As outlined in part 1, online newsrooms are an essential tool in helping you to engage better with your key audiences, increase your exposure, and protect your brand’s reputation.

As Sam Phillips explained in his post, it is now essential for corporate communication teams to be able to demonstrate their value. Setting up and measuring key performance indicators (KPI’s) has become fundamental to evaluating the performance of an online newsroom and proving its success and presenting its value at director level.

1. Focus on what matters

First of all, it is important to start with your objectives in mind when establishing your KPI’s. You may be looking to increase the number of repeat visits or sign-ups to your corporate communications via the newsroom.

2. Use analytics to monitor your traffic

Treat your newsroom like a corporate website and implement an analytics solution to allow you to analyse traffic and user behaviour.  This is a great way of providing you with insight so that you can understand how people get to your site and what content they like. Some basic KPI’s are listed below:

• Number of visits
• Number of unique visits
• Average time spent
• Sources of traffic i.e. search engines, blog, social media

Google Analytics is a good free solution that can be used.

3. Evaluate your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Understanding how your newsroom is performing in the major search engines allows you to ensure your optimisation work is paying off.  If you’re not showing within the top 20 results, the chances are you could be missing out on lots of relevant traffic.

Some basic SEO KPI’s:

1. Number of pages indexed – this allows you to understand how easy it has been for the search engines to read and index your content
2. Number of external links – this allows you to assess how popular your content has been as people are linking to it. It’s also a really important factor when it comes to gaining a high ranking in Google
3. The range of keywords driving traffic to your site – if you’re only being found for brand related terms then you could be missing out on a ton of traffic for keywords which relate to your products or services

If you’re providing multimedia content on your newsroom you should also look at the ranking of your assets on the search engines.

Use “link:www.yourdomain.com” within Google or Yahoo to assess link popularity, or site: www.yourdomain.com to analyse the number of pages indexed.  Tip: Yahoo is a bit more transparent when it comes to disclosing the actual volumes. 

4. Measure through Social Media

If you have prominent links/feeds from your social media channels within your newsroom, on a basic level you should be monitoring the number of people who ‘like’ you on Facebook and the number of followers you have on Twitter.

Another simple way to use social media is to incorporate Facebook “Like” and Twitter “Re-Tweet” buttons. They automatically count the number of interactions and will allow you to easily identify your most popular stories.

5. Access full engagement reports

Taking it a step further, an online newsroom combined with a communication management platform will provide you with much richer reporting. This powerful combination will track engagements, such as:

- Number of visits per release
- Number of interactions with each of your assets (e.g. watched video, downloaded a document)
- Number of media requests

In effect, it will allow you to understand the success of each of your releases and assets.

Adding login access to your newsroom will make you aware of each individual visitor, allowing you to track the success of your communications based on your key contacts.

6. Evaluate the impact in the media

Good monitoring and evaluation tools allow you to analyse your offline and online coverage and link it to each of your releases. As stated in the Barcelona Principles, “measuring the effect on outcomes is preferred to measuring outputs.”

Those tools can provide you with an in depth breakdown of those effects:

• Your coverage by release
• The tonality of your coverage per release (positive, neutral or negative)
• Evaluation of the coverage that is linked to your newsroom
• Share of voice amongst your competitors

Such a solution will let you understand the success of each of your stories and the impact that your newsroom has on your coverage.

These best practices should allow you to evaluate what has been popular and why so you can refine your future communications. You will also be able to demonstrate the newsroom’s overall success and Return on Investment.

With an ever-changing media landscape and the rise of social media, the need to be able to react quickly is greater than ever before. Online newsrooms have become an essential tool to allow brands to better manage relationships with the media, key stakeholders, the general public and therefore the company’s reputation. Having developed newsrooms for a large number of leading brands, I would like to share some best practices I have identified over the last few years. These guidelines will help you to increase your visibility online and make sure that your newsroom becomes a valued source of information for your target audience.

1. Identify your key audiences

Your online newsroom must be able to cater for a varied audience.  Increasingly, newsrooms are accessed by journalists, stakeholders and consumers alike so you need to have content readily available for each audience member.

