Apr 14

Six Benefits of Meaningful Segmentation When Measuring PR

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PR content analysis

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One of the most important considerations in the development of any actionable media analysis program for PR is the meaningful segmentation of all qualified content. And when I say “meaningful,” I am referring to the process by which human analysts categorize each article, post or tweet into buckets according to the subject matter at hand and not based solely on the presence or absence of keywords. Even the most thought out search string is a reactive exercise based on assumptions rather than the focus of the articles, posts and tweets that make up your brand visibility. Furthermore, this “keyword game” becomes even more challenging when applied to social media or depending on the intricacies of the brand, product or service mentions included in the research.

As you look to develop or refine a media analysis program for your organization, pay special consideration to how your content and analysis is segmented and remember these six benefits that your due diligence will deliver:

1. Internal practitioners gain quick and easy access to relevant content and its corresponding measures.

As responsibilities and areas of expertise vary within PR teams, so too does the content and analysis that matter to each team member. By appropriately segmenting media coverage into buckets that represent these focuses, you essentially make the measurement more meaningful and useful to each individual. This segmentation may reflect the distinct the business units of your organization as well as major initiatives such as corporate social responsibility.

2. Ensures your share of voice is based on a level playing field.

Organizational structures differ. Take a look at the individual business units that comprise your organization and list out the top two or three competitors for each. It’s quite likely that the competition amongst your business units vary from one to the next. Proper segmentation will lead to the accurate calculation of your share of voice and all associated analysis. Don’t let irrelevant content skew the analysis and, in turn, cloud your understanding of your competitive positioning.

3. Allows you to understand the impact of corporate initiatives and industry events.

Proper segmentation includes the tagging of one-off events including corporate initiatives, such as a product release or trade show, and industry happenings, such as an acquisition or litigation. By doing so, you gain the ability to understand the degree to which these individual events contribute to spikes in visibility as well as their impact on corporate reputation and competitive positioning. You will also establish a meaningful benchmark from which future and similar events can be measured against.

4. Helps to identify the subject areas responsible for trends in visibility.

As the volume of content your organization earns increases, so does the degree of difficulty associated with identifying shifts in discussion and the subject matter behind these shifts. By establishing a firm understanding of the different areas (ex. business units) that make up brand visibility, you will be able to accurately measure their associated trends and connect each to the larger corporate picture.

5. Clarifies the areas of visibility responsible for favorable and unfavorable positioning.

It is important to understand how media visibility impacts brand reputation and differentiates you from the competition. Including tonality and positioning statements in your measurement program (see Three Metrics That Make PR Measurement More Meaningful for more on these metrics) will highlight and clarify the variations of your positioning. Proper segmentation will allow you to examine these metrics in detail in order to recognize the areas that are driving sentiment as well as the specific attributes behind favorable and unfavorable positioning.

6. Essential when assessing correlations between outcomes and the right exposure.

When possible, understanding the relationship between exposure and desired outcomes, such as an increase in awareness, inquiries or donations, offers insight into the impact of your visibility and positioning. However, this is often a challenging exercise given the numerous factors that contribute to these different outcomes, including word of mouth, advertising, organic searches and past campaigns to name a few. To improve the accuracy of these results, it is essential to limit the calculations to the right exposure; exposure that was intended to drive the stated outcome.

If you are seeking an actionable media analysis program to assist with the creation and evaluation of your strategies and the demonstration of their impact, meaningful segmentation is an essential component. This approach ensures that you have quick, easy and accurate access to intelligence on your brand reputation, competitive positioning, campaign initiatives and industry events. All of which combine for a better understanding of brand visibility and positioning and, in turn, better decision making.

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Jan 24

PR Measurement and the Pursuit of the Perfect Metric

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PR Metrics

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Defining metrics that are meaningful and actionable in public relations has received increased attention as of late. With the release of the Barcelona Principles and the denouncing of AVEs, there has been an uptick in discussions focused on outlining standards and finding a replacement for AVEs. I do not expect these conversations to end anytime soon. The reason being, in my opinion, is that there is no “holy grail” when it comes to PR measurement.  Although the search for one would be an endless endeavor, it would not be a futile exercise, as efforts to identify or define the “perfect” metric would help promote new metrics and refine or eliminate existing ones.

