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

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

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

• Proactively Manage Issues

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

• Engage Your Shareholder Base

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

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

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

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

• Glean Deep Reputational Insights that Guide Strategic Investor Relations Decisions

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

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

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

• Identify Influencers that Drive Investor Perceptions

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

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

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

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

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

Many of us have probably heard of SMART goals or goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound. Rather than having a vague notion of what you want to accomplish where success is somewhat subjective, setting SMART goals provides structure to your objectives and maps a clear path to success.

Using SMART goals in PR and communications could look something like, “we’re going to increase positive innovation messaging to the Street by 10% in the next 6 months” or “we’re going to launch an employer brand campaign and earn placements with great place to work messaging in our top 20 outlets that reach millennials in the next 6 months.”

What constitutes success here is clearly spelled out and your progress can be easily tracked. But if you want to set even better goals, make your goals SMART-ER. Global Managing Director of AMEC Johna Burke explained SMART-ER goals in a recent webcast, adding ethical and revolutionary to the facets of great goal setting.

Ethical Goals

Ethical refers to the data used to measure success. Your PR and communications measurement should be consistent, transparent, and valid, meaning where and how you get your data, the criteria for success, and other metrics can easily and confidently explained. The measured results should also be replicable. If you don’t understand exactly how you get your data, you can be sure your executives will ask the same questions you’re asking yourself. Make sure your communications analysis is transparent.  

Revolutionary Goals

Are the insights from your measurement program revolutionizing your communications strategies and tactics? Streamlining or changing processes inside and even outside your department? Setting revolutionary goals is all about understanding the impact of your results and using insights to optimize strategies. If you successfully increased positive innovation message penetration to the Street by 10% in the last quarter, what impact did that have on your brand and your organization’s business goals? Maybe you’ll see a correlation between the uplift in positive coverage and an increase in institutional investments. Glean insights from the data and results that not only prove your worth, but show you what to do next.

Learn more about SMARTER goals from AMEC Global Managing Director Johna Burke.

“My boss isn’t asking for data or measurement results so why provide it?”

In Mark Cuban’s words, “the greatest value you can offer a boss is to reduce their stress.” Your boss wants you to think ahead of them, not the other way around. This is the case I make when PR execs tell me they don’t need to measure because their boss doesn’t ask for data-driven results.

Let’s think about it this way – imagine you’re the boss. Someone shows up in your office with a suggestion or even a full-blown solution to a problem that has been nagging you – but one that you had not assigned to anyone. Your immediate reaction is probably something like, “Wow, you mean we can solve this thing without me having to go through the pain of figuring out every last detail?”

Talk about relieving stress. You had absolutely NO expectations of receiving this wonderful gift. More importantly, you now know this person thought through this issue and can do the same with other problems without being prodded. In fact, you will probably leave them alone because you trust they have their arms around problems before you need to intervene. Incredibly powerful.

In my experience, a sure-fire way to succeed where there are no expectations is by using data and analytics in the corporate communications function. It seems hard to believe, but there are businesses that still don’t use data to drive their communications strategy. It’s not for the lack of data and analytics tools; many tools exist, and many public relations practitioners use them.

Yet PR professionals have all sorts of reasons why they don’t measure. The most common reason I hear is, “the boss isn’t asking for data or measurement results so why provide it?” Using data to back up a sound communications strategy is no different than the marketing department measuring the impact of a campaign or using a net promoter score. You do these things because they make sense, they drive strategy, and they improve execution.

If a public relations practitioner provides quality analysis on the effectiveness of a campaign or the overall department’s contribution to shareholder value, then the CEO naturally will have greater confidence in their ability to manage their department. Moreover, the CEO likely will trust them and let them keep moving forward – and will look forward to the next report. Build it, and they will come.

But what if the report has bad news? The only thing worse than bad news is you not knowing about it and having no plan to deal with it. Any quality PR analytics solution will provide insights to help you gauge the scope of the issue and develop an appropriate response. Scope and context are important because it is not uncommon for some people to blow things out of proportion, particularly when it comes to media. Any PR strategy must have measures to show that the problem has, in fact, been fixed. If you don’t measure it, how do you know if you have actually fixed the problem?