2. Branding

The look and feel of the newsroom is important and must be considered carefully. It needs to be authentic and consistent to your brand and your main company website, using the same layout, fonts and headers.

3. Make your newsroom visible

• First of all, I highly recommend that the newsroom sits seamlessly within the main company website. Otherwise make sure that your company site has a clear link to your newsroom.
• Publish multimedia content – adding images, videos and other documents will help SEO and transform your newsroom to a valued source of information.
• Adding email, social media share and RSS feeds functionalities is good way to let your audience disseminate your stories and assets for you.
• Tagging all of your newsworthy content with key words is a great way of increasing the visibility to search engines.

4. Fresh content

Update your newsroom regularly to make it sticky.  Refreshing your content frequently will generate regular visitors and help SEO.

5. Clearly laid out and easy to navigate

• Include a simple and advanced search functionality to allow your audience to easily find the information they are looking for.
• Classify your releases by date and by category (if relevant).
• Provide high and low resolution images that are easily downloadable.
• Supply embed codes for your videos.
• Allow your audience to enter their email address to receive a newsletter about your latest news.

6. Relevance is key

It is essential to provide information that is relevant to your audience. You should then monitor the most popular stories and assets to refine your communications.

A good way to access more data while providing more relevant content is by giving your visitors the opportunity to create an online profile within your newsroom. During the registration process you can ask them to select their preferences. This will allow you to reach them with targeted emails and even tailor the information that they see within your newsroom (when logged in).

7. Keep the engagement high

• Wherever possible, make sure your stories are visually stimulating by including images, videos and other digital assets.
• Enable your audience to react to your stories by adding some “comment” boxes under your articles.
• Include some social media feeds to allow your audience to access a larger source of your information.

8. Regain the control of your communications

I would strongly recommend using some sort of CMS (content management system) which lets you take control of updating the content on your media centre, without the help of any IT department.

Some more advanced tools can also allow you create, distribute and publish your stories all in one simple platform.

These tools are very valuable. They will help you to increase your reactivity, achieve higher quality reporting and significantly streamline your processes.

PR and corporate communications teams are required to be more and more accountable for their activities. A good online newsroom can allow them to measure and report on the impact of their communications in terms of online metrics and coverage.

This type of information enables them to refine and improve future communications.

The second part of this blog will outline how you can measure the success of your online newsroom.

In 2005, the UK’s largest PR firm, Bell Pottinger, published an excellent whitepaper on The Future of Public Relations, based on interviews with CEOs and Communications Directors from some of the UK’s biggest organisations.

It is worth looking back to see how – if at all – the issues and concerns of five years ago have been addressed and whether those issues will continue to dominate the PR landscape of the future.

PR needs radars rather than loud-hailers

One of the key themes of the original report was that public relations has become much more difficult at an operational level.  Five years on, those operational issues have only intensified and in the future, organisations can expect more of the same. The key drivers of this situation are unlikely to change either – smaller teams of people who will be tasked with managing more information and relationships with fewer resources.

In 2005, the view of senior communications directors was that PR practitioners were particularly alive to the notion that they must use “radars rather than loud-hailers” to communicate – the emphasis shifting from talking and transmitting to listening and receiving.

In the intervening years, new tools have been developed to overcome the challenge of listening to huge volumes of brand conversations in the public domain and to speedily and appropriately respond to them.  For example, the plethora of sentiment analysis tools currently flooding the market is indicative of the demand from organisations to better understand what people feel towards them. However, the promise of this technology has largely not met customer expectation. More specifically, there is much skepticism about whether technology can truly automate the process of analysing large volumes of content to produce an accurate picture of sentiment. Nevertheless, the demand remains – and surely a technological breakthrough in this area can’t be long off.

Who said what from where

But sentiment analysis is not the only area that will have a large part to play in the future of PR. As the original Bell Pottinger report pointed out: “New technology, the fragmentation of delivery through complex digital media channels, the problems of knowing who is saying what – and where they are getting it from – and the increased reputational risks created by speed and ease of access to public audiences, make it extremely difficult for Communications Directors to keep on top of what is “out there”.”

