http://xmrv.me.uk | The changing face of media measurement As recently as 5 years ago print was king when it came to media evaluation. Very few measurement companies tracked web content and there was little demand from clients to do so. Things rapidly started to change as companies began to recognize the influence of online media. Today there are literally hundreds of solutions to monitoring and analyzing online coverage. A selection of free and paid-for tools can be found here. Where once companies would focus on monitoring a few important websites there's now a mad clamour to track anything and everything that appears online. Some companies are now settling for evaluating just their online coverage. Trying to evaluate everything that's posted online (regardless of influence) at the expense of analysing print/traditional media is dangerous. It ignores potentially important areas and produces data overload; many services offer fancy graphs based on an overwhelming volume of data, but the results are far from useful. People thought TV would kill off radio, but it simply forced radio to fill a different role - in the same way, although there will be much consolidation, print wont die out completely. |
Confused about how best to evaluate your PR coverage?
It's now fairly unusual to find a PR Director who doesn't at least pay lip service to evaluation. If you do come across such a person, however, you know (a) they suspect the results will show them in a bad light and they have no interest in gaining insights that could help them improve the situation; or (b) they feel that PR provides no measurable value - in which case why is the company investing in it?
All PR managers and marketing directors should have in place a clear set of measurable objectives. Far from simply counting clippings companies should use measures that give insight into how PR drives business performance.
When implementing media evaluation, try to keep things as simple as possible. So many companies go from having no measurement in place to wanting a system that measures everything and produces all kinds of metrics that would probably never be used. Here's a quick summary of things to consider when looking into media evaluation:
 | (1) Level of detail As a minimum you should be tracking how your coverage changes over time. Far more useful is benchmarking against the competition. This need not be an expensive exercise. One way to keep costs down is to focus the analysis on a core group of publications that are read by your target market. Not only does this cut the cost of the research it helps avoid getting swamped with data from the millions of website and blogs that will have negligible impact on your business. Within the key group of titles benchmark share of voice; get insight into what's working for the competitors - the angles they've used to generate coverage, the journalists who are covering your space etc. This will result in a far more focused and effective media strategy. |
(2) Benchmarking
There's little value in looking at your coverage in isolation. Try and select a group of companies that you sell against. For broadly-based competitors ensure that coverage is filtered so that the analysis focuses exclusively on coverage of the product or service you compete with. To ensure accuracy its a good idea to select a media measurement company that specializes in your sector or has a detailed knowledge and understanding of your market. (3) What media to monitor To get real insight from the vast quantity of online coverage you need to cut through the noise. Part of this is to identify and track just the most important social media. This is more easily done in some industries (tech for example) than others (eg FMCG). Don't overlook traditional media if there are influential print publications read by people who invest in what you're selling. Don't let your PR agency insist on including "soft targets" in the analysis. Anyone can get their press release posted on certain websites and including this data in the measurement adds no value and skews the results. (4) Involving your PR agency It's a good idea to get your agency involved in the measurement process. They can help interpret the data, provide insight into the results and ultimately help adjust your PR strategy based on the findings of the research. However your agency should never be the ones undertaking the research. Time spent analysing coverage is time not available to generate coverage; more importantly it lacks the credibility that independent research provides. Companies aren't allowed to audit their own accounts and it pays to invest in a 3rd party to provide media measurement. (5) Analyzing tone of coverage Accurate automated sentiment analysis is the holy grail for measurement firms. Even companies like Google & Microsoft (http://bit.ly/S4yLS) are now getting in on the act, but there are still huge problems with automated sentiment analysis. It can't cope with colloquialisms sarcasm. Rarely, if ever, will automated sentiment engines distinguish whether the positive comment was from a journalist, a company spokesperson, or an industry analyst. Here's an example of a free sentiment analysis tool (http://twittersentiment.appspot.com/) Try it and judge the results for yourself. Here's an example of a resource that seems to be slightly better at scoring tone: http://www.tweetfeel.com/ However, for accurate sentiment analysis use a company that employs human readers. This is the only way to properly understand the language. Again, it need not be prohibitively expensive provided you've narrowed down the list of publications under analysis to those that are truly important to your business. (6) Using the results The results of the benchmarking analysis should be used to shape future PR strategy. Are some publications giving a disproportionate amount of coverage to a competitor? Has your strategy with certain journalists simply not paid dividends? Are there new journalists covering your space that might not have been on your agency's radar? The data from the analysis should also be mapped against other web and marketing data such as web hits, forms filled, enquiries etc. For this reason you should try to synchronise PR evalulation reporting periods with web analytic and marketing data cycles. As valuable as good media measurement analysis can be, don't expect too much from it. It's unlikely to be able to demonstrate all of the value that you and your agency have created, or all of the work you've undertaken. And there's still no real, cost-effective, way of stripping out the vast array of other influences and link PR directly to sales.
Craig Hodges consults on media measurement matters and specializes in implementing media research programs for technology organizations. His expertise is understanding, integrating and applying research to create business and customer value. http://www.linkedin.com/craighodges |
