Large companies often find themselves in the spotlight whether they like it or not. Sometimes it happens for reasons that are completely unforeseen. With the high impact that publicity can have on a business, the question of how to engage with both the mainstream media and social media has moved up the agenda for many companies. Learning more about the digital landscape through continuous media monitoring is a first step to becoming better at managing publicity and marketing.
For a company, media can be both beneficial in terms of positive attention and problematic in terms of negative attention. As social platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok have grown, so has the ability to spread information quickly. News are shared and commented on in seconds, which is why it is particularly important today for companies to have control over what is published and written about the company. A first step to succeed with your PR work is therefore to invest in media monitoring.
Media monitoring involves analyzing articles and other sources of information to identify trends and opportunities for good PR. An additional benefit is that monitoring helps you to immediately spot negative information, allowing you to respond directly to false claims, for example. Historically, it has been very common to follow traditional media, such as newspapers and news programs, but as information dissemination now mainly takes place digitally, it has become increasingly popular to focus solely on digital information sources.
Several approaches
As a business, you can approach publicity in many different ways. A well-known example is the saying "All publicity is good publicity", which has been adopted by the British airline Ryanair, among others. After several years in the spotlight, with bad reviews and massive criticism from customers, Ryanair has nevertheless managed to turn the bad publicity to its advantage. Much of the airline's public relations work involves using humor and sarcasm to confirm the rumors and tell the story of its offer - cheap flights and nothing more. For example, in a post on X in early March, the company wrote: "no instagram? no problem! we don't have wifi anyway".
A common approach is to try to be visible just enough. In addition to the necessary corporate communication towards the market, some effort is put into social media to build a positive image of the company towards customers, employees and shareholders. This is often a balanced approach and works well as a preventive measure.
An increasingly common phenomenon among many well-known brands is also to use their position to try to strengthen the brand further by actively seeking publicity around current trends, while often poking fun at other companies and competitors. This phenomenon is known as 'brand banter' and there is often a fine line between being funny and being a complete failure. IKEA in the UK had a bit of a hit last November when it made fun of a towel skirt from fashion house Balenciaga (Vogue article testing the skirt) with a price tag of close to 10,000 SEK. On its Instagram account, IKEA UK posted a picture of a man wearing similar clothes with an IKEA towel around his waist and the text "VINARN Towel skirt £16". The post received a lot of attention both in traditional media and on social media.
Media monitoring services
There are a number of companies offering various media monitoring services. Some of the most well-known in the Nordics are Cision and Meltwater, but other providers are also available. Unlike traditional media monitoring, most of the work is done automatically, which makes the day-to-day work easier. However, it requires a long manual start-up process that can be tricky to tackle. A first step is to identify the areas to be monitored, which may vary from company to company. Some, in a competitive environment, may prioritize monitoring competitors, while other companies, in the process of building their brand, may instead place more emphasis on monitoring and evaluating the impact of campaigns.
With the many powerful tools offered by the likes of Cision and Meltwater, there is a high risk of getting stuck in the "data swamp" with too much irrelevant information. Therefore, it is crucial to first understand what kind of data and information you are looking for. One question to ask yourself is which keywords are most important. It is from these keywords that you create good searches. Unlike regular search engines, Cision and Meltwater, for example, use boolean search strings. Commands can be used to ensure that relevant results are obtained without including too much spam. Creating accurate searches can be a demanding process and it can often take many attempts to get it right. But once a search is polished, you can count on good results.
In addition to Cision and Meltwater, there are also a couple of other options for providers in the Nordic region. Retriever is one of the more well-known examples, although the price and technical platform differ from Cision and Meltwater. MyNewsDesk and Newsmachine are two more examples.
To get a handle on social media, the process is similar and there is a plethora of professional tools to use. Above all, however, it's about interest and having staff dedicated to branding, data collection and social media marketing. By building internal processes, budgeting and planning for how social media will be used, you can quickly both collect data and increase your own presence on different platforms.
Don't forget to evaluate
It's easy to forget that you should also use the results you get. Media monitoring giants offer several tools to share easy-to-read reports that provide an overview of trends and articles. For example, it is possible to automatically receive a report via email that lists the most relevant articles for your company. It is also possible to create analyses that are then distributed to selected recipients. Here it is important to know who should receive the material. When a recipient receives too many reports, the likelihood that no one will read them increases. If the emails start to look like spam, there is a risk that important news gets lost in the noise. That's why it's important to be selective about which reports are sent, when they are sent and who the recipient is.
After a couple of weeks of media monitoring, it is time to evaluate the work. This will give you an idea of how well you have achieved your objectives. Sometimes, you may need to make adjustments - for example, with which searches you include, or how the results are distributed. There are many pieces that need to fall into place before media monitoring is perfect. At AVA, we have experience working with all monitoring tools, as well as social media, and are happy to help you set up a comprehensive media monitoring strategy tailored to your specific needs.
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