National Brand Gauging Grassroots Efforts

One of America’s leading energy providers operates in 48 states and Washington, D.C. The Communications teams are tasked with monitoring and reporting on media efforts for national and regional brands.

To tie back their efforts to the objectives of the business, they needed to analyze media coverage that included specific topics in local markets. A media intelligence partner must provide analysis on their grassroots efforts around topics such as Rates, Energy Efficiency/Conservation, Customer Service, Reliability and Community/Philanthropy – even if the actual words aren’t present in the articles.

Comprehensive Media Strategy

By combining comprehensive coverage access with human analysis, PublicRelay would deliver the media intelligence the client needed for all topics and geographies.

The brands could now report on the impact of community programs to increase STEM education at local schools, economic benefits provided by local nuclear plants, state-level legislative efforts impacting business, reaction to outages, restoration projects and more.

This flexible, hybrid media intelligence approach enabled all brands to receive analysis on the metrics they found most impactful – on a daily, weekly, monthly and/or quarterly basis. Each team could also do quick turnaround, deep dives on events such as storms or industry mergers. Moreover, the company gained comprehensive insight into message Share of Voice (SOV), tone of coverage over time, and the probability of specific topical coverage being shared across social media platforms.

Accurately Informing Strategy

With more accurate and comprehensive intelligence, the energy company could answer several important questions:

• Which local influencers are significantly impacting our brand reputation?
• How effective are our spokespeople at driving positive community messages?
• How do our territory-specific grassroots campaigns compare to each other?
• What are suggestions for improvements from our customers directly?
• Are articles more likely to be shared if they feature a quote from a spokesperson?

The context and visualizations provided by human analysis, gave the client insight into areas where they were excelling or needed improvement. The more accurate data also enabled a level of predictability around items including:

• What the social media sharing impact would be on an article based on topic, spokesperson, tonality, author, etc.
• Best days to share certain topics in each region for more positive coverage.
  This created trust with the C-suite and enabled them to make more strategic and targeted plans moving forward.