The biggest change from five years ago has been the incredible growth in social networks and the volume of content that organisations now need to monitor. What has clearly changed from five years ago is the increasing development of “digital listening posts” to help organisations deal with this. But even though specific tools and services have emerged to address individual aspects of the communications lifecycle (digital press release distribution, etc), the challenge today and over the next few years will be meeting the demand from organisations to smoothly integrate these currently disjointed activities.

Consistency of brand messaging

Another key challenge facing organisations then – and now – is how to achieve consistency of messaging across so many channels. As senior communications directors opined at the time “There is no longer the option of targeting one audience in isolation – the internet has put stakeholders in touch with each other and we face a much better networked set of stakeholders than ever before. Communications planning simply has to take this into account. At the same time, ‘shot-gun messaging’ is not an option; we face a growing need for ‘segmentation’ and tailoring of messaging if we want to achieve cut-through in the information age.”

And yet, if “shot-gun messaging” is not an option, why do so many organisations still employ this tactic?  This is surprising given that the technology to allow for the “narrowcasting” of information has definitely improved in the last five years.  In terms of the press specifically, the online pressroom technology of today is vastly superior to that of a decade ago. The ability to deliver quickly and cost effectively a wide variety of multimedia content in a targeted manner is available now. Whereas in the past this might have seemed a “nice to have” feature, this will surely become an essential part of any successful communications department in the future.

Technology has a key role to play

Finally, the view of senior communications directors in 2005 was that “Intelligence, intuition and research must be the key to tracking the chaotic and fragmented world of communications. This requires investment. Is this happening on any meaningful scale? Our view is that it is not.”

Anecdotally, things have improved in this area since 2005 – although whether they have reached a “meaningful scale” is a moot point.  The future of PR almost certainly involves greater investment in technology to help organisations gain greater insight into the feelings and behaviours of key stakeholder groups – as well as being able to respond to this intelligence with highly targeted and engaging content.

If anything has changed in five years, it is that a greater array of tools have become available to help PR and communications teams “read the world” and to help them more effectively communicate to all relevant stakeholders. Even if investment still hasn’t reached the “meaningful scale” referred to previously, the indications are – at least in this area – that things are moving in the right direction. Nevertheless, operational complexity is here to stay – those communications directors who will sleep easiest at night are those that are preparing to deal with those future scenarios today.

Sam

connect with me on Twitter @samphill

While it’s vital to create good digital listening posts, there’s little point in knowing what’s going on if you don’t have the means to respond and engage effectively in the new landscape. I call this ‘Engaged Listening’.

Market-leading companies are changing the way they communicate, putting far more effort into creating dynamic, discoverable content that is easy to digest and propagate. More about this in my up-coming ‘Newsroom of the Future’ post. In the meantime, here are some examples of companies putting out news in an engaging media-rich format:

• Motorola
• Sony
• VisitBritain

Integrated platforms

There is a trend among leading bluechip companies towards integrated digital platforms. That is, integrating the content-creation tools into the listening tools. This allows everything to be measured and joined-up.

By consolidating content, publication, relationships and results into one Integrated Platform, it not only increases the efficiency of the team’s ability to listen and engage, it also uses measurement as an integral part of our day-to-day activity. Take this scenario;

An organisation responds to an insight by building and deploying some key content.  The content is then published and distributed through the same platform.   The organisation then uses the same platform to measure all parts of the engagement cycle, not just the end results.

An integrated digital listening platform will measure the number of emails read, images downloaded and links clicked on. In turn, this will get fed back into the CRM database so that we know what lights the fire of our key stakeholders and influencers. Coverage will similarly be linked back to the same database, giving us vital intelligence about interest areas. All of this increases the organisation’s intelligence and improves future targeting accuracy.

Centralised knowledge

Yes, it is possible to do this with separate tools. But separate tools create separate knowledge pools and most organisations now are working hard to centralise and share knowledge, ideas and creativity.

