Media Intelligence

Media intelligence helps you understand how topics are covered in the media, and the sentiment and influence behind the coverage. By collecting and analyzing large volumes of information from various media sources, it's possible monitor how your brand, product, or business is perceived.

For example, a motor vehicle company may use media intelligence to determine public attitudes to electric vehicles and correctly position its brand within the EV industry.

This guide takes you through the basics of media intelligence and explores the tools required to best benefit from this activity.

A platform like CisionOne, for example, can help your business or organization navigate the competitive world of public relations, marketing, and communications.

Track your media presence and the market's perception of your brand, monitor your competitors' media strategies, and make real-time adjustments to your strategy as you go.

We'll also touch upon advanced technology such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics.

What is Media Intelligence?

Media intelligence is the concept of collecting and analyzing data from various media channels, to broaden your knowledge.

There are three core aspects to media intelligence:

Data Collection: Harvesting information across the media spectrum, from television and newspapers to social media platforms.
Analysis: Using a media intelligence solution like CisionOne to conduct analysis on your data, and discern patterns, sentiment, and influence within media content.
Application: Taking those insights into your decision-making for PR, marketing, product development, and competitive intelligence strategies.

Read more about each step of media intelligence below:

1. Media Monitoring and Data Collection Techniques

The first step when conducting media intelligence is to research and collect data by monitoring the industry.

Media monitoring requires you to search and analyze content across various outlets. Use different strategies to gather meaningful insights and manage your brand.

Three data collection techniques are:

a) Harvesting Traditional and Digital Data

Data collection for media intelligence starts with both traditional and digital media. A platform like CisionOne allows you to listen in to millions of hours of TV, radio, online news, and podcast broadcasts.

By scanning newspapers, tracking brand alerts on TV and Youtube, and crawling websites, it's possible to pull the right data into one place.

b) Visual and Social Media Monitoring

Next, it's time to look at socials. A tool like Brandwatch allows you to follow online conversations in real time and monitor images, videos, and interactions across social platforms.

Social media monitoring tools help to assess trends, hashtag performance, and audience engagement, offering research insights into your brand’s social presence.

c) Machine Learning and AI

By implementing machine learning and AI, a business or organization can effectively sift through massive datasets efficiently.

For example, you could use image recognition software to identify brand logos or products in social and news posts.

You can also use natural language processing (NLP) to interpret and classify content sentiment from your collected data.

2. Data Analysis in Media Intelligence

Once you've collected your data it's time to analyse it. Media intelligence thrives on robust data analysis to provide actionable insights for strategic decision-making.

Crunching the numbers is made much easier when using media intelligence solutions such as CisionOne. Here's what you need to know:

a) Turning Data Into Insights

Transforming collected data into insights involves a series of analytical steps:

Data Cleaning: First, you need to remove irrelevant data to improve accuracy. Create filters and additional tabs in your data to 'clean' it of unnecessary figures.
Data Categorization: Next, organize your data into categories for easier analysis. For example, age demographics of audience data.
Trend Analysis: Then, identify patterns that indicate a rise or fall in media sentiment or engagement. Whether positive or negative, insights generated here will help you move forward.
Sentiment Analysis: Finally, by determining the attitude of media coverage and public opinion, you can begin to understand your current brand position.

By processing data through these steps, you can extract genuine insights that inform any future strategy and optimize your campaign's performance.

b) The Role of Big Data

Big Data revolutionizes how you manage and interpret media data. The rapid expansion of digital media and social media platforms means a brand may be found across the media spectrum.

When conducting big data analysis be sure to remember the three Vs: Volume (size of your data), Velocity (speed to get your data), and Variety (analyzing more than one type of data).

3. Applications of Media Intelligence

Once you've acquired your data and analyzed it, the next step is to apply that intelligence. Three ways to do this are as follows:

a) Brand Monitoring

Leverage your newfound media intelligence to keep a vigilant eye on how your brand is perceived across various channels. You can identify key influencers and content creators that positively impact your brand image. You can also monitor industry topics in real time to adapt your branding and messaging accordingly.

b) Competitor Analysis

Your data analysis should give you a good picture of where your brand sits in its industry, but also your competitors. Use your findings to monitor how a rival business or organization operates.

c) Crisis Management

Comprehensive media intelligence analyzing means you can create an effective crisis management strategy armed with useful data.