What if the CEO is the problem? Some public relations people who report to their CEO believe you can’t get data out of the news. I have met them. I have also seen a PR executive, armed with solid data, face down a bunch of engineers – and win. Data can help convince your CEO of the true nature of the issue when they think a negative story is a catastrophe, or worse, dismisses a substantive problem as “fake news.”

Despite all this, I still come across PR execs who demur. To them I say: Who do you think is the best communications team in your industry? Find them, and ask how they drive their strategy and tactics.

If they don’t say “with data,” I’ll buy you lunch.

Communicators agree vague potential impressions metrics are quickly becoming irrelevant because they don’t provide business value. But how can PR pros demonstrate their contribution to business goals and become more strategic business partners is the question that naturally follows – especially when their executives are accustomed to seeing potential impressions grow ad infinitum.

One way to correlate PR activities to your organization’s goals is to conduct demographic and psychographic audience analysis of your earned media coverage to ensure you’re reaching your target potential audience, not millions of anonymous people. Leverage demographic and psychographic analysis in the following ways:

Demographic Audience Analysis

Demographic audience analysis segments your audience by data points such as age, gender, income, education, marital status, and political affiliation. Compare your readership on these demographics to see if you’re getting coverage in front of people that you are trying to get to take action.

For example, a non-profit organization benefitting children is trying to increase their millennial donor base. They can understand exactly how much of their earned media is currently reaching not just millennials but those above a certain income threshold with children.  Using this information they can determine if they need to adjust their outreach plan.

Psychographic Audience Analysis

Psychographic audience analysis segments your audience by data points such as social and consumer behaviors and future buying intent. This allows you to get extremely granular with your targeting, especially when combined with demographic audience analysis.

Say you work for a utility company and want to get coverage about your organization’s R&D in clean energy in front of a more liberal audience, whereas you want conservative readers to see your message against a certain energy industry regulation. Use psychographic audience analysis to target a specific segment down to the key message.

Benchmark your reach to this segment and improve penetration over time using insights from campaigns as you continually perform demographic and psychographic analysis. It might surprise you what demographics and behaviors drive increased relevant web traffic, report downloads, and other conversions.

Influencer Identification

Use demographic and psychographic audience analysis by outlet to proactively pitch outlets and authors who aren’t covering you or are only covering your competitors, but reach the audience you want to target.

Demonstrating your ability to reach relevant audiences is a business conversation your C-suite will want to have and appreciate your effort to contribute to business goals.  

The PR profession is moving away from impressions, reach, and AVE metrics because they cannot be used to answer how PR is affecting business outcomes. They are also single data points that don’t illustrate the value of your work. At a recent PR conference, one of the speakers asked, “Have you ever wondered why there isn’t a ‘PR Equivalency’ metric?” Excellent point.

Attributing how your Communications work is impacting the business, requires a comprehensive measurement program. Not a “magic bullet” metric that cannot be defended. Your PR measurement program should enable you to correlate your earned media analysis data with other data points from the business – website traffic, revenue, reputation, donations, membership, hiring efforts, etc.

PR Attribution technologies may provide media tracking options beyond link tracking – tracking visitors from earned media articles back to your website. There are three important questions to ask any vendor, especially if you are trying to attribute revenue:

1. Are my attributed articles relevant?

Repeated studies show that even in news stories with rich keyword matches, less than 25% are actually relevant to the brand.

• For example, a burglary at the jeweler next to the Starbucks does NOT mean that the visit to the Starbucks web site had anything to do with that news story
• For example, the redevelopment of a local office building that is next door to the local office of McKinsey & Company is not a relevant McKinsey news story.

2. Will the articles be toned for my brand, product, or message?

 If you do not take into consideration the tone on these additional data points, you may end up attributing sales or website hits to articles that are negative and clearly not driving sales.

3. Can I understand exactly how my results are calculated?

If anyone challenges your results or wants to dive deeper into your numbers, can you defend the “credit” you’re taking? Be wary of the “black box” calculations masquerading as PR Attribution.

