How can you use media analysis to assess your company's reputation?

Bloggers and influencers cannot compete: conventional media have the greatest influence on public opinion. Any self-respecting communications professional knows how important the various media outlets can be, and the number of hours spent on journalist relations compared to other tasks is a prime example of this.

But how is this influence measured?

MEDIA COVERAGE ANALYSIS is a media coverage analysis that uses both automatic and manual processing systems to show what kind of economic value and reputation the media coverage of a company has generated for itself or for a specific product, brand or service.

Data analysis can be quantitative or qualitative: the latter type of analysis is also able to detect sentiment, i.e. whether the company itself or the focus being analysed is perceived positively or negatively.

An analysis of this kind provides a picture of a company’s media presence, the results of which are used by PR and Marketing as management leverage, since in this way the PR operations undertaken become measurable/valuable to all intents and purposes, and by Press Offices (internal or external to companies) as a concrete measurement of return of investment (ROI).

The four main performance indicators we use for our analyses are…

1. The number of articles
   Simply the number of published news items dedicated to the topic of our interest or to the company itself. The field of research ranges from international, national and local print media to the web, including institutional websites and portals and sector blogs, and national and local television and radio stations. The number of articles published, or reports aired, is the first important indicator of how much the focus of the analysis has resonated in the media.
2. The visibility
   Also called OTS (Opportunity To See), it represents the potential audience of the news, the quantification in readers of media exposure. It is a figure that is constructed from data on readership (print media), audience (radio and television) and traffic (websites). This figure is variable and changes not only depending on the newspaper, but also on the positioning and size of the individual article and the presence of photographs and headlines dedicated to the focus.
   To give a practical example, it is clear that an article on the front page or homepage will be seen and read much more than one on the following pages, and that a news piece that takes up the whole size of the page will be more visible than a footnote.
3. The advertising valueThe sentiment
   Called in our jargon the AVE (Advertising Value Equivalent), it represents the economic weight of the review, based on the proportion between the spatial dimension occupied by the news and the advertising rates of the newspaper, which obviously vary according to its media impact.
   In practice, the AVE measures how much it would cost the company to purchase an advertising space as large as the physical space occupied by the article.
   In order to further enhance the PR work required to get people to spontaneously write about the company or its products/services, a multiplication coefficient is sometimes used in the calculation of AVE.
4. The sentiment
   When the analysis requested by the company is qualitative, as well as quantitative, it is necessary for the analysts to proceed with an in-depth reading of the published articles in order to detect the sentiment, thus determining the ‘tone’ of the news (positivity, neutrality or negativity).

The criterion used by the journalist to report the news in a favourable way (content with explicit or indirectly expressed appreciation), with an informative tone (without any opinion expressed by the journalist, but only focusing on the description of the fact), or in a negative way, with veiled or markedly critical messages, is assessed.

The total advertising value is the result of the algebraic sum of the values of the positive or neutral tone articles. If the article is negative, the AVE is considered to be zero, being itself the calculation of the return on investment.

The Media Coverage Analysis therefore allows us to understand the current situation of the company’s coverage and reputation in the media and also, by comparing the data with that of any previous analysis, to make predictive calculations based on statistics and on professionalism and experience.

That’s why Mediability has the right tools and skills to provide you with all the services you need.

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