The explosion of data that we are all experiencing, while sometimes intoxicating, causes most of us organisational issues. What do we look at? What don’t we look at? We have to find ways of simplifying our data view and cutting out the chaff.

Large teams, often spread across different locations, also need central repositories where key content, relationships and intelligence can be housed in one place to ensure consistency of message, effective distribution of media assets and up-to-the-minute awareness of brand reputation.

Finally, all of this has to happen fast because the Engaged Web is constantly mutating and evolving. Joined up platforms create joined-up thinking that’s quicker than the step-by-step approach.

Sam

Two capital cities played host to two major PR and communications events in June – both of which have far reaching implications for the industry.

Sweden was the venue for The World Public Relations Forum where the Stockholm Accords were unveiled. Their stated aim is “to articulate and establish the role of public relations within a fast-evolving digital and value-network society.”

In Barcelona, the world’s experts in research came together under the umbrella of AMEC to agree a set of measurement and evaluation fundamentals called the Barcelona Principles.

The unspoken premise behind both of these two initiatives is that the PR and communications sector has to make a bigger effort in demonstrating its value to business and society at large and to lay claim to a greater involvement in organisational success.

At the heart of the Accords is the notion of a “communicative organisation”.  It suggests that organisations that put more effort into communicating with stakeholders and acting rapidly to feedback are those most likely to succeed. More ambitiously, the Accords suggest that PR should be involved not only in its traditional communication role – to both internal and external audiences – but should play a part in other issues such as sustainability, management and governance.

The role of technology

Perhaps understandably, the Stockholm Accords make little reference to how the industry is to achieve this specifically.  But there can be no doubt that technology must have a role to play in surmounting some of the big challenges ahead.

For example, in terms of communicating with a key external stakeholder group – the media – online media centres have come a long way since they first made their appearance over 15 years ago. Whereas early forms of online media centre acted as little more than glorified press release archives, the modern day media centre allows communications departments  to rapidly provide highly targeted content to relevant media contacts while at the same reducing the overhead traditionally required to maintain brand and message consistency.

Another  key component of the Accords is the desire to support a “listening culture”.  The biggest challenge to adopting this approach in recent years has been the rise of social media in the shape of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn (that said, not every senior corporate communications director is convinced about this – Rolls-Royce’s Peter Morgan being the most recent high profile dissenter).

However, there are areas where technology has not yet delivered in terms of aiding the PR industry’s mission to demonstrate more value. Automated sentiment analysis perhaps  being the most obvious example of where the promise and the reality have failed to match.

Measuring outcomes, not outputs

Ultimately, what links online media centres, automated sentiment analysis, social media and research is the overriding need to measure and evaluate PR investment. And to do so far more rigorously than in the past. The Stockholm Accords and the Barcelona Principles are both in agreement on this point. The Barcelona Principles are all about abandoning the use of AVE’s as a way of measuring the value of PR and instead, focussing on outcomes rather than outputs.  As the Accords state: “Evaluation implies the prevalent use of qualitative tools while measurement implies a prevalent use of quantitative tools. The new frontier, as is happening for other management functions, relies in “quantilitative” tools which integrate both evaluation and measurement.”

Aside from the rather ugly coinage of “quantilitative”, this raises the biggest question. How is the PR profession to demonstrate its value to the organisation’s multiple stakeholders now and in the future?  There is no shortage of technology and tools available to address specific parts of the problem. However, those that focus on integrating technology to address all aspects of internal and external communication must surely have a head start in creating the organisational success the industry so craves.

Sam

This is the third and final part in my Engaged Web series of blog posts.  If you missed the previous posts, you can access them using the links below;

Part I: The Engaged Web, Part II: Speed is the New Currency

3 key challenges

There are 3 key challenges which organizations face when measuring engaged two-way media:

1. Sentiment is fluid and can change rapidly online. What begins as positive can change to negative and even back to positive. In other words, it evolves. It’s crucial, therefore, to look at trends and movement rather than just volume.
2. Defining what is positive or negative is based upon your point of view. What good for one organisation is not necessarily good for another. Perspective is paramount.
3. The engaged web has its own language. The syntax used on Facebook and Twitter is very different to that of conventional prose. Think hash tags, emoticons etc.

