CorpComms Magazine

As the internet increasingly penetrates people's lives, timely media monitoring is becoming a mission-critical weapon in the corporate communication professional's armoury. But there is also a need to keep key executives and staff updated without drowning them in information.

'It's an increasingly big challenge for us,' says Matt Peacock, group director of communications for FTSE 100 natural gas company BG Group. 'There is an electronic waterfall of information flowing over the internet and pouring into people's in-boxes, and one of your many jobs as a communications professional is to be a filter, not to allow the waterfall to pour through your boardroom.

'But what you also need to do is stand beneath it and make judgements. What information do you prioritise? What do you investigate? What do you ignore?'

Bobby Leach, group media relations director at Vodafone, came up against just such a conundrum in March when South Africa's Sunday Times reported that Vodafone had held talks with the country's third-biggest mobile operator, MTN, about acquiring a stake in its international operations. The following Tuesday morning, Leach held Vodafone's daily conference call with PR teams from many of its 27 operating countries.

'The call gives us a snapshot of what the media are saying in each market,' Leach says. 'We could find out online what is going on if we wanted to, but we also want to know more detail, such as what sort of questions our people are getting from journalists. On this particular call it became clear that as well as this article appearing in South Africa, it was being followed around the world in India, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and so on.

'We decided that, because the story was so grossly untrue, we would give a quick verbal comment to Bloomberg and Reuters saying as much. By mid-morning, Reuters was running it.' The story soon died.

Such affirmative action is unusual for Vodafone, which traditionally sticks to the 'no comment' response to speculation. However, this case was different, says Leach, not least because Vodafone owns 50 percent of MTN's fierce business rival Vodacom.

'First, we wanted to evaluate how much traction this story was getting,' says Leach. 'Were we getting further enquiries, what was the feeling in South Africa, and how much damage could be done by any suggestion that we were irritated with the government there? We checked with our government relations people and decided to put out the clarifying statement.'

Leach included just a single line about the original story in the weekly email he sends to Vodafone chief executive Arun Sarin summarising important press stories. 'This is always sent in a BlackBerry-friendly format, kept short and presented in rich text,' says Leach.

Press gangs
Every weekday the PR departments for Vodafone's operating countries send Leach a report of all relevant print and online articles. Every Friday a weekly summary is sent. Leach often distils 40 or 50 pages of relevant coverage down to a paragraph for Sarin. If the share price starts moving on a rumour, he may simply walk to Sarin's office or the investor relations team to discuss it.

Vodafone also pays for an annual media analysis report from Millward Brown, specifically related to its position in the UK market, as well as a monthly analysis from Metrica.

Beyond a UK cutting service from Precise Media, however, Leach keeps most of Vodafone's daily media monitoring work firmly in-house, including monitoring of the newswires and various blogs.

'At the moment, I have an individual who spends her life searching the blogosphere,' explains Leach. 'It may be that there comes a time when we think that is too much for one person, but I feel more comfortable knowing we are personally on the case and can tailor our message more accurately to what is going on.'

Many other companies are turning to media monitoring agencies for coverage of breaking stories from internet sites and blogs. Keir Fawcus, managing director of Precise Media, claims his company's client base has doubled in the past two years to around 1,500. Precise now covers 10,000 media sources and 5,000 online sources.

'We have to make it readable and digestible and get it out to them quickly,' says Fawcus. 'We usually deliver digitally to the PR function and the board. There are normally only two or three articles that will make or break a corporate communications professional's day, so we categorise that coverage and summarise it in emails to their BlackBerrys by 7 am.

'We also evaluate whether the coverage is positive or negative, or carries some corporate message. Most people want to see four or five interesting paragraphs on their coverage once or twice a day.'

Checking out
Greg Dawson, director of communications for Travelodge, employs Durrants' media monitoring services to record every media reference to the privately owned hotels group. He receives the information twice a day.

'We get mentioned about 15 to 20 times a day in the UK press, and it's imperative first thing in the morning that I know what's being said,' Dawson says. 'You could have your own staff monitoring it, but then people would never get around to doing their job.'

Using Durrants' cuts, Dawson's team compiles a weekly summary for the top 60 to 80 managers in the business. 'When I was at Sainsbury's and Royal Bank of Scotland it was better to do that on a daily basis as a lot of news can be share price-sensitive,' he explains. 'But Travelodge opens a new hotel every eight days, so those of us in the communications team need to know what messages are coming out about the business on a daily basis. More than ever, media is 24/7, and monitoring messages on that timescale is crucial.'

Each piece of coverage is sent to Millward Brown, which provides a quarterly report and a tailored monthly PowerPoint slide - or 'dashboard' - that captures how the company is performing in PR terms. Dawson uses this at Travelodge's monthly board meetings to explain to directors and owner Dubai International Capital what he and his team have been up to.

'I am not embarrassed about having to justify the existence of the corporate communications function,' Dawson says. 'The finance director wants to know about costs. We are a private equity-owned business, and we have to drive the value of the business hard.'