“When you aim for perfection, you discover it’s a moving target.”  ~George Fisher

There are two primary reasons for why I believe that the search for the “perfect” metric has no end in sight:

First: Metrics that are meaningful for one campaign or initiative may vary from the next. Metrics that are relevant and important to one industry or organization may vary from another. For example, “thought leadership” metrics are more likely to be included in B2B measurement programs than in B2C programs. Metrics need to be defined based upon established goals that measure the effectiveness of implemented strategies and the objectives they were meant to advance. Metrics need to be defined with an aim on delivering insight that can assist in the creation and refinement of future strategies. Remember, identifying the right questions to effectively conduct the evaluation process precedes the selection of metrics used to answer them, not vice versa. Don Bartholomew, the MetricsMan, astutely captures a relevant viewpoint in his post: Don’t Let the Tool Tail Wag the Measurement Dog.

Second: More often than not, measurement delivers actionable insight by analyzing a combination of metrics. Alone, a metric can shed light on the big picture but when combined with additional metrics, the details begin to become clear and details are what make measurement meaningful, and in turn, actionable.

The baseball analogy is used often and applies here as well. Think of evaluating a hitter. There are a vast amount of statistics that are used to evaluate hitters and relying on a single statistic runs the risk of ignoring important aspects of the game. Even given the wealth of statistics at our disposal, player evaluations often turn to the “intangibles.” Furthermore, the statistics used to evaluate a leadoff hitter will differ from those that are used to evaluate a cleanup hitter or by teams looking to employ a different offensive strategy such as small-ball.

The point here is that PR metrics, much like baseball statistics, are meant to assist and guide our evaluations, not dictate them. The more metrics we have at our fingertips, the more insight we can gain into brand positioning or campaign effectiveness so that future strategies benefit from the lessons of past experiences.

It is my view that meaningful research is born from a combination of creativity and sound methodologies. Removing AVEs from this formula was a step in the right direction and it is my hope that ongoing efforts will focus on denouncing bad practices rather than placing artificial constraints on PR measurement and evaluation. Just as equally important in my view, but receiving far less attention, is the call for transparency from the Barcelona Principles. This means that black box algorithms, such as influencer scores and automated sentiment analysis, should be used with extreme caution, if at all, in measurement as they lack the transparency to be dependable and trustworthy.

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

As the discussions on standards and replacement metrics for the measurement and evaluation of public relations continue, let us remember the follies of AVEs and resist the attraction that such “metrics” offer. The popularity and rampant use of AVEs in PR’s history did not lie in the premise that it delivered meaning and insight. Rather, AVEs were so widely adopted because they offered a single metric that offered the illusion of ROI. Let us not fall into this trap again.

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Dec 14

Utilizing a SWOT Analysis to Uncover Opportunities and Threats in PR

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Opportunities & Threats

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In the previous post, we began to look at how we could derive competitive intelligence from measuring public relations by employing a SWOT analysis to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of an organization’s media presence. In this post, we will take a look at different areas of evaluation in order to uncover possible opportunities and threats that may exist and lead to shifts in PR strategies.

Opportunities and threats, the external factors of a SWOT analysis, represent the items that lie outside of an organization’s immediate control. They are constantly changing and present themselves in many forms. The more intelligence you have at your fingertips, the better you position your organization to mitigate the threats and capitalize on the opportunities before they magnify or diminish respectively. I’d like to focus on two areas that I believe to be the most relevant to public relations: technology and the competition.

Technology may offer a new means for reaching and interacting with target stakeholders or advancing your key messages. Gadgets, such as the iPad, have the potential to greatly expand the reach of certain media outlets and some have even gone as far as to label it the “saving of the newspaper industry.” Social networks, such as Twitter, present a new (relatively) medium for organizations, making it easier to connect and share. And let’s not forget about customer review sites, such as Yelp, putting customer experiences a click away from impacting the purchasing decisions of potential customers.