In my view, the measurement industry needs to move from looking at ‘what has happened’ to ‘why it has happened’. But, as we see above, there remain some real challenges.  Effectively measuring reputation requires measuring all reputational influence.  We must measure traditional media (newspapers, magazines etc) alongside the Facebooks and Twitters of the world. If we don’t, we will fail to understand trends and patterns and establish the true connections.

The Case for Automated Sentiment Analysis

So how does an organisation know at the right time what is being said about it across tens or hundreds of thousands of media channels? It simply cannot be achieved quickly enough (let alone cost-effectively) with human evaluation methodologies. This is why more and more companies are turning to automated sentiment analysis.

Sentiment analysis engines have traditionally used a dictionary-based approach to measuring and identifying sentiment.  This method needs a dictionary of at least 250,000 words to be anywhere near effective.  It also means that it must be constantly updated with new words if it is to stay on top of the latest linguistic nuances.

However, superior tools are now being developed which operate around rule-based methodologies that do not use dictionaries, but instead analyze grammar and context.  This allows them to have a far greater level of language independence plus the ability to cope with slang and the other syntax challenges previously mentioned.  Tools which use this approach also have the ability to self learn and automatically adapt to language change as it happens which is critical when measuring the constantly-evolving engaged web.

Over the years, automated sentiment analysis has had a few false horizons and there is, quite justifiably, cynicism from some as to its efficacy. But this is now being cracked. Huge gains are being made in accuracy, speed and usability.  As this develops, the world will become divided into those who great reputation management software and those who don’t.  There will be clear winners and losers. The winners will be using sentiment analysis platforms to elevate the human role to high level analysis and decision making, while those who don’t will be left drowning in thousands of pages of posts and tweets, wondering where it all went wrong.

Sam

The engaged web is organic and fluid, meaning that it changes rapidly.  What was a positive comment can turn into a negative one within minutes and the social community expects rapid response.

Take the below as an example of just how quickly things can change.

During the recent UK election, the Labour party released this campaign poster depicting David Cameron as the Ashes to Ashes character DCI Jean Hunt with the following tagline.

Less than 24hrs later, the Conservatives had turned it round with the following alternative tagline.

Note the quip “idea kindly donated by the Labour Party”.

Organisations which spot things early and have the ability to respond quickly and effectively will gain significant competitive advantage.

The days of rear view mirror reporting are gone.  Receiving a quarterly evaluation report, no matter how pretty and intelligently assembled it is, has limited value in today’s connected world because it will be too late to do anything about the information contained in the report by the time you receive it.

There are some really good examples of how some companies have lost out due to the speed of their response.  Earlier this year, a freelance Paperchase illustrator who created the Hidden Eloise character, noticed that some of her work was being used without her permission.  Having attempted, without success, to contact Paperchase, to ask for royalties or to issue a desist notice, she began tweeting about the incident.  This resulted in coverage in The Independent and the Channel 4 News.  This done untold damage to the image of Paperchase right before one of the busiest times of the year, Valentine’s day.Read the article in The Independent here.

Consider on the other hand, Sony Playstation’s agility in handling its console woes earlier this year.  Some consumers were left unable to use their Playstation 3 consoles after their systems mistakenly calculated that 2010 was a leap year.  Bloggers were the first to identify this issue and while Tokyo investigated it, they put up holding statements as well as the eventual solution to the problem on Twitter.  Although they certainly experienced reputational damage, it could have been much worse than it was, all but for the speed and methodology of Sony’s reaction.

Real time ‘v’ right time analytics

The ability to have good digital listening posts that allow us to see true meaning when it most empowers good decision making, means we need to be able to analyse information in real time but we need to get the full picture at the right time.  If we don’t, we run a real risk of knee jerk reaction tactics.  You wouldn’t want to alter the corporate strategy in reaction to a Twitter storm which was later to prove inconsequential.

