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.
One of the nation’s most prominent financial services company did not have the resources to track its complex and vast media coverage, let alone dive in to its context, to better impact business goals like strengthening brand health.
The communications team found itself struggling to keep up with a data-driven culture, where all department leaders must demonstrate how they are using data to fortify and guide their resource allocation and strategies.
To remedy this the team turned to PublicRelay to measure its coverage and expand its media intelligence to analyze things like their brand drivers, competitor coverage, the authors, and outlets covering them, and general industry trends. With this insight, the team could not only evaluate how they are doing today but build more informed strategies in the future specifically around enhancing messaging around key brand and industry topics like “innovation” and “financial performance”.
Clip reports gave the team the ability to hyper focus on their most important coverage, as they used these to inform the communications team’s daily outlook while quarterly in-depth reports helped them monitor brand health progress over months.
Through this robust program, the company could finally answer questions like: Do financial performance or thought leadership topics get shared more often on Twitter or Facebook? Do certain authors write my competitors more than they write about us? How are the top tier outlets performing? Who are influencers that I should target and are they improving my message penetration over time? How is my company’s coverage around major events? Etc. The answers to these questions allow them to enhance their brand reputation management strategies and tactics.
Today, the ability to use accurate data to both understand and inform the future is a game changer for the communications team as they harness insights to elevate their department’s position as a strategic partner to the business.
Influencers are all the hype nowadays, with both communicators and marketers jumping to uncover the perfect social media campaign or engage outlets that receive the most impressions online. Yet, time and time again, one very powerful type of influencer is often omitted from even the most robust of engagement plans.
The Power of Third Party Influencers
When it comes to traditional media strategy, communicators typically focus on the influencers that they need to have relationships with in order to get coverage. Those journalists and authors in turn have relationships with subject matter experts that they frequently contact for comments. These are third-party influencers that can hold great sway in an industry or significantly increase the social sharing of articles when they are quoted or mentioned.
Read: “How 3rd Party Influencers Can Shape Your Media Strategy“
Third-party influencers such as academics, political organizations, regulatory groups, industry experts and NGO’s have significant clout in their fields and is an important step of setting your PR strategy, particularly in highly regulated industries. Other major benefits of these types of influencers is that they:
- Often have serious audience reach
- Can bolster trust in your organization’s values if they align
- Frequently in the news
- High levels of credibility and expertise
- Carry a sense of objectivity
While getting a brand mention from third-party influencers is rare, developing relationships with subject matter experts will enable you to educate them about your brand stance and key messages. Depending on your industry, you may already have a clear picture of the key third party influencers and are actively engaging with them. In other cases, you may need to do some research to find them.
Uncover and Engage Third-Party Influencers “Hidden” in the Context of Your Coverage
So, if these types of influencers are so valuable, why do they continue to fly under the radar of many communicators? Because they have been traditionally difficult to uncover.
It is relatively easy to find information about authors and outlets through a myriad of databases. But gleaning a clear understanding about the people and topics they write about is a different and time-consuming task. Finding relevant articles to analyze is the most important step as the more niche an industry, the more difficult trending topics are to categorize using a word or string of words. Here is where Human-assisted AI is essential – this approach helps to quickly cull through the influx of content published around various topics and isolate the most important coverage and find those third-parties quoted in it.
Once you have the right data you can start to identify trends and figure out which SMEs are the most powerful. This is where you answer questions like “do articles that contain particular quotes or view points from political pundits or grassroots organizations get shared on social media more than those who contain an academic?”, “Do some experts tend to be featured in high powered outlets more than others on specific niche topics?”, etc.
Finally, you can start to engage the third-party media influencers that you deem the most impactful to your strategies. And, over time, you can measure these engagement tactics and see if they are helping you improve your brand position.
Building a comprehensive communications strategy requires engaging with and leveraging multiple media channels. Trends emerging on one channel may differ from another or share similarities in ways you didn’t expect. Knowing if and how much your earned media coverage is getting shared is fine, but you need to understand both how and what is getting shared to strategically amplify your key messages. Dig into the data to identify trends and use those insights to build campaigns specifically designed to drive coverage that encourages social sharing. Leveraging the interplay between traditional and social media can lead to higher levels of trust, engagement, and success for your brand.
If you’re not already measuring the impact of social media on your traditional coverage, you could be missing out on these insights:
Understand which messages get shared and engaged with and on what channels
Not all messages are shared equally. Often one message will resonate particularly well on one channel, but not on another. Analyze which topics are receiving the most shares and on what platforms. Maybe your CSR coverage is highly engaged with on Facebook, but your business strategy and financial performance news is shared more on Twitter. Use this information to inform your campaign and media relations strategies to pitch more CSR messages that you know will amplify your brand.
Understand which audiences are more responsive on which platforms and target your messages
Not all outlets have audiences that engage the same way on social media. Use demographic and outlet data to understand how certain audiences engage on social and with what topics. Then tailor your messaging to the audience you want to reach.
Use trends emerging on social media to inform and refine your traditional media messaging
It seems counter intuitive, but there are hot topics in traditional media that rarely receive engagement on social media or vice versa. Answer questions like these to build traditional media campaigns that you know will drive high engagement on social:
- Are there topics lightly covered in traditional media that catch fire in social media?
- Do your key social influencers drive engagement with a particular demographic?
- Do certain influencers stand out who weren’t already on your radar?
Consistent measurement will provide historical data you can refer to in a crisis
Consistently measuring and the interplay between traditional and social media will show you what a normal amount of social sharing looks like for your coverage, allowing you to quickly react to any anomalies as they occur. You can then use historic social sharing data around outlets to amplify crisis response messaging to the right audiences most efficiently.
Measuring the interplay between your traditional and social media will give you the ability to leverage the undercurrent of public opinion that spreads through social media. You will gain insight into new social media and third-party influencers as you dig into the context of what is being shared and by whom. Consistent analysis will give you the data needed to build more targeted campaigns and prove the impact of your campaigns over time.