These examples only highlight a few examples of how technology can present and define brand opportunities and threats. Does new technology offer a means to mitigate existing or potential threats? Extend thought leadership? Expand visibility? Clarify message communication? Asking these types of questions may lead to answers that can be applied to strengthen and maximize competitive positioning. Establishing a meaningful measurement program will provide you with consistent data and assist in answering these types of questions.

For most organizations, the competition most likely represents the greatest threat to realizing their stated objectives. Watch for trends in strengths and weaknesses, as it relates to your media presence, and understand why these trends are developing. Understand if the trend was the result of:

  • A temporary shift caused by an industry event or product launch
  • A change in the competitive landscape, such as an acquisition or a rising competitor
  • The competition expanding their reach through new outlets or influencers
  • Prefaced by trends in competitive positioning that could have been identified and addressed

Additionally, it is important to ask yourself: “Are our strengths and weaknesses in positioning reflective of the perceptions that our stakeholders hold as derived from survey data? Are they in line with the results of independent evaluations such as Consumer Reports or Charity Navigator?” Similarly, understand the differences between your share of voice and comparative measures, such as market share, to identify variations that raise flags. Discrepancies may point to a failing strategy, intensive tactics by the competition or a hole in communications efforts that can be shored up in order to capitalize on existing opportunities.

Understanding “why” media trends develop or positioning advantages exist help to determine what, if any, shifts in strategies should be considered and to identify whether or not additional research may be appropriate. The “why” is a moving target which becomes easier to identify with the assistance of an established and meaningful media measurement program. Maintaining a firm grasp on your media presence, in relation to the competition, enables you to discover opportunities and threats and to take informed steps towards achieving your stated objectives.

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Dec 02

What Measuring PR Can Tell Us About Competitive Positioning

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Strength

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Gaining competitive intelligence is one of the primary reasons for implementing a brand media analysis program. Understanding how the media positions your organization before your stakeholders, as compared to that of the competition, arms you with intelligence to recognize trends and take advantage competitive strengths and weaknesses. In this post, part one of a two part series, we will borrow some exercises from a SWOT analysis to assist in the evaluation of an organization’s media presence in order to identify what differentiates them from the competition.

So what is SWOT? It’s a strategic process that identifies the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats of an organization’s competitive positioning. Using this technique, we are going to look at how PR measurement can provide competitive intelligence and how we can use this information to evaluate and enhance PR strategies.

The four components of a SWOT analysis are broken down into two segments:

The internal factors:

  • Strengths: what an organization possesses or does well in regards to the competition as it relates to achieving the stated objective
  • Weaknesses: what an organization does not possess or do well in regards to the competition as it relates to achieving the stated objective

And the external factors:

  • Opportunities: conditions that exist and present a venue to advance the stated objective
  • Threats: conditions that exist and present a barrier to achieving the stated objective

With that in mind, let’s start by looking at those items that differentiate an organization from the competition, its strengths and weaknesses, and what we can identify based upon a brand’s media presence. To accomplish this, we’ll delve into a couple areas of evaluation, a brand’s media visibility and positioning, and what can be derived in order to fill in the “S” and “W” quadrants. It is important to keep in mind that this must be in relation to the competition for a specific market or it is meaningless.

Visibility: If we take an in-depth look at brand visibility and understand how your share of voice varies between individual key performance indicators as compared to the whole (see Sample Chart 1), then we are able to better highlight areas of strengths and weaknesses. Criteria for evaluation may include your share of voice in:

  • Desirable exposure (positive and neutral sentiment) – Is your media exposure aiding an advantage in awareness?
  • Negative exposure– Is your brand more susceptible to threats?
  • Spokesperson visibility – Are your spokespeople taking the lead in demonstrating expertise and thought leadership?
  • Regional exposure – Does your organization garner a larger share of voice in specific regions?
  • Target audiences/stakeholders – Do you fare better or worse among the business community? Activists? General Consumers? Industry Analysts?
  • Different mediums – You may achieve a greater share of voice in newspapers, but what about broadcast mediums? Twitter? Blogs?
PR Measurement KPIs

Sample Chart 1

Positioning: Just as it is important to understand the extent to which you are visible to your target audiences/stakeholders, it is equally important to understand how that visibility distinguishes you from the competition. To expand upon your strengths and weakness, we need to capture the specific attributes that are being tied to your brand, and to that of the competition, in the media. We went into the details of positioning statements in our previous post: Three Metrics That Make PR Measurement More Meaningful.

