But it’s even more difficult for communications teams at large organizations and Fortune 500 companies – and that goes double (maybe even triple) for publicly traded firms, or companies with trendy yet easily confusable names like Apple, Box, Amazon or Alphabet.

That’s largely thanks to a perfect storm of factors, each working in tandem to ensure daily media monitoring for a large organization always has certain challenges, including:

• Heavy volumes: Large organizations typically get far more media and online mentions than do SMEs, with some organizations receiving thousands of global mentions per day
• Irrelevant results: Because many mentions are in passing or are not relevant, automated media monitoring without human curation typically produces inaccurate results
• An impatient C-suite: Executives and C-suite members at large organizations expect up-to-the-minute media monitoring results, but are almost always short on time

So what’s the best way for communications teams at large organizations to convey media monitoring results to the C-suite and executives?

The value of human-curated daily news briefs

Everyone who has ever been on a communications and PR team likely knows this feeling: your media monitoring provider or SaaS solution has missed an important story – maybe even a story that’s close to the leadership’s heart – and you’re bearing the brunt of your CEO’s wrath. It’s a difficult position to be placed in, but it’s also one that’s unfortunately far too common in the media monitoring world.

Human-curated daily executive news briefs, however, make PR and communications teams look good – and, by extension, make executives happier. That’s because:

• They summarize articles in an easy-to-scan format
• They’re curated by media experts deeply intimate with the nuances and details of your media monitoring program, weeding out irrelevant mentions and highlighting coverage that really matters
• They feature important articles hand-picked for relevancy, and delivered to stakeholder inboxes the moment a client needs them – whether it’s 4 p.m. or 4 a.m.
• They’re customized for your organization’s brand standards, and feature rich graphics and formatting to increase shareability
• They link articles with trending social media data, so executives can quickly pick out which campaigns or PR efforts produced the most value

The key to stakeholder engagement: Buffet-style customization

Large organizations who partner with a strong media monitoring provider can take these benefits even further, however. That’s because good executive media briefs should always have the flexibility to be completely customizable to whichever stakeholder it is sent.

A strong executive media brief, for example, should feature buffet-style content customization based on various categories such as company news, news on the company’s various brands, competitor news, trending industry issues and topics, and more. That way, when your CEO or CFO only wants to receive briefs mentioning company news, competitors, and industry news – but nothing else – it’s super easy for her to turn those taps on and off as needed simply by selecting or deselecting various topics right in the brief.

Creating effective executive news briefs

Fullintel offers three main types of executive news briefs, each one delivered daily at the time and frequency of your choosing:

• The Daily Digest. As its name implies, the Daily Digest is delivered every day and provides an executive overview of your organization’s most important news coverage as determined by your needs and goals, delivering brief article summaries, trending information, and other important details at a glance.
• The Media Coverage Report. Whereas Daily Digests are quick summaries, this is a more in-depth overview of an organization’s daily media mentions. It includes features and metadata such as article reach, the article’s original image, potential reach including all syndication, and any related stories that may have been published.
• The Media Impact Report. This is a comprehensive overview of your daily media coverage that also includes in-depth data and metrics, such as human-scored article sentiment, influencer shares, estimated social media reach and more.

Whichever size of organization you and your communications team work for, your media monitoring program will always have challenges – that’s just the nature of media monitoring and crisis monitoring. But these challenges grow exponentially when monitoring mentions of large organizations or public companies with gigantic public profiles, where the sheer number of mentions can overwhelm lesser teams and throw media monitoring programs into disarray. 

Timely, well-crafted, easy-to-read executive news briefs can make you look like a hero to your C-Suite and executive team.

See how Fullintel’s human-driven media monitoring and curation can make your PR and communications team look like bigger superheroes than they already are. Request a free customized executive news brief today.

Whether you’re looking for insight into your influencers, or an assessment around brand sentiment, the good news is that this isn’t the media monitoring of the past where you get a simple clipping report each morning. Media intelligence is a strategic business tool that provides valuable insight for everyone from the PR team to the C-suite.

However, many times media intelligence isn’t done in a way that produces the high-quality media intelligence needed for it to be truly impactful.

