Measurement

You could feel the tension rising in the air, knocking out the aroma of coffee beans and herbal tea. Nancy had ordered a decaf-caf skim latte and the barista seemingly got it wrong. She stormed… Continued

Though it’s extremely important for individual communicators to take steps to become proficient with data and analytics, it won’t do much good if the rest of your company isn’t on board. Brands that embrace metrics at all levels of the organization are in the best position for success.

Leave it to Cisco’s charismatic Carmen Collins to serve Southern-style sweet tea while explaining the sales funnel. Well, she doesn’t exactly serve sweet tea, but she describes how tea and the sales funnel have plenty in common. She also provides insight on using data to report your social media story to the C-suite. Drink up.

PR News editor Seth Arenstein spoke with senior-level communicators at brands to find out how they’re crafting communications efforts that produce data that means something to CEOs and CFOs. Meaningful data and insights for the C-suite—that’s the pot at the end of the rainbow for PR pros.

It’s arguably the communicator’s main stage: providing messages and data to the CEO and the C-suite. What are the best ways to report data and difficult issues to senior leaders? We ask communicators for tips and tactics.

While most C-suite executives are still working to grasp the full value of earned media, they are getting savvy about data mining and analytics. The smart ones will begin asking pointed questions about PR measurement. And they will question reports relying on ad tech-based attribution that artificially inflates PR results. Beware.

As measurement has become increasingly ingrained in the lives of communicators, the question becomes not just how to determine appropriate metrics for your company and collect data around them, but how to present that data in a way that is engaging and actionable. And contrary to popular belief, this doesn’t just mean making a pretty dashboard, but figuring out how to make the data on that dashboard leap off the page.

With so much noise on social media these days, how can communicators determine which KPIs are the most vital for their organization? The key is to be proactive, and to leverage analytics to identify the most important signals for your brand. There are three basic questions that any communicator can use to create a simple, effective and valuable digital signals tool from scratch so you can react to any trend appropriately.

As lines between traditional and social media continue to blur, influence is everything. And it’s important to remember that influence is not always about specific platforms and prestige, but who actually has a concrete ability to influence others. By employing data to identify and rank influencers based on their reach, relevance and resonance, you can identify who are the right people to build up your brand to the right audience at the right time.

One of the biggest challenges communicators face is battling pre-conceived notions with data, especially when it comes to hard-hitting or controversial issues. Here’s the six-step process Aetna uses to infuse their storytelling with data.