The process can be overwhelming. It’s hard to differentiate between the advantages and disadvantages of all the options. And while the platforms for gathering metrics are many and vary widely, when all is said and done, you have to pick the solution that works best for your company.

Asking the right questions (of yourself and of the provider) can help you avoid the headache of being in a service agreement that doesn’t suit your business.

Here are 5 pitfalls that can be easily avoided:

1. Short-sighted purchasing decision

Before you engage service providers, it’s important to do a bit of a self-audit. Ask yourself: “Are my requirements now the same requirements I’ll have five years from now?” What if something controversial happens in your industry? Can the platform grow with your constantly-changing business?

2. I have to be at my desk to manage my portal

Is it important to you to know when something’s happened even if you’re not at your desk? Ask the service provider how their solution supports a travelling practitioner. Maybe you want real-time alerts sent to your smartphone. Does the provider offer that as an option?

3. Unexpected transactional fees

Budget certainty is important to many businesses. How important is it to your business? After the implementation costs, what other fees might be incurred? This one’s like getting locked in a cell phone service contract where you signed up for a $45/month plan but your bill always comes in at $75/month.

4. Having to pay for extra searches

Change is inevitable and flexibility in your search terms is paramount. Things may seem quiet right now, but maybe you have a product launch in a few months. Would the number of search terms you purchased be enough to monitor an influx in chatter? Does the provider offer unlimited search terms? If not, what will those extra ones cost?

5. I can’t preview my clips before purchasing them

In the end, engagement is usually what you’re trying to measure. Numbers can help tell the story, but the difference is in how your audiences are talking about you. If you’re tracking an issue, wouldn’t it be nice to preview some of the content so you can decide whether or not it’s worth including in your analysis? Ask the provider if they allow clips to be previewed before you purchase them.

If you don’t ask, you don’t get. Before you sign a service agreement, make sure you’re evaluating the provider from all angles. There’s a lot to take into account but you can avoid these pitfalls by asking the right questions.

What would you add?

Your PR department has been collecting clips for your company for a while and you’ve even managed to come up with some metrics to trend for tone. But how do you know you’re capturing all the coverage that’s meaningful to your business? How many sources do you examine?

Have you ever really considered the cost of doing this kind of thing manually?

We did.

Made a few assumptions, adjusted for inflation, and voila! We figured out what a North American company spends on average per year on monitoring its media coverage. When trying to justify a monitoring service, consider these figures.

How much time would it take to compile a clipbook manually? This depends on the size of the company but, on a regular day (no issue to be managed or crisis to quell), let’s assume (if you’ve had your morning coffee)…it takes:

• ~ 2 hours every morning to scan the news sites, broadcast sites, video sites, RSS feeds, and collect news clips
• ~ 1 hour to manually generate a clipbook
• ~ 1 hour converting the information into manipulate-able data…if you’re an Excel wiz
• A few hours for tone analysis and reporting brings you to your full 8-hour work day

Some days will be worse than others. You might be sluggish because it’s a Monday or maybe your company recently released its earnings and there are a higher volume of mentions.

Now let’s talk money. According to the American Bureau of Labor Statistics website, in 2010, the hourly mean wage for a Public Relations Specialist is about $33.50 per hour. The Living in Canada website, in 2010, cites the average wage for a Public Relations professional working in Toronto at about $25.00 per hour. Landing somewhere in the middle, we’ll use $29.00 per hour as our yardstick wage.

Let’s say that he/she spends about 95% of their time working on media monitoring-related things. So, based on a 40-hour work week, your company pays about $1,000.00 per week toward manual media monitoring – which rings you in at about $52,000.00 per year.

Now, if you’re a larger company, you could be paying 2 or 3 staff members to share that work. Or consider if your PR pro is at the higher end of the pay scale and makes closer to $40.00 per hour – now it’s costing your company about $80,000 yearly.

When you consider that your company pays somewhere between $50,000 and $80,000 annually on manual media monitoring, it might be time to consider a full-service provider.

