2022 is shaping up to include some major new developments in communications measurement tools. Here are four measurement tool trends to take note of:
1. Wonky reach data? CoverageBook has a solution.
Clients are becoming savvier and more skeptical about the “reach” data provided by many vendors. CoverageBook has a solution. The company has been around since 2014, when it revolutionized the clip book by automating the process and making it much faster and easier to show off your coverage. But they learned that customers want more than just pretty pictures to show “media impact”—an amorphous term that means different things to different people (see our No Bullsh*t Pr Measurement Glossary).
So CoverageBook now estimates lifetime views of social coverage using a predictive algorithm built with help from research by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It factors in social platform usage, followers, and engagement.
The latest version of CoverageBook reviews publisher traffic and influence data such as domain authority. Then, through the URL, it looks at where the coverage was placed and how it was engaged with by readers. These data points are added to the lifetime views algorithm. It’s a huge step in the right direction.
2. Social media is becoming (even more) important.
Tracking Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit is standard these days. But in 2022, given the importance of video, more and more organizations are asking for monitoring of YouTube and TikTok as well as podcasts. The good news is that many of the most popular services, like Talkwalker, are already tracking podcasts as well as the most influential social platforms.
LinkedIn is bit more of a challenge because Microsoft has yet to make an API available. Hootsuite can track activity on your own accounts, but if you want to know what other people are saying about you, you need to do it manually. It’s not much fun. (Trust me, we’ve been manually scraping LinkedIn for years.) Inside sources tell me that there may be a solution later in ’22.
3. ESG is your new KPI.
More and more investors look at ESG scores as a measure of risk and the value of a company. So watching the impact of your communications efforts on your ESG score is critical. It’s easy enough to use the free ESG score on Yahoo Finance, but what really matters is what particular ESG rating your institutional investors trust the most. Check with your IR team to make sure you’re using the right one(s).
Mark Stouse at ProofAI routinely incorporates ESG scores into his clients’ dashboards. He uses Mettle Capital’s data to show the impact of communications and marketing activities on ESG. I predict that by year’s end Mark will not be the only one doing this.
4. AI is actually getting more useful.
Most content tracking platforms use AI these days, and some have thereby vastly improved their data quality. It used to be impossible to track amorphous concepts like trust, credibility, and empathy. But today, with better algorithms and better training, organizations are able to use social media to get a handle on emerging issues. ∞
Thanks for the photo up top to Aleks Marinkovic on Unsplash.
