Brand reputation is one of the most important assets of any company. A strong one elevates the market value of an organization by 2.5 times when compared to the rest of the market, while a hit to a company’s reputation can leave sales reeling for years to come. While most companies understand its importance, most lack a way to continuously measure the performance of their brand. Luckily, media data can act as a real-time focus group to measure brand reputation. Here’s how you can leverage this important dataset.

Only collect data that’s important to your brand

While it may be tempting to collect every bit of data around your brand, it’s actually not that useful. The sheer volume becomes overwhelming and it becomes hard to sift through the data to find any real insights. For example, Walmart does not care about the “People of Walmart,” but does care about mentions of the brand associated with customer service. It’s a good idea to work out the conversations that aren’t relevant to your brand and create parameters so that this information isn’t captured in the future. This way, you’re left with what’s actually important and can start digging into the data that’s actually important to your brand.

With the right parameters in place, you can start using media data to detect the early signs of a crisis, identify key influencers within relevant conversations and measure your brand against the competition.

Measure your brand traits

Every brand has certain ideals that are used to separate their company from the competition. Whole Foods wants to sell “the high quality natural and organic foods,” while Google aims to “focus on the user and all else will follow.” Every company has their own unique set of values, but all tend to fall under a combination of the following categories: performance, products and services, leadership, workplace, governance, innovation and citizenship.

Despite every company’s brand values differing so much, there is a way to universally measure them in a way that makes them comparable. By creating search queries around each brand trait, media data can measure the impact and resonance of each within the public.

Measure your share of voice against competitors

Media data also offers a good look at the reputations of competitors and consumers opinions of them. Every company wants to be known as a thought leader within their space. One way to calculate their effectiveness is to look at all the conversations within an industry and measure the number of times each competitor is mentioned, as well as looking for how they are mentioned — are they mentioned positively, considered a thought leader or being associated with a particular trait? It’s also worthwhile determining the influencers who promote competing brands to see the impact they have on competitors reputations.

While brand reputation has become more complicated to measure in recent years due to the number of mentions and stakeholders being dramatically increased, there are now more insights for brands around their reputation in media data than there have ever been. Brands just need to understand how to leverage this dataset properly.

If you’d like to learn more, download our white paper: Building and Protecting the Health of Today’s Purpose-Driven Brands.