Your PR Attribution efforts should yield reliable and defensible analysis that can hold up to scrutiny in the C-Suite and the Board Room.

PR News’ recent Measurement Conference provided an interesting glimpse into the state of PR measurement and analytics, bringing together a cross section of practitioners. Some attendees had fully integrated PR measurement strategies and others were just starting to look at PR measurement and analytics. Wherever they were in their journey, it was encouraging to see so many communicators in one room who recognize the importance of measurement and analysis to not only help them prove their value but also become more proactive and strategic business partners.

A few common challenges emerged regardless of experience level. Whether they were seasoned data analysts or measurement newbies, many continue to wrestle with these issues when it comes to creating an insightful PR measurement strategy:

1. How to Tie Your PR Measurement Strategy to the Business

Starting with the first session and throughout the day, speakers unanimously agreed that reach and potential impressions metrics are quickly becoming irrelevant. As AMEC Global Managing Director Johna Burke pointed out in her session about the Barcelona Principles 2.0, if you have 6 billion impressions but can’t walk out on the street and have one person tell you about your brand, it’s probably a fake metric. To implement a PR measurement strategy that provides insight, you must root your metrics in the goals of the business.

I think all communicators can agree with this premise, but attendees’ first question was: how do I actually do that?

The simplest and best answer is to have a conversation with your senior leadership about the company’s priorities and how you can contribute. Once you know the challenges they’re trying to solve, you can bring forward insights that matter.

2. How to Attribute Business Impact

The ways in which you can attribute your business impact are not always obvious. Even after you’ve had the conversation with senior leadership, it might take some creative thinking to determine how you can contribute to that goal. If your CEO says, “our only goal this year is to grow by 30% percent,” you might feel pressure to tie to a dollar amount. But unless you’re an online retailer or similar direct to consumer business, this is very difficult and PR pros should be wary of metrics like AVE’s that claim to do so.

Think creatively about this goal: will you be recruiting new sales and marketing employees? You’ll want to be known as a great place to work. Trying to attract a millennial and Gen Z audience? They want to do business with socially conscious organizations.

Using accurate and relevant data, correlate how your work impacts:

• Website Traffic
• Reputation
• Revenue
• Donations
• Membership
• Hiring efforts
• Sign ups
• Employee engagement
• Loyalty
• Advocacy

3. How to Find Agreement and Get Buy-In

Most questions throughout the conference revolved around how to get stakeholders on board with a new measurement strategy. If executives are accustomed to seeing growing impressions quarter over quarter, how can you convince them that new metrics are more valuable?

Panelists agreed you can’t completely rip the rug out from under them. Show them impressions, but then introduce a metric that actually provides an insight into a business challenge they’re trying to solve. This is a sure-fire way to get buy-in from senior leadership. Try introducing demographic and psychographic data that shows what percentage of your coverage and key messages reached your target audience – not just 6 billion anonymous people. Those are conversations that the rest of the business can understand.

Getting people on board with a new measurement strategy requires asking a lot of questions of your stakeholders, from executive leadership to teams outside your department like Marketing and HR. It’s worth the effort to ensure agreement across stakeholders and align your metrics to business goals from the outset of your PR measurement strategy.

It’s not enough to count how many brand or product name mentions you and your competitors are getting – you need to know what is being said – and by whom. You need specifics to really understand your position in the market and be able to share that highly valuable insight with your C-suite. You can then use those insights to revise your strategy, reallocate resources, and take advantage of gaps in your competitor’s positioning and messaging if they arise.

1. Market positioning vs. earned coverage

Every communications plan revolves around market positioning. Communications and Marketing teams use themes for their campaigns, web copy, press releases, pitches, etc. But sometimes those messages aren’t mapping to what authors are writing about. For example, one of your competitors is touting an innovation that is revolutionizing the industry. But none of their earned coverage is mapping to that message. What are they writing about instead? How can you take advantage of that gap?