When analyzing this data, it is essential to go attribute by attribute in order to understand what differentiates you from the competition. I believe that you will find that this is where a great deal of the insight lies. Innovation, environmental sustainability, product quality, and customer experience offer a few examples of attributes that can be evaluated. These will vary based on the industry and not all attributes are created equal. It’s important to understand those attributes which your stakeholders place the greatest value on in order to better understand their potential impact on brand reputation. This data can be gathered by asking your stakeholders to rate the importance of each brand, product or service attribute, which can be easily incorporated into your awareness and perception surveys and/or through ongoing customer satisfaction surveys.

In the second of this two part series, we will cover the opportunities and threats section of a SWOT analysis and the potential action items that can be uncovered from this exercise.

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Sep 16

Three Metrics That Make PR Measurement More Meaningful

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3 PR Measurement Metrics

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So the extent of your PR measurement program involves some cookie-cutter charts that come standard with your clipping service. You know the ones I’m referring to, right? Possibly a pie or trend chart that’s pulled from the article source (e.g. media type, region, etc.) or based on a set of keywords that attempt to capture brand or product visibility. The problem here is that they often raise more questions than they answer. Furthermore, without the human touch, the validity of these metrics does not inspire much confidence.

So you ask yourself: “How do I make my measurement program more meaningful?” It’s a great question and an important one. After all, you are monitoring for a reason. You have invested some significant resources and TLC into building your brand reputation, crafting key messages and promoting your products and services and events. Now the question turns to “how” to measure your coverage? What metrics will establish a meaningful benchmark by which future strategies can be measured against?

In June, seven key principles were established and agreed upon at the second European Summit on Measurement in Barcelona. These principles do a great job in that they are meant to serve as guidelines towards meaningful research versus a strict set of standards. Given the varying objectives that communications research (media analysis and surveys) are meant to address, this distinction is an important one.

Staying on topic, let’s take a closer look at principle #2: Media Measurement Requires Quantity and Quality. In short, clip counting is not enough. In order to be meaningful, media measurement must include quantitative and qualitative metrics that begin to offer insight into your brand reputation. With that being said, let’s have a look at three metrics that will move you beyond clip counting and help to clarify your brand visibility and positioning:

Tone (Sentiment)
There has been a flood of discussion surrounding tone, thanks in no small part to the arrival of social media and the numerous sentiment analysis solutions that followed. This overwhelming focus on tonality would lead you to believe that tone represents the holy grail of media analysis. While we won’t go that far, tone is essential to most media measurement programs.

It’s important to keep in mind the strengths and weaknesses of measuring tonality in your media coverage. It helps to group the good (positive) and the bad (negative) within your brand visibility. This is not to say that neutral coverage is not good, but rather to indicate that there is a difference between a mere mention and one that has the potential to improve or damage your brand’s reputation.

When analyzing over time and against the competition, tone draws our attention to developing trends and positioning within the industry. Tone also provides us with a big picture overview of the health of your brand in the media for a given time period. What tone does not do, is tell us why a mention is positive or negative. If you are looking to evaluate your strategies and differentiate your organization from the competition, understanding the “why” is a critical step.

Segmentation

Segmentation allows you to organize your media coverage into customized groupings that reflect your media environment and organizational structure. If we place your coverage into neat, little buckets, we can evaluate your coverage on a deeper level. For example, if we were to segment your coverage into three distinct areas (e.g. corporate, B2C and B2B) and notice that negative coverage has increased two-fold, then we can run a trend report on negative coverage by segment to identify where the greatest opportunities for improvement exist.