Power player
Dominic Fry, consultant at financial PR agency Tulchan, says he found monitoring services invaluable in his previous role as group communications director of ScottishPower.

Five years ago, Fry faced a PR headache when the Californian energy crisis struck, as half of ScottishPower's electricity business was in the US. ScottishPower bought huge quantities of electricity forward in the market at high prices. A subsequent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ruling caused the price to plummet, leaving ScottishPower with an enormous liability to communicate to staff, journalists and investors.

A fractious period followed, during which any news about energy from the US could spook investors. ScottishPower operated in six states, each separately regulated. 'When you tell a state regulator you want a price increase, a bargaining process goes on,' says Fry. 'But many analysts hadn't understood that the company wouldn't ever get what it first asked for.'

So Fry used Tulchan, ScottishPower's agency at the time, to keep track of any judgements or statements by state regulators. 'They might be released by the local newspaper in Utah and then run on Reuters, and come to a bunch of unsuspecting analysts whose knowledge of the region is small,' he explains. 'Those analysts might then panic and publish flash notes downgrading the shares. By anticipating the judgement, having Tulchan providing info and knowing what was running on the wires, we were able to talk to our investors and say: It is a long process that will take six to nine months. Don't believe what you're reading in terms of snap judgements.'

Fry believes monitoring really has to be done out-ofhouse. 'In my experience of corporate communications, watching the market and providing information on a realtime basis is a luxury precious few companies can afford,' he says.

Music to their ears
Every day, Universal Music's PR team selects and posts relevant stories and news clips on The Globe, the company's intranet. Various senior executives also subscribe independently to music news aggregator services - such as the UK's Record of the Day.

'We make a point of drawing management's attention to specific stories, articles and blogs that are of interest - sometimes with comment about the sourcing, about the particular media's leanings, and so on,' says Adam White, vice president of communications at Universal Music.

'But there is such a volume of coverage that we don't attempt to distil or comment upon the bulk of what's reported; there aren't enough hours in the day. We save the proactive commentary for major company or industry developments, or for particularly significant news.'

One example of just such a major development came last year following negative coverage sparked by Universal Music's acquisition of the UK-based V2 Music Group. The purchase had to be cleared by the Office of Fair Trading, prompting the media to focus on its implications for competition.

'Because competition regulators rightly frown on deal advocacy in the media while the details are being studied in Whitehall offices, we made few comments to the media, either on or off the record,' says White. 'But knowing that staff would see the coverage and be quizzed by peers and colleagues, we took action internally.'

Universal chief executive Lucian Grainge put the issue in context with an upbeat memo. White says the result was very positive in terms of staff morale and equipped employees with valuable talking points to use if they were drawn into conversations outside the workplace.

'All of this may be basic communications procedure,' says White, 'but it illustrates the virtues of clear, timely and selective internal communication when a company is in the news, and when employees are wondering what management is thinking.'

Differing approaches
Peacock takes a similarly selective approach, typically distilling down the day's key media stories to five or six paragraphs for his chief executive Frank Chapman.

But Peacock says a business like BG needs to take a very different approach to media and news monitoring from the average corporate. ' If you are Microsoft or Oracle or Pret A Manger or Waitrose, technology is your friend,' he explains. 'It is fine to pay agencies for electronic monitoring and push email services because you operate predominantly in countries where the majority of people are online and all the major media have significant online outlets.

'But if, like BG Group, you work in a mix of OECD and non-OECD countries, you are never going to be able to track emerging threats to your reputation that way. In a lot of our markets the internet is very constrained, so you are basically talking about gossip.

'The only way you can get your hands around that early enough is to employ communications people who are nationals of the country, who are senior, experienced, connected and understand your business and corporate aims. It's a little like military intelligence and espionage. You cannot watch this stuff remotely; nothing beats boots on the ground.'

Sensitive information
Quite so, according to another senior oil executive, who asked not to be named. He describes how another exploration company almost had an international incident after failing to spot a communications disaster waiting to happen on an onshore rig in the North African desert.

'The cause was a stupid British contractor who sent a group email with a ' joke' about the Prophet Mohammed,' says the executive. 'It was picked up by a devout Muslim on the same drill site, who printed it, circulated it to colleagues and posted it on a blog with allegations that this company was supporting abuse of the Prophet Mohammed. The first the company knew was when the army had to be called out to rescue the contractor.

'These things happen quite regularly in some parts of the world, but this incident should never have reached the level of a 'category one' emergency. The company's Anglocentric IT tools failed to spot the blog, which was in Arabic.

'More importantly, the company had no local communications professionals who could have taken the issue straight to the country manager, called a site meeting with the offended person, pursued the halfwit who sent the email, said, He's been disciplined and reiterated that his view did not represent those of the company. If it had done all this, the incident would have gone away.'

So it seems that while you can buy all the media monitoring technology in the world, without human intelligence, experience and old-fashioned PR savvy, a communications disaster could be just around the corner.

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