Staying with the games console industry as an example, if say Nintendo were to spot some negative comments around the pricing of one of its systems, it may be inclined to reduce its pricing.  However, if it notices that there is an overall pressure on pricing throughout the industry, including its competitors, its reaction is likely to be very different.  Hundreds of millions of pounds are likely to be at stake on these kinds of business decisions.

The measurement industry is therefore evolving from a ‘what has happened’ industry to a ‘why it has happened’ industry, but there remain some real challenges.  In part three in my Engaged Web series, I outline just what these challenges are.

Sam

Since World Cup fever took hold of the Glide office last week (dream teams have been chosen, sweepstake bets have been placed and the plasma screen has been wheeled into reception) we’ve been wondering how the work forces of the UK will be taking in the games being played during the 9-5.  So, we decided to use our market research tool, GlideInsight to tap into the psyche of the football loving 9-5’ers in the UK, Germany and France to find out who’d be playing by the rules and who would be bending them slightly.  We received over 3000 responses within 24 hours, find out the results below.

The majority of UK respondents (23.55%)* said that their place of work would be “showing the games in the office”.  For those not so fortunate, the old “working from home” line was being wheeled out by 19.20% of you with the other popular options included “on the radio at work” (18.11%) and “online at work” (14.49%) so look out for your office internet slowing down a certain points throughout the day.

The most popular disingenuous option for the UK was to “take a sick day”.  However, only 5.43% of our respondents opted for this.  It would seem that the companies who will allow their workers to watch the games during working hours will benefit most.

We asked our panels in France & Germany the same questions.  In France, watching “online at work” was the number one response at 28.44% “showing the games in the office” coming in at number four with 11.93% a lot of faith in Domenech’s troops it would seem).  In Germany, listening to games “on the radio at work” is the favoured option at 26.58% with “showing the games in the office” coming in at number 3 with 15.82%.

The answers from each region are ranked below.

France

1.    online at work
2.    on the radio at work
3.    working from home
4.    work are showing them
5.    holiday time
6.    meetings
7.    parental leave
8.    sick time

Germany

1.    on the radio at work
2.    online at work
3.    work are showing them
4.    working from home
5.    holiday time
6.    parental leave
7.    meetings
8.    sick time

UK

1.    work are showing them
2.    working from home
3.    on the radio at work
4.    online at work
5.    holiday time
6.    sick time
7.    meetings
8.    parental leave

*We surveyed 3020 people for this research; 1009 from the UK, 1005 from Germany and 1006 from France.  The results have been extrapolated from the 1727 respondents who liked football.  All results were returned within 24 hours.

So,  after our first round of research showed that there was quite some work for the various parties and their leaders to do to win over the undecided voting public, we decided to ask who came out on top after the first UK televised election debate.

As the post debate polls suggested, it seems that Liberal Democrats leader Nick Clegg had the most success in swaying the undecided. Unsurprising I thought as he seemingly did everything out of the guide to public speaking – looking directly down the camera, remembering the names of those who asked a question and by separating himself from the other main parties, he gave the public a reason to remember him by.

Back to the results.  Looking at the research we ran on the 13^th of April, the Liberal Democrats have increased their popularity among potential voters by  10.2%.  On the other hand,  Labour’s popularity has decreased 3.35% (I thought that it would have been much higher) with the popularity of the Conservatives decreasing by 4.83%.

However, it would seem that neither leader did quite enough to sway the majority of the voters as the undecided only dropped by a measly 1.8%.

So, there’s still work to be done as the next round of televised debating approaches.  Stay tuned to find out who will win the battle of ‘the undecided’.

Alex

Taking a break from our regular thoughts and musings on the goings on in the digital world, I’m delighted to announce that the Glide family has grown this week.  Shona, Tom and Alistair all welcomed new additions to their families this week – a first for Shona and Tom and a second for Alistair.

That just leaves Terri….come on baby Watts!

Emma