prioritize your outreach. Then use the data again when crafting your pitch to personalize your outreach and maximize the chances that your message is picked up. Customizing your outreach will be much more effective than an impersonal, mass email blast.