Aside from the additional layer of analysis, segmentation offers two primary benefits:

  1. By segmenting your coverage in a manner that closely reflects the responsibility or specialized focus of the professionals that make up your communications team, you effectively make measurement more applicable, and in turn more meaningful to internal audiences.
  2. Segmentation also allows for a fair comparison against the competition. Including competitor coverage in your analysis provides you with competitive intelligence as well as a benchmark for your positioning within a market. But a brand-for-brand analysis most likely does not provide an apples-to-apples comparison, making it imperative to confine your competitive research to tightly defined market segments.

Tip: Best practice is to segment coverage based on the topic or subject matter of the article versus the presence of a few keywords or a complex search string.

Positioning Statements (Attributes/Themes)
Positioning statements are easily my favorite metric and a must for understanding how media coverage positions your brand. By identifying the specific attributes that are tied to your organization, products and services, you gain a better understanding of how the media is influencing the perceptions that readers form.

Positioning statements answer the “why” behind tone. If the tonality associated to your brand in a specific article is “positive,” what does that tell you exactly? Well, other than that fact that your brand was portrayed positively, it lacks specifics and specifics are what make the data actionable. By digging a little deeper, we may find that your organization was positioned as innovative and a steward of the environment or that your signature product was seen as possessing a rich feature set and delivers superior performance. It is this level of insight that empowers communicators to build and refine strategies and advance objectives.

The inclusion of positioning statements is also valuable for two important reasons:

  1. Positioning statements are a competitive metric. They provide us with a direct, attribute-by-attribute comparison so that we may identify the strengths and weaknesses that differentiate you from the competition. This clarity helps you to better understand how your strategies and messaging are resonating in the media.
  2. In coding for positioning statements, we begin with a clean slate and allow the content to speak for itself. In doing so, we create a discovery process where we capture all of the attributes that are tied to your brand reputation instead of working off of a predefined list. This approach presents an opportunity to capitalize on favorable positioning and mitigate unfavorable positioning from the offset.

Applying these three metrics will help to answer many questions that arise regarding your brand positioning and visibility. While goals will change over time, it is imperative to have a reliable, consistent and meaningful benchmark from which we can measure against.

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Aug 17

Not All That Is Monitored Should Be Measured

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Media Monitoring

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At the base of any meaningful media content analysis program is… the content. We often tend to think “big picture” and focus on metrics that are going to deliver insight into such measurement objectives as clarifying your brand reputation, competitive positioning and campaign success to name a few. We look to use this information to prop up our strengths and capitalize on our competitors’ weaknesses, identify influencers, repeat successful initiatives and refine or eliminate strategies that fell short.

But what if the metrics were based on a hotchpotch of content and, hence, erroneous and inflated? This may give you a false sense of accomplishment or overstate a weakness in your brand positioning. The credibility and meaningfulness of these metrics rely heavily on the content from which they are pulled. Flawed data increases the likelihood of flawed decisions.

A sound content collection and qualification methodology is a crucial step in the establishment of a meaningful measurement program. One that delivers data that you can trust. One from which you can demonstrate success (or failure) and make decisions.

Now, this is all easier said than done thanks in no small part to the arrival of social media. To be frank, content collection is one of the most challenging aspects to any measurement program and deserving of the attention and detail that will lead to a clear and consistent media content population.

While there are many factors that will define the quantity and quality of your media content collection ranging from the use of keywords to the thoroughness of your monitoring sources, I’d like to focus here a bit on the content that you should omit or consider omitting from the analysis.

Now, with your objectives in mind, be wary of the following content that may make its way into your measurement program.

Advertisements: Ads are straight forward and easy to identify yet they do get picked up by monitoring spiders and search engines.

Off-Topic Competitor Coverage: In many cases, competitor coverage is included in your measurement program in regards to a specific market segment. If you are a shoe manufacturer and have included Company A to benchmark against solely within your “Athletic” segment, then be sure to exclude coverage for segments such as “Sandals” or “Boots” as this will skew the results.

Similarly, consider that Competitor B’s product segments perfectly align with your own, yet they are a public company whereas you are private. You will want to ensure that all financial coverage is excluded, or tagged appropriately for later filtering, so that your share of voice is based on an apples-to-apples comparison.