If you’re still not sure of the difference between each type of media, here’s a bit of a breakdown:

What you pay for. This includes paid advertisements, TV spots, radio spots, news releases (you paid for distribution and you own the content), web banners, paid searches, etc. This type of media is often targeted at new markets or “strangers”.

What you own. This includes your corporate website, microsites (your Twitter account, for example), your company’s Facebook page, branded collateral, a live event you put on for clients, etc. This is often targeted at current and future customers.

What you earn: This includes focused social media content (retweets, for example), organic blog posts (this means a blogger talks about your company or product without incentive), videos, cover stories, etc. This is often targeted at existing and potential brand advocates or fans.

In a way, none of the media you garner is free. The planning and management of the campaign itself could be labour intensive and costly. And, more often than not, you’ve paid for a conversation starter (beware: you might get in to hot water if you try to buy the entire conversation).

The advantage to paid and owned media is that mentions are more predictable. You control the owned outlets, and you likely produced the content you’ve bought. It’s the aftermath of that campaign initiation – the earned media – that comes littered with nuances and subtleties. This is likely because earned media is often based on trust. Journalists and bloggers are often hesitant to talk kindly about a brand if they don’t fully believe in the cause. If they don’t trust your product, they won’t promote you. And, don’t forget, it doesn’t count as earned media if it’s incentive-based mentions (like sending a blogger a freebie to get them to talk kindly about your product).

It’s not always easy to differentiate between the different levels of media mentions. Especially when it comes to earned media. If you use a media monitoring service here are some first steps to take once you’ve performed your searches:

• Categorize your content: organize your clips based on paid, owned and earned.
• Clean it up: go through the earned media to make sure the “earned” really happened organically; that the mention happened without incentive or payment; re-categorize if necessary.
• Scrutinize: be sure that if you’ve categorized a clip as “earned” that it’s more than just a name drop – did the mention result from your campaign? Was the earned media positive or negative? Did that mention lead to more sharing? If not, does it make sense to keep it in the “earned” pile? Is it worth reporting on?

In the end, a solid campaign is built around successful engagement. No engagement, no sale. You’ll have to take time to monitor what’s being said about your brand. And the levels of engagement should be the focus.  Don’t forget some of that media can be negative. So be honest with yourself – knowing the true landscape will give you a better chance to improve.

Brent Carey, Director of Communications for Mattamy Homes tells us how their company uses MediaVantage to do just that.

Q: Why did Mattamy Homes start using MV?

We needed a solid foundation for our external communications strategy going forward – policies, monitoring, training and outreach. We knew we needed to start taking a more planned, deliberate approach, and that this needed to start with the essentials – getting a handle on the reach and perception of the Mattamy brand with key external audiences, as a lead-in to more proactive work down the road. In the end, it was an easy decision to start using MediaVantage to help us do that.

Q: How do you use the MV suite daily, weekly and quarterly?

On a daily basis, we monitor references to the Mattamy brand and our competitors, to see if there are any issues or emerging trends that we need to watch or respond to.

Weekly, we generate clipbooks of company and competitor information for our Senior Management Team. We add our own commentary and post the results to the company intranet.

Quarterly, we use MediaVantage to produce detailed metrics reports and trends for tone over time. We also track the sources of our coverage.

Q: What’s been your experience with MV services and support?

The training and setup was perfect. The staff was very, very helpful. If I have questions, they’re always answered right away. I really have nothing but great things to say about the service and support.

Q: How does using MV help your business?

As I enter my budgeting phase, I need to answer: “What does it enable us to do?”

Because we use MediaVantage, we now know how our brand is perceived in mainstream media and in social media. It has helped us move from a reactive, ‘no comment’ organization to one that is starting to engage our audiences with tailored communications.

Brent says MediaVantage helped their team put in place a foundation to be able to move forward strategically. And when asked if Mattamy Homes has considered alternate solutions to CNW’s MediaVantage suite, Brent responded: “I didn’t even think of anyone else.”

You know it’s bad. All signs are pointing to a corporate crisis.