When a crisis hits, swift and informed responses are crucial. Media intelligence helps you:

Detect early signs of potential issues to preemptively address them.
Guide your communications strategy during a crisis, minimizing long-term brand damage.
Inform how you can improve your crisis strategy next time.

Creating a Media Intelligence Strategy

It's important to create a strategy when engaging with media intelligence, in order to get the best use from your tool. After all, there may be no point in data mining for mentions of your brand in a market or country where you cannot sell your product.

Understand Market Dynamics

No strategy is complete without dissecting current market trends. These dynamics are the forces that influence price and behavior in a market, including:

Supply and Demand: Monitor news sources and social media to gauge fluctuations in consumer demand and supply changes.
Competition: Keep an eye on your competitors' media presence. Analyze their coverage to benchmark your performance.
Customer Sentiment: Use sentiment analysis tools to get an overview of consumer perceptions about your product or service.

Understand Your KPIs

Armed with knowledge of your market dynamics, you can now begin to establish your strategy KPIs. These can cover everything from financial targets to global social influence.

If you're unsure of what KPIs you should be targeting then a tool like CisionOne can help you craft some. Here are some of the most popular for brand managers:

Brand Awareness
Brand Sentiment
Customer Loyalty
Conversion Rates
Market Share
Position Against Competitors
Reach

Begin Creating Your Strategy

Once you understand your market and your KPIs, you're in a place to craft your media intelligence strategy. Start engaging in media monitoring and draw down five or six core goals for your campaign. It may be that your strategy involves overhauling your brand, or you may simply be looking to understand the media coverage and reach of an existing campaign.

Whatever your strategy, remember to come back to your KPIs and refresh your understand of the market as you go.

Implementing Media Intelligence Solutions

Once you have a strategy in place you can begin to use a media intelligence platform to implement it. Here's how you approach these steps to measure achievements more accurately.

Choosing the Right Service

It's important to assess your specific needs when choosing a media intelligence solution. These can include:

Scope of Coverage: Does the service track all the media outlets that are relevant to your business? If not, find one that does!
Real-time Analysis: Can the platform provide real-time insights, media mentions, and alerts?
Historical Data: Does your tool offer access to historical data for trend analysis? This could be hugely valuable, especially if you need to predict industry trends.
User Experience: Is the platform user-friendly and accessible to all team members?

Create a checklist tailored to your necessities and evaluate potential services accordingly.

Integration with Existing Systems

Your media intelligence solution must complement and enhance your current tech ecosystem. You might not have used anything like this before, so getting it right the first time will save you time and effort.

Campaign integration is crucial, so consider the following:

Compatibility: Is the platform compatible with your CRM, analytics tools, or other software you use?
Data Synchronization: Can it sync data to provide a single source of truth that everyone can trust and act upon?
IT Support: Is there adequate support on the platform to help you get the most from it?
Demo Mode: Check to see if you can pilot or test the platform before signing up.

By taking these steps, you guarantee that your new system adds value without disrupting existing processes.

Measuring Success

It's important, too, to define the criteria for campaign success before you start harvesting media intelligence data. Look back at your overall strategy and consider those KPIs that improve your organization or business.

Top tools like CisionOne allow you to set custom categories and monitor success, while spotting pain points and issues along the way.

Smart Social Listening – The Future of Media Intelligence

A core element of the new landscape of digital information is social listening. Here, tools like Brandwatch tap into social conversations and provide full analysis of how customers and audiences view organizations.

Intelligent social listening isn't just about seeing which hashtags are most popular to use. This form of media monitoring helps identify influencers, understand trends, spot successful media content, decipher visual content, and get comprehensive coverage of the full social spectrum.

You can do all this in real time. By listening into socials, it's possible to:

Analyze Online Conversations: Discover what people are saying about you online, even if they don't speak to you directly. Identify trends that may prove useful to future communications and see where your media content can improve.

Build Customer Relationships: Social listening gives you a better understanding of your audience or customers, so you can begin to strategize a better customer service solution. By using different methods of customer relations – such as direct conversations, competitions, press releases, and influencer marketing – you can build a better connection with your audience.