2. Third-party influencers

Many industries have subject matter experts that the media will turn to for comment on a regular basis. These experts can be academics, industry regulators, analysts, and politicians among others. It can be incredibly insightful to understand how these influencers talk about your peers or competitors – especially in articles where your brand isn’t mentioned. Are your relationships with these important influencers where they need to be?

3. Media relations

In addition to uncovering third-party influencers in your peers’ earned media, you can also find new authors or outlets to pitch. The intel you gather will help you craft smarter pitches. Should you reach out to authors that write negatively about your peers? Or those that have never covered you at all? Hear how some of your peers are using competitive intelligence to up their measurement game.

Sometimes it’s difficult to quantify the business impact of a PR crisis. But in the case of Uber’s string of bad publicity in 2017, the business impact of PR is quite clear – and devastating.

A recent Stratechery article (if you don’t already subscribe, I highly recommend) makes a compelling case for the idea that Uber’s PR problems actually saved their biggest competitor, Lyft.

In 2017 Uber dealt with a federal lawsuit over stolen technology, workplace harassment accusations, and a series of high-level executive mishaps  that ultimately ended with the resignation of then-CEO Travis Kalanick.

At the same time Uber was fighting these crises, Lyft gained significant market share as seen in the chart below from Lyft’s S-1.

 Lyft provided an explanation for these results in their S-1 saying,

“The growth rate in Revenue per Active Rider increased significantly in the first and second quarters of 2017 as our brand and values continued to resonate with riders and they increased their usage of Lyft instead of competing offerings.”

“As our brand and values continued to resonate with riders” is key here. There has been much talk recently about the importance of brand advocacy and values. It’s well-documented that consumers increasingly expect their brands to make a positive impact on society – or at the very least, not make a negative one, as I’d argue Uber did in 2017.

For example, in a recent study from APCO Worldwide, respondents said the single-most important thing a company can do when it comes to being “good to society” is  treat their employees well. Amid harassment allegations and high employee turnover, Uber clearly did not live up to this order and paid the price  – in market share that they have not been able to win back and eventually the loss of their CEO.

Brand building and public relations was a key  differentiator between these two companies in a competitive marketplace where the switching barriers are minimal. If this case study proves one thing, it’s that the strategic and business value of PR cannot be underestimated – Just ask Uber and Lyft.

When a large nonprofit children’s hospital garnered negative publicity around their executive compensation practices, the organization’s issue management team needed to determine if and how to react. The most important questions on their minds were:

• Is this a crisis or not?
• How does this coverage compare to other peers in their industry?
• And will this negative coverage upset our target audiences and donors?

PublicRelay helped the communications team formulate a plan to analyze and handle this looming issue.

Step 1: Determine the severity of the issue and who is producing the coverage

First, the nonprofit’s communications team referred to their historical data to determine the significance of the story. They analyzed where it was coming from by outlet power as well as volume. The team was able to determine the coverage was not being produced by the high power outlets that typically influence the hospital’s donor base. The negative attention was also not significant in volume compared to other brand crises that the hospital had seen in the past. Therefore, the negative press about the brand was unlikely to immediately impact donations.

Step 2: Determine if it is spreading

The communications team paired the information with social sharing data to ensure that the story wasn’t gaining traction. Millennial donors are a key public for the hospital, so the organization was concerned about the reach of this potential issue on specific channels like Twitter and Facebook. After tracking the coverage across social platforms, the team was able to confirm that it was not picking up many social media shares nor growing in traction.

Step 3: Compare the coverage to others in the industry

As a final precaution, the team wanted to compare the issue about its compensation practices with other peers in the nonprofit realm to ensure that they were not getting more attention than their counterparts. The media analysis revealed that out of all the other major research foundations and hospitals of similar size, they had far less negative coverage than their peers during a similar event.

Step 4: Monitor the topic more closely moving forward

Although this instance did not require a response, the communications team now proactively analyzes the topic of executive compensation throughout its industry to ensure that they are not blindsided by any negative stories. Furthermore, they can consistently keep their C-Suite informed about trends in this domain and prove that they are appropriately tailoring their responses to negative stories.

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.