Now’s not the time to lay blame. And until time travel’s perfected, it’s up to you – the PR pro – to help your organization weather the storm.  

You’re used to leading teams and guiding organizations down the right path. You try to keep a clear head about the whole thing but the office uproar is distracting.

To help you stay focused, here are some simple Dos and Don’ts to keep in mind when dealing with your crisis:

The last thing you want to do in the throes of a crisis is make things worse.

Remember to always refer to your crisis communications plan. But, if it gets lost in the chaos, you can fall back on these 5 reminders.

In January 2009, salmonella contamination at a peanut manufacturing plant was linked to nine deaths and 691 reported illnesses resulting in the largest food recall in North American history. The industry association, the American Peanut Council (APC), looked to Argyle Communications to help weather the storm.

Argyle used media relations and digital strategies to provide accurate information to consumers, preserve confidence in the U.S. peanut industry’s products and practices, and to develop an industry consensus for a post-crisis recovery strategy. With Argyle’s help, the American Peanut Council emerged from the crisis as a leading source on food safety.

On Monday, April 11, 2011, Argyle president Daniel Tisch and vice president Alison George shared the secrets of their successful crisis management campaign as part of the CPRS National webinar series. You can listen to the archived webcast on the CPRS website here.

CNW connected with Dan and Alison to ask them some questions about media relations and crisis communications:

Obviously, media relations played a big part in managing this crisis. As the messages and information changed, how did you ensure your spokespeople stayed on message?

“While training and preparation were very important, our client’s success flowed mainly from never forgetting the most important principle: food safety must be a food industry’s number one priority. It was critical to be completely aligned with messages coming from federal regulators, and later to be direct and honest in condemning the unconscionable actions of the manufacturer at the centre of the crisis.”

How important was it to track media coverage? How did these insights affect your plans?

“We tracked both mainstream and social media every day, since this was one of the first major recalls played out on the social web. We quickly realized that our target consumer was going online for information about food safety, so we had to watch that channel and use it to reach her. Monitoring also told us early that broadcast media were more likely to get the story wrong, leading us to deploy our dietician spokesperson on TV.

Monitoring also told us we were turning around the story. We tracked a rapid decline in inaccurate stories and a rapid growth in stories featuring our client’s messages. Tracking of social web coverage on peanut butter showed a coverage balance of 18% positive, 33% neutral, 49% negative in the first 30 days, exceeding our expectations given the seriousness of the situation.”

Of course, the program went on to win a CPRS National Award of Excellence, but what made it successful in your mind?

“The most important legacy of our program was the facilitation of an industry-wide consensus to review agricultural and manufacturing practices, enhance collaboration with the Food and Drug Administration, improve training and education at all levels, and reaffirm the American Peanut Council’s role in leading food safety initiatives. This provided important reassurance to consumers and propelled the industry not just to a recovery, but to a new record in sales.”

Is there anything you would have done differently?

“The major thing we would have done differently is being not just web-savvy – which we were – but also “web-ready.” We had to put a lot of online resources in place very quickly. With online and social media so much more advanced today than in 2009, it’s critical for all industries to have Internet tools ready for a crisis at any time.”

What key lessons or tips would you share based on your experience with this crisis?

1. Make sure you understand your client’s business, the policy and regulatory environment surrounding it, and the drivers of consumer attitudes and behaviour.
2. Know and anticipate the triggers of controversy.
3. Understand the decision-making process — both within the organization and within government and other stakeholders that could affect the outcome.
4. Build relationships with stakeholders early – not just when you need them.
5. Accept that you can’t control everything. Control what you say, and try to influence others with timely, accurate information – proactively and responsively.
6. Be web-savvy and web-ready.
7. If change is going to be thrust upon you, try to lead that change.

But listening is only half the battle. Reporting on and analyzing your monitoring results can help you detect trends, nip a crisis in the bud, or adjust your communication strategy on the fly.

