Enterprise brands like Walmart receive millions of media mentions a day. However, just a small subsection of this information is actually useful to enterprises. Executives don’t care about mentions from sites like the “People of Walmart” — they want quick, actionable insights around their brand. The challenge is sorting through all these messages to find the nuggets of information that can be used to measure brand issues reputation, awareness and preference.

This is where using Big Data and boolean search terms can help communications professionals. Powerful cloud computing, combined with Artificial Intelligence, can surface relevant content to analysts, rejecting anything that isn’t relevant to your brand. Teams can then use insights gained to drive better, well informed strategy.

Here are three tips to get the most from your media data:

Link metrics to business goals

The best way to ensure that only relevant data is collected is by establishing metrics that track the performance of overall business goals.

These goals can vary dramatically from company to company. For example, an electronics manufacturer may want to increase brand awareness for their new phone in Europe, while a fast food chain may want to improve customer satisfaction for their burger.

These are two very different goals, so both require different metrics to measure performance. The manufacturer looking to increase sales in Europe would want to measure mentions for their phone in European countries, while the fast food chain trying to make tastier burgers would want to track the change in sentiment for their burger, as well as the words and hashtags used in association with the product. By aligning metrics to business goals, you can ensure that you have the right data.

Centralize your data

Every channel has its own unique characteristics — LinkedIn is professional; news, while traditionally impartial and factual, becomes opinionated when people share articles on Twitter; and TV segments tend not to be as deep as long-form articles. Traditionally, enterprises have used tools to monitor channels individually, providing only a segment of the full picture, often with duplicate datasets as different departments use disparate tools to track the same channel. Viewing data from every channel in one location provides a holistic view of information that can generate more accurate insights — like which channels your target audience predominantly uses, where they are located and how they talk about your company — and provides the adde bonus of eliminating duplicate datasets.

Visualize the Data

Communications professionals aren’t data analysts — their expertise lies in writing, verbal communication and strategic planning. The easiest way to share insights from millions of media mentions is through visualizations. What are the keywords associated with your product? Where is the conversation around your brand occurring? The answers are much easier to see when presented in a Word Cloud or on a map showing mentions by location. With one glance a Chief Communications Officer can see brand recognition within key target markets and overall sentiment for major products.

 

Media data holds so much information it can becoming overwhelming, especially for professionals without a background in data science. However, tying metrics to business goals allows you to have a clear focus on what to look for.

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