Do You Care What People are Saying? If You’re Running a Business You Should!

Each day new clients come to me and ask, “Why should I care about what a newspaper in another country is saying about my business?” This question has two major factors in it. First its your company’s reputation and if you don’t care about that, you should really evaluate why you are in business. Second, no matter what country or what media outlet is writing about you the whole world can see it. As technology keeps advancing and the communication barriers between countries fade, your reputation can be enhanced or completely ruined in a matter of a few key strokes. Companies need to invest time, energy, and funding into reputation management.

Over the next few blogs we will take a look at the top five key factors in reputation management. First we will look at media monitoring and analysis.

Media Analysis provides your company with comprehensive, real time (daily, weekly or monthly) analysis of all media coverage. The analysis details the reach and frequency of your earned media coverage and goes well beyond to give you diagnostic data on what messages are working and why. You need to quantify all your coverage in terms of:

• Tonality – the degree of positive, negative and neutral coverage
• Brand Messages – the quantity of exposure of your key brand messages in the marketplace
• Brand Counter Messages – the quantity of messages that are counter to your brand positioning in the marketplace
• Brand Attributes – quantifying the set of attributes that are associated with your brand, both desirable and undesirable
• Competitor Coverage – the quantity, tonality and brand quality of your key competitors’ coverage

Media Analysis provides you with real time diagnostic information on the impressions that are being made with your corporation, brand or products. This allows you to be proactive and design communications strategies to capitalize on the messaging that is having the strongest effect on your brand and to actively change impressions of coverage that may be damaging your brand.

You need to find a group that delivers easy to understand graphic summary format (even if you have millions of impressions being formed in the marketplace) so you don’t have to weed through thousands of clippings and try to discern the patterns buried in those reports. Media Analysis does the legwork, quantifies the data and delivers the insight to allow you to make smart, real-time strategic decisions on the critical messages that need to be communicated to the marketplace.

There are several good groups out there that can provide such information. But the key to working with these groups is to have a project manager trained in Media Anaylsis to lead this effort. We team with Critical Mention and VOCUS PR. Our clients have found that this trifeccta of project mangement, research and real-time data has been extremely effective as they craft thier messages and brand.

If you’re interested in learning more please give us a call or respond to this blog. Our next blog will feature Step Two in reputation management. We look forward to sharing the information with you.