Comments: Yes, comments. Sure, they mention your brand and often in very colorful ways, but do they align with your objectives? Are your key metrics as applicable to comments as they are for a blog post or newspaper article? Do you feel comfortable including comments when calculating your share of voice?

Comments are a moving target, both in quantity and visibility. They often cloud the bigger picture rather than clarify it. This is not to say that comments should not be monitored but think twice before including them in your analysis and key performance indicators.

Duplicates: This may seem obvious, but if you are not removing duplicate articles/posts from the analysis then you’re inflating your metrics. Maybe a story was edited or received a new comment or possibly multiple sources are being used to ensure that your content is comprehensive and complete. Whatever the reason, duplicates can find their way into your data set and they should be identified and removed.

Medium: Your objectives lead to the definition of your key metrics and audiences/stakeholders. Your metrics and audiences/stakeholders will define the different mediums that can be and should be collected and analyzed. In many cases, newspapers are measured differently than Twitter which is measured differently than forums. Identify your mediums and be aware of content that falls outside of this set.

“Spam” sites: Ugh, these are the worst. We’ve all seen them, sites where computer scripts “republish” content based on keyword matches in order to gain ad hits. I know, advertising revenue is the business model for publishers, but there’s a difference between buying a Rolex in a jewelry store versus some back alley. The challenge with these sites is in identifying them. With the understanding that the volume of “posts” will be relatively high on these sites in order to gain ad hits by the sheer volume of new visitors (repeat visitors are unlikely), here are a few indicators that may give them away:

  • The “About Us” page starts “This is an example of a WordPress page…”
  • Very little care and attention was given to the logo and overall site aesthetics
  • An abnormal amount of real estate is dedicated to ad space
  • No credit is given to the original author of the story
  • Off-topic posts appear due to false hits based on the use of keywords. For example, a blog dedicated to the Ford Fusion contains posts on nuclear fusion
  • An unmanageable volume of post categories exist or there are post categories that are virtual duplicates of one another (ex. “mid size cars”, “mid-size cars” and “midsize cars”)

The purpose of this post is not to set guidelines but rather to raise awareness concerning the quality of the content that comprises your media analysis program. Measurement objectives vary and, in turn, so do the parameters for content collection and qualification. Human analysis will easily address some of these challenges, while others will require additional training and a watchful eye. Remember, content inclusion should be intentional and controlled as it is the foundation of a meaningful measurement program.

This list presents just a handful of examples to be aware of. Do you have others to watch for? Please share, we’d love to hear them or any other comments you may have.

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Jul 21

Symscio Launches PR Measurement Blog

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Launch of The PR Measurement Table

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Welcome to The PR Measurement Table, the home of Symscio’s corporate blog. As a communications research firm, we focus on objective-based measurement, including media monitoring and analysis for traditional and social media as well as survey research. What makes this area so fascinating right now is that communications research is in a period of increased adoption and evolution. So, needless to say, we have seen a wealth of opinions and approaches to sift through in order to extract better ways to measure brand reputation, gain intelligence and evaluate PR strategies. We aim to discuss these views and share our experiences in hopes that you may leave here with information that will contribute to a more meaningful measurement program. This is what has inspired us to launch The PR Measurement Table.

What we believe

  • We believe that in order for measurement to be actionable, it must be meaningful.
  • We believe that in order to be meaningful, measurement must reflect your objectives, strategies and media environment.
  • We believe that the human element is at the heart of any meaningful measurement program and that technology is a tool, not a solution.
  • We believe that in order to earn trust and credibility, our industry needs greater transparency and less concealed and ambiguous algorithms.
  • Most importantly, we believe that measurement is meant to empower communications.

What we hope

  • We hope that this will be your first of many visits.
  • We hope that each post will lead to practices and insights that contribute to more meaningful measurement programs.
  • We hope that if you disagree with us, you will speak up! We would rather admit we are wrong than be wrong. After all, it’s called research for a reason.

So here’s to making measurement more meaningful! If you have any questions or suggestions, please share, we would love to hear from you.

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