CorpComms Magazine

Media measurement has become more important than ever in this new media world, with a fundamentally changed landscape and citizen journalists coming to the fore, according to Chris Shaw, global practice director at Factiva Insight, the media evaluation company recently acquired by Dow Jones.

 Speaking to a breakfast roundtable of communications professionals, Shaw reiterated that the aim of media evaluation and measurement remains the same. 'You should measure your performance and - more importantly - you should measure the performance of your key competitors,' he said.

But the process of surveying this new world has changed. Shaw highlighted the rise in 'text mining, which automatically analyses vast amounts of media output that the traditional system of newspaper clippings - a manual process - just can't keep up with.'

With a dramatic increase in the speed of information transfer, Shaw described how stories now 'bounce' from bloggers to social networking sites before being pulled into the mainstream, the kind of movement that makes clippings irrelevant. 'The speed has changed, so the processes have to change; you cannot rely on manual analysis alone to provide you with historical perspective when what happened yesterday changes your whole industry,' he pointed out.

The new technology enables companies to assess sentiment. Analysts read stories and code them, based on a brief from a client, while sentiment is also analysed automatically using an algorithm. 'You can pick up, for example, whether key journalists are turning to bloggers to pull a story online, and which bloggers they are turning to,' Shaw said.

Melanie Surplice, media consultant at Dow Jones, added that it was also important to separate the wheat from the chaff in any search. 'External search engines are fantastic, but we all know what it's like trawling through 20 pages of Google news stories,' she remarked. 'The ability to filter that based on pretty tight criteria and getting the information from credible sources, whether it's the news services or aggregation services, will become vital.'

While the onus might be on the clients to know what they are looking for, the world is constantly changing. 'One of the things we're increasingly saying is, If you're in such and such a sector, you must measure this. This is how we categorise environmental leadership. This is how we categorise corporate governance,' said Shaw. 'There are key things you know about, such as the drivers of goodwill and the associated reputation and relationship assets.'

Shaw believes that for each media evaluation project, around 40 percent of the data is totally customized while the rest comprises a core set of reputation drivers against which a company should measure itself and its competitors.

Win friends and influence people 'When I was doing PR at Dow Jones, we were very aware of a core bunch of bloggers who were not necessarily professional writers, but were certainly very opinionated, and they had a following with some of our key customers and stakeholders,' said Surplice. 'We began to brief them - not quite as we would a journalist because we couldn't assume they would behave in the same way - but we began including them in our media relations programme.'

Shaw recommends that media relations teams identify the most relevant and influential journalists or bloggers as well as the protagonists or antagonists of a brand and how important they are. 'You have to measure the ones who help build your reputation but you also have to monitor those who can suddenly kick the tyres a bit,' he noted.

Vast swathes of text can be daunting, so Factiva recommends transforming the data into visual representations. 'We present charts - pie charts, bar charts, trend charts or a grid - that show you where the buzz of media is,' said Shaw. 'By visualizing, you can identify where the anomalies and exceptions are so much more easily.'

'I think in a campaign there are always going to be core messages that you want to track,' added Surplice. 'Some of the big consumer companies will specifically target blogs. I know a big producer of deodorant that was using blogs to target that audience.

If you're spending that much money, you want to know who is following up and what the results are. If you're three months into a campaign, getting a cuttings book or a media evaluation report then is too late. This is where the new technologies come in: they can give you insights that can perhaps allow you to tweak information on the fly.'

And there are ways to soften the message of even the most obstinate blogger. 'Those bloggers who really lead the pack and are incredibly influential can never be swayed, and indeed that's the whole essence of their brand,' explained Shaw. 'But we're doing a lot of network analysis to identify who taps into them. You can stem the flow or you can change opinion a bit.' The new techniques, which quantify the work of a communications department, are also useful for proving to the board that a good job is being done.

'Evaluation is more like elevation,' said Shaw. 'The average tenure of someone in a corp comms or marketing role is around 14 months. I'd say the majority of people who take evaluation seriously see personal empowerment and career elevation in it.'

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