6 Core Attributes of Advanced Media Analytics
Today’s media environment is noisy and crowded, with a staggering amount of new content being posted on a daily basis. With more than 2 million news articles and 500 Million Tweets coming online every day, how can PR agencies possibly surface the content that is most important to their clients on a real-time basis?
In the not-too-distant past, PR agencies were able to reliably depend on external services to track and monitor coverage for their client brands. With a bit of manual searching to identify articles from more obscure sources that might not be picked up, they could be reasonably certain that they had captured most of the coverage that appeared for their client brands.
But with the exponential increase we’ve seen in the past two decades in social media platforms and activity, the process of tracking and monitoring coverage has become significantly more challenging. For larger client brands, tacking multi-channel news and social activity on a global basis can be a costly, time-consuming and labor-intensive task. Given the enormous volume and relentless pace of today’s media landscape, most PR firms have to subscribe to a host of services to enable them to track and monitor an overwhelming amount of content. And unless the content is analyzed in real-time, agencies risk missing key mentions until after the optimal timing for a response has already passed.
As we enter a new decade, it's not just enough to merely track and monitor client coverage. In order for PR agencies to offer true strategic value, they need to separate and elevate everything that really matters from the vast sea of less relevant content out there.
AI-driven filtering enables a world of potential for Advanced Media Analytics, by allowing PR firms to filter media based on content type, source, scoring and date. An AI-powered visualization engine can not only offer the ability to track multi-channel media activity on a continual 24/7 basis, it can also offer cross-media correlation, or the ability to understand how the various channels (e.g. social and news media) inform and impact one another.
News and social mentions are not all the same. In order for media analytics to provide meaningful insight, the metrics need to take into account several factors that either increase or decrease their importance to a particular client’s brand. Similar to the way scientists see inside each strand of DNA to predict key factors about a larger organism, PR firms need to view the internal coding of each piece of content in order to surface the activity that is most important.
Here are 6 key attributes to consider when determining whether a piece of media content is important enough to be escalated:
Reach. This attribute is calculated by multiplying the number of mentions by the viewership of the media outlets in which they appeared.
Influence. This metric takes reach into consideration, but also includes legitimacy. For example, a mention in the New York Times carries far more influence than a mention on a lesser known independent blog with high UVMs.
Trust. Most clients don’t want to see their brands featured on pornographic websites or media outlets known for espousing racist content. So, in addition to Reach and Influence, it’s crucial to take the integrity of the source into consideration. This is not a subjective metric – it’s actually based on the rankings of a variety of outside sources with an established methodology for determining integrity.
Velocity. This metric is calculated based on the number of mentions that occur in a given number of time. But in order to utilize it in a proactive way, you need to know not only the current level of activity, but also the predicted velocity. For example, say someone posts something on social media about how his guitar was damaged in transit by Airline X. In the first few hours, it might be retweeted dozens or even hundreds of times, causing a sharp increase in trending velocity, but by the next day, it might be down to zero. Ever been awakened by a 5:00 a.m. call from a client about something that was happening on social media in Europe while you were asleep? That’s a great time to know about predicted velocity. In many cases, by the time the client starts paying attention to something that’s trending on social media, the velocity is already decaying.
Relevance. Brands are mentioned in lots of different types of news articles and social posts, but some are far more relevant than others. For example, a feature profile on the CEO would have an extremely high degree of relevance, whereas a mention of the company brand in an article about a competitor or vendor might be less relevant. It’s critical to find a visualization engine that sorts and prioritizes articles by relevance to your client’s specific brand.
Sentiment. This metric is often tracked using Natural Language Processing, but there are many subtle contextual nuances that come into play. For example, if someone refers to a new sports drink as “sick,” a standard NLP engine might misconstrue it as a negative mention. Similarly, a mention of a pharmaceutical brand in the context of the word “cancer,” might also be misclassified as negative. There is no magic bullet for this -- language is always changing, so sentiment tracking methodology needs to change, too.
In order for PR agencies to do their jobs successfully in today’s media landscape, they need to be able to map the DNA of each piece of media content with respect to a particular client’s brand. Sound complicated? It doesn’t have to be. Taking all of these attributes into consideration, Tickr has developed its own Impact Score, which serves as a general index number indicating whether a news article or social post warrants additional attention. Tickr’s Impact Score is based more than just an average – it’s a weighted score based on a proprietary algorithm that can be customized according to the metrics that are most important to each client. For example, if the client feels that Trust is more important than Influence, the Impact Score can be configured accordingly.
Are you ready to bring your media tracking and monitoring to the next level through Advanced Media Analytics? Contact Tickr for a demo today.