The Canadian Air Transport Security Authority (CATSA) uses MediaVantage for monitoring and reporting. Here’s what Mathieu Larocque, CATSA’s Senior Advisor, External Communications, had to say about why reporting is crucial to their team:

“Monthly reports that we produce using MediaVantage are an integral part of our dashboard reporting approach. We use the information to evaluate and adjust both our proactive and reactive media relations strategies. They are also used more broadly to evaluate the work of our branch. The data generated by MediaVantage is incorporated in a larger dashboard that includes many other indicators. The reports are also used at the end of each proactive campaign to evaluate reach and the overall effectiveness of a specific campaign. Likewise, we also use the reporting function to analyze a particular situation or episode related to our operations.”

For more on how reporting on monitoring results can give you the intelligence to analyze why and when to adjust your strategic communication plans, download our white paper, Continuous Measurement and Analysis.

The French speaking community is an important audience for Canadian organizations and inter-listed US companies. Now, even if you don’t speak French, you can understand how the market is responding to your brand online and in social media.

Here’s what Nicole Guillot, CNW’s Vice President of Product Management and Operations, had to say about the announcement:

For more on this announcement, check out our Social Media Release. And if you’re still scratching your head on what the heck sentiment analysis is all about, check out these recent posts:

• What the Heck is Sentiment Analysis Anyway?
• How public relations and corporate communications can leverage sentiment analysis

Analyst or Industry Relations teams are responsible for keeping their industry analysts up to date on their company’s strategy, products and services. The objective is to persuade analysts to review your company in the best positive light to end users of your product in their high-level industry research reports. Thus, for AR folk, it is important they keep tabs on which analysts are covering their industry – to ensure that they are focusing their relationship building efforts on the right people!

Online and social media monitoring, together with sentiment analysis, can help AR professionals by giving them the tools to a) identify which market research reports and research analysts are covering their space, and b) which of the above reflect positive and negative sentiment about their company and its competitors.

By having media monitoring searches for key phrases, research firm names, job titles and authors (analyst names), Analyst Relations pros can monitor and influence analyst coverage.

I use MediaVantage to monitor analyst research trends within the industries of relevance to us: media intelligence, public relations management, customer intelligence software By regularly reviewing the content that my saved keyword searches bring in, I’m able to keep up to date with the latest research reports my key analysts are publishing and the sentiment of the coverage the companies included in these reports are receiving.

All of this intelligence helps guide the Product Development roadmap, and further solidifies the foundation of our relationship with our analyst friends. As an analyst relations professional how do you use sentiment analysis to be more effective in your role? Please comment!

The potential effect a crisis can have on your stock price

This is our second post on how professional communicators can benefit from sentiment analysis. Last week we looked at public relations and today we’ll dig in to IR.

A key challenge for investor relations teams is gaining insight into the sentiment of the investment community. Fortunately with social media and social networks, understanding how your investors and potential investors are feeling on any given day is now possible.

Consider this. You’re in IR and looking to release your quarterly earnings statement. Prior to online monitoring and analysis tools, you would be more or less putting your release on the wire with a less than comprehensive understanding of what frame of mind your audience was in, let alone how your message will be received. Scary thought when your bottom line is showing.

Online media monitoring gives IR professionals the ability to explore and develop a greater understanding of the general attitudes of their investors, gaining insight into the tone of online and social media coverage.

Using an aggregator with automated sentiment analysis like MediaVantage, IR teams can track financial blogs, investor forums, websites and their investor community on Twitter, giving the department the advantage of identifying (and riding) the sentiment of investors. Automated platforms can significantly assist in filtering out the noise via tonality filters (among others) that investor relations pros can leverage directly on their media coverage dashboard.

Financial blogs, and investor bloggers are often the source of lengthy candid reviews, possibly more representative of the general market as they are often written by active investors. Investor relations practitioners can use this information to get a better handle on the sentiment or attitudes of investors and influencers within the stock trade industry.

As an investor relations professional, how do you use sentiment analysis to be more effective in your role? Please comment!

Next week I’ll look at how Analyst Relations can benefit from sentiment analysis.