Here are three proven steps to gathering high-quality media intelligence:

Step 1: Ensure All Media Coverage Is Being Assessed

High-quality media intelligence is only as powerful as the breadth and depth of the coverage gathered, and at times there can be significant gaps in coverage. Monitoring tools are often limited in terms of the content they’re monitoring due to being behind paywalls, behind sites that are private or content sources being unique and not crawled by the major platforms. As a result, the PR or marketing team is then left trying to fill in the gaps with manual logging in, out, searching and monitoring to ensure nothing is overlooked.

The goal should be to have all relevant potential channels of coverage monitored so there’s an accurate picture of what’s happening with your brand. Monitoring should include news clippings, coverage across all channels — online, social media, TV, radio, print and even subscription sites.

It’s not only about monitoring how many times you are mentioned but also knowing whether the mentions you are getting are positive or negative. You should look for trends such as if your negative mentions are in a certain market, or your positive mentions are often on a certain program. Then you can create action plans to put more (or less) effort in a specific direction.

Additionally, having full coverage means that there may be emerging needs — such as in the time of a crisis — where additional monitoring and issue management is required. You will want to ensure your media intelligence gathering process can handle this so that key stakeholders have the information they need when they need it.

Step 2:  Ensure The Right Content Is being Analyzed

The data gathered through monitoring isn’t going to be useful unless there’s context for what your company really needs. You want the most relevant, contextual high-quality media intelligence possible to ensure you’re focusing efforts in the right area.

When deciding what to gather intelligence on, including things such as brand terms and adjacent terms, can help provide insight into what products people are most interested in, or determine purchase intent. With more and more consumers turning to influencers to help them make choices about buying, monitoring influencers on social media is a critical piece of the puzzle when it comes to your analysis.  

For example, when we do a search on Twitter for “influencer marketing” because it’s such a broad topic, we have hundreds of tweets and potential influencers to sift through. The reality is that it would take hours (or possibly days) to go through each of these accounts and tweets to determine who’s most relevant, and a report that just shows these results wouldn’t be particularly helpful. 

This is why human-centered curation of your media intelligence is key. Having an expert who understands the nuances of your business will help filter out irrelevant coverage and ensure that the analysis is being done on the content that will have most value for your business. With a service like this, you’re not be stuck trying to decide who’s relevant and who’s not, as it would be done for you by a specialist who works with media intelligence all day long.

With an expert taking care of your monitoring, all sourced data can be reviewed for its relevance and accuracy, along with its value, before being cascaded out to the appropriate teams.

Having analysis done by a person — not only by a tool — helps turn data into action, as findings are then relevant and actionable and the impact on your brand determined. An analyst can handpick the right news, identify emerging issues and sentiment previously unmonitored, social media posts, influencer opinions, and competitive insights for your organization, helping to filter out the noise.

Using a human to do your monitoring also add value in situations where computers and technology can get confused.

For example, Fullintel client AAA has their acronym name mentioned thousands of times, which results in as many hits picked up by media monitoring platforms. However, the use of the “AAA” name could be in relation to batteries, or groups for alcoholics, or any number of other things that are not relevant at all. Analysts that understand their business can ensure that relevancy is 100% and influencer intelligence is spot on. A person is far more likely to pick up on these nuances than a computer program.

Step 3: Create Actionable Reports That Justify Your Value And Identify Clear Business Opportunities

Media intelligence is no longer the domain of your PR team but something that your entire organization can use, so intelligence collected needs to be put into a format that can be reviewed and put into action by relevant stakeholders.

Ideally, your media intelligence will be customized to your organization’s specific needs and delivered in dashboards and reports you can share it with busy executives.

Reporting should also be able to be customized to different roles so that everyone has only the intelligence they need on an ongoing basis, and that information is delivered in a format that best suits their role — from alerts to intelligence briefs to customized dashboards.

Fullintel client, MUFG Bank uses their reports to take a data-driven approach to media list development and PR opportunity pitching. Adam Snyder, the VP of Corporate Communications and his team use their daily monitoring reports and regular influencer monitoring for helping demonstrate the impact and contribution of the PR team to the business.

In a 24/7 world, you can’t wait until the next morning for the information you need as you need it. You need high-quality media intelligence gathered around the clock and media analysis reports available on demand.

Having strong reporting that is pertinent to different stakeholders means you can also implement a process to triage and delegate. For example, if your brand is being criticized and this is captured through monitoring, your process may be to immediately alert the PR team. Or if your brand is getting lots of positive buzz from a particular person on social media, then you may want alert marketing to investigate if this person is an influencer.

The idea is to have reporting structured in a way that as many areas of the business can use it to their advantage.

Ultimately, reporting should be connected to KPIs so that you can create actionable plans that support the organization’s broader objectives.

Investing time and money into ensuring you have strong, high-quality media intelligence available to you can help set you apart from your competition. The combination of media intelligence gathering and skilled human analysis allows for curated data that can take your brand and influencer marketing to the next level. By focusing on quality over quantity, you’re likely to see a much better return on your efforts to make the most of your media intelligence.

2017 was an epic year for crisis managers in the public relations realm. While there are some examples of a problem being efficiently handled, there are also instances where companies have become prime examples of what not to do when crisis strikes. Some of them include;

THE UNITED AIRLINES CRISIS

United Airlines faced a huge PR crisis last year when one of its passengers was dragged down the aisle. An unequivocal apology could have stopped the crisis escalating into a full-blown PR disaster.  But, as Elton John said, sorry seems to be the hardest word.

Ultimately, the United CEO did apologize – but it was too late and too feeble.  As crisis war room veteran, Zach Grosser says, a negative narrative is one of the most influential forces in the universe. The latest United crisis about a puppy that died because it was forced into an overhead bin, only reinforces his theory. The company did manage a comeback after cutting its ties with the NRA, but there was hardly any news coverage about this.

As Zach says, the last thing that any company should do while they’re in the middle of a negative narrative is to validate everyone’s perception. Every decision that they take must consider the possible implications of such a narrative. As the puppy controversy proves, any story that’s consistent with the narrative will complicate things further.

THE HARVEY WEINSTEIN CONTROVERSY

Could the Harvey Weinstein scandal be a watershed moment for Hollywood? Could the #MeToo be the modern parallel to the suffragette movement of the late 19^th century? And most importantly, does PR have a role to play in the controversy?

Harvey isn’t the first or the only sexual predator in Hollywood, but what caused his downfall was the fallacious belief that he could buy his way to good PR.  In fact, his response to the crisis has been dubbed as one of the worst apologies ever by PR experts.  When faced with concrete evidence about your wrongdoing, the last thing that any person should do is to threaten people (especially news folks) with legal action. Power can be intoxicating – that is perhaps why people like Harvey fail to recognize shifting tides until it is too late. They often think it is possible for them to bully their way of a situation. Harvey’s conceited and condescending attitude only forced other women to come forward to share their stories of sexual abuse.

But there’s also an important lesson for the anti-sexual harassment activists. Naming and shaming sexual offenders in public; especially holding a trial via social media cannot be a permanent solution. We need much more than insincere attempts made by Hollywood actresses paying lip service to the #MeToo movement. It does little towards helping real women who’re being sexually harassed every day at work and home.

THE PEPSI CRISIS

It’s good to watch commercials that not only appeal to the emotions but compel us to think about social and environmental issues. But some companies take things a little too far. The Pepsi commercial starring Kendell Jenner was a classic example of the phrase ‘too much of anything is good for nothing.’ The ad, claimed Time, was a take on an old Coke ad that aimed to unite the world with soda. Only this time, the message was considered tasteless and was unanimously condemned.

It took a few days and a couple of thousand protests on the company’s social media pages for Pepsi to realize that their take on the Black Lives Matter protests was shallow and unacceptable. To their credit, Pepsi did pull out the ad and issue an earnest apology, but it was too late by then. Nearly 58.6% of the company’s social mentions were negative by the time Pepsi decided to pull the commercial. Tweet after tweet, including one by Martin Luther King’s daughter, made it clear that the ad was unacceptable. Companies looking to tide through a crisis should never ignore social conversations. Social media being a public platform, it is here that people air their disapproval. Responding to these problems not only helps companies manage a PR crisis but also create brand advocates.

THE EQUIFAX DATA BREACH

The Equifax crisis was about a security flaw that the company knew almost two months before hackers gained access to personal data of around 143 million customers. Some of the personal information accessed included, individual names, social security number, birth dates, addresses, and even driver’s license number.

While this is a huge data breach with immense consequences for consumers, what stands out in the entire crisis is the company’s response to the problem. It did not reveal information about the breach for several months. The official apology was half-hearted and full of jargons.  It did not clearly state how Equifax planned to remedy the problem. And most importantly, what about the people whose personal information was compromised?

The golden rule about apologies is that the longer you take to say sorry, the longer you prolong the crisis. And most important of all, do not say sorry just because you have to – an honest apology isn’t about you. It should be about the affected person.

Every crisis presents an opportunity – sometimes, we learn from our mistakes and sometimes from the mistakes of others.

An Academy Award (or even a nomination for that matter) automatically translates into big bucks and an even bigger career for the people involved. But there’s more to the glitz, glamour and the razzmatazz of an Oscars night. For one, they present some unique lessons for PR folks around the world. Some of the key takeaways from this year’s event include:

1. ENOUGH WITH THE PREACHING

The Oscars have always had a political undertone. In fact, art in any form has always been inseparable from the society, holding a mirror up to the society and informing people about the social, cultural, and political issues of the time. The problem, however, is that Hollywood has gone a bit too far. Ordinary Americans are no longer willing to be lectured about climatic changes and homelessness from people who travel in their private jets to the many multi-million dollar homes they own all over the world. It’s hard to agree with the acid-tongued Piers Morgan, but this time, he was probably right when he asked Hollywood to bite their pontificating lip at award shows.

In contrast to last year when winner after winner engaged in Trump-bashing, this year’s Oscars was more about social issues. Thanks to initiatives like #MeToo and #TimesUp, the focus was more on issues closer to home, viz. sexual harassment, gender parity, and inclusion. Of course, Trump and his VP were made fun of, but Oscars 2018 was mostly Trump-free. The lesson for PR professionals, you ask? Speak up, but keep things light.

2. KEEP IT SHORT, SILLY

Report from Nielsen indicates that this year’s Oscars may have had its lowest viewership ever, averaging at around 26.5 million – that’s a decline of almost 20% from last year. This may not have been entirely unexpected, because award shows have witnessed a steady decline over the years. But, I’m sure nobody expected them to beat their 2008 record of 31.8 million viewers. Despite the jet-ski lure, most winning speeches averaged at around 3 minutes. The first Oscars ceremony held in 1929 lasted all but 15 minutes. In contrast, Oscars 2018 dragged for 3 hours and forty-eight minutes. The key takeaway – messages stick when they are short.

3. LEARN FROM YOUR MISTAKES

With the Trump administration only a month old and the President facing fierce backlash, last year’s Oscars was unsurprisingly controversial. But nobody has ever expected the envelop mix-up that took place last year. This year, the Academy has put in place several steps to prevent envelopes being mixed up. The envelopes this year were clearly marked and in a huge font. Staffs handling the task were forbidden from using social media or cellphones. In addition to these, the stage manager and the celebrity presenting the award had to confirm that they’ve been given the correct envelope. Surely, they’ve learned lessons from last year’s fiasco. PR lesson #3 do not be afraid to embrace your mistakes to create a better you.

4. TELL YOUR STORY BUT WITHOUT BORING THE AUDIENCE

As I earlier said, the Oscars this year wasn’t without its share of political messages, but this time, the Academy’s chose to tell the tale a little differently. They chose to honor people who they believed are the beacons of hope for fellow immigrants. But rather than putting up a special montage of the movies, they chose to narrate their story through Kumail Nanjiani and Lupita Nyomgo, also immigrants. This was well appreciated by the live audience as well as viewers watching them from home.  The key takeaway, it’s not just the content, but the narrative also matters.

5. SOMETIMES PEOPLE NEED A SECOND CHANCE

Imagine having your name called out for an award, only to be told seconds later there has been a goof-up. Of course, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway cannot be blamed entirely for the envelop-fiasco, but it sure is embarrassing to make a mistake of such immense proportions before such a massive audience. Perhaps that is why the duo was called this year as well to present awards for the Best Picture. The lesson – It doesn’t hurt to give people a second chance!

The Oscars are the ultimate recognition for a group of people who thrive on applause and appreciation – it’s an acknowledgment of their toil and sweat.  But it isn’t always about winning! This is perhaps the most significant lesson that the Oscars offer. Some movies may not have won an award, but over time they have proved to be just as good, or even better! Case in point: Spielberg lost the coveted Best Director and Best Film award to Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi. But three decades later, which movie would you rate the best – E.T or the biography on the Mahatma?

These are the intuitive lessons we learned from a major event… What insights can Fullintel analysts uncover from your next big campaign?