Transparency: We Reveal our PR Metrics, Best Practices and Results

Nestled firmly underneath the greater Marketing umbrella is Public Relations – the department responsible for courting members of the media, upholding a brand’s image, as well as disseminating company messaging.

Done correctly, PR can contribute to overall brand awareness, so it’s important to take time to contemplate the proper method of going about communicating with writers you hope to secure opportunities with.

At Brandwatch, we’re in a state of transition as our brand has gone from well-known and respected startup to flagship global enterprise social intelligence company.

How we go about securing press coverage, and its resulting significance, is shifting.

As we’ve left the first half of 2015 behind, we look to how our PR tactics must adapt to where we are currently, and where we wish to go.

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The PR metrics we use

When we review a piece of coverage we’ve secured, we classify it within three specific metrics.

Type: This essentially asks the question, “What sort of pertinent information is being shared about us?”

We filter our news into three categories:

• Company: Corporate news, financial/client/company mentions.
• Product: Mentions and/or descriptions of specific Brandwatch products, features, updates, capabilities.
• Data: Social insights powered by Brandwatch in the form of infographic/data viz/volumes of mentions or any other social intelligence driven insights coverage.

Publication tier: This classification examines the publication in which our coverage appears.

We look to an outlet’s readership figures, as well as its reputation within the journalistic community.

This certain metric relies on both qualitative and quantitative reasoning. Upon review, we’ll breakdown publications into three tiers:

• Tier 1: Top echelon print, broadcast and online news outlets. Tier 1 in our industry also includes social media/digital, enterprise tech, and marketing/PR news sources and blogs.It is also important to note that blogs are also examined based on their influence within their specific community.

• Tier 2: Well-read blogs and news outlets, as well as new industry verticals with lower circulation and readership figures. Local broadcast and regional networks and their affiliates are designated as tier 2.
• Tier 3: These outlets consist of smaller blogs or news aggregators.

Coverage origin: Self-explanatory, but within this metric we consider how we secured a particular piece of media coverage.

This metric also has three categories:

• Strategic: These stories feature executive commentary, industry news and mentions that were proactively secured by us.
• Tactical: These articles are data-driven news mentions provided by Brandwatch as either proactive or reactive research.
• Organic: These pieces consist of blog pick-ups, mentions of our platform or technology and news that has been re-published or aggregated from larger (more top-tier) sources.

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Strategy

When securing media coverage, Brandwatch employs three distinctive tactics.

These tactics require the entire team to know what is expected of each individual, and for them to be able to work proficiently in their role.

This section could very easily be the longest of this entire post, but in an effort to preserve our best practices, and the work that goes into developing and executing each, we will choose to err on the side of tact.

A strategic decision, you understand.

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Brandwatch PR results

Now comes the time where you get to check our results for the first half of 2015 while using all the aforementioned PR metrics and tactics.

Total Qualified Cover in 2015

• 1,369 pieces

Total News Mentions in 2015

• 3,551 mentions

Top Tier Coverage in 2015

• 297 pieces

Not too shabby.

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Looking to the future of PR

Moving forward we will continue to tweak and refine how we approach securing media coverage and engaging with the press.

To execute a successful PR strategy you need to know where your company currently stands within its industry, what the competitive landscape looks like, and in the world of social intelligence — the breaking news of each and every day.

You need to be honest with your current position, you need to have realistic but ambitious goals for the heights you want to take your company’s PR, and you need to be honest with the amount of time it will take for you to achieve those goals.

There are instances where quality is more important than quantity and vice versa, and recognizing that fact is hard for many PR pros.

We have to do it every day when it comes to responding to incoming inquiries, analyzing social intelligence data, and evaluating the worth of our coverage.

It’s a media-driven, data-filled world, and we’re just living in it.

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