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Generative AI is everywhere now. You see it in content, campaigns, customer experiences, and even internal workflows. It promises speed, scale, and efficiency, but there’s a harder question sitting underneath all that progress; Do your audiences actually trust it?

Trust in the Age of AI: What Consumers Really Think About AI Generated Content

Today, PR teams aren’t just tracking media coverage and share of voice. They’re also measuring how their brand shows up in AI-generated answers, search summaries, and large language models (LLMs). This new LLM visibility layer is quickly becoming a critical part of PR performance.

15 Must-Have PR KPIs and How to Track Them

See how one platform can power every decision across PR, communications, and marketing.

The Meltwater Blog

Blog Topics: Generative Engine Optimization, Media Intelligence, Media Relations, Social Listening, Consumer Intelligence, Influencer Marketing

Find out how you can leverage Facebook to boost your brand's online presence and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

Facebook Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage Instagram to boost your brand's visual appeal and gain a competitive edge. Explore our category page today!

Instagram Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage LinkedIN to grow your professional network and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

LinkedIn Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage TikTok to elevate your brand with creative content and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

TikTok Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage X / Twitter to engage your audience effectively and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

X / Twitter Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage YouTube to create engaging video content and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

YouTube Blog | Meltwater

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is transforming how brands show up in AI-powered search. Explore insights, strategies, and best practices to help your content rank and resonate across conversational engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot.

Explore insights and strategies for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to help your brand stay visible and discoverable in AI-powered search.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Blog Collection | Meltwater

Every day billions of conversations take place on social media: tweets, posts, comments, blogs, reviews, podcasts, and much more.
Learn how to use social listening to make sense of all of that data.

On our social listening category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around social listening and social media monitoring. Read more.

Social Listening Blogs | Category

Business Reputation Management: What does it take to add reputation management to your marketing strategy? More importantly, how do you keep your reputation sparkly and shiny? Here’s your all-access guide to online reputation management for the long term.

On our reputation management category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around business reputation management. Read more.

Reputation Management Blogs | Category

From your brand's logo to your website, your social media presence to your customer support—these elements combined are what constitutes a brand in the minds of customers. But, there are thousands of other businesses that have a logo, website, social media presence, and website. So, how can you position your business on the market and make it stand out from the competition?
The key to success is branding & brand management!

On our brand management category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around brand management. Build your strategy and reach your goals!

Brand Management Blogs | Category

Competitive intelligence and the act of collecting competitive data can be seen as growth drivers for a company. Our guide will help you understand the concept of competitive intelligence (CI) by answering questions such as: What is the definition of competitive intelligence? How is competitive intelligence useful to organizations? What is the goal of competitive intelligence? And more.

On our competitive intelligence category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around competitive intelligence. Learn how to stay ahead.

Competitive Intelligence Blogs | Category

Let’s dive into the customer journey framework and how to optimize the process by creating a customer journey map and using metrics that matter when analyzing the customer journey.

On our customer journey category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around mapping and understanding the customer journey.

Customer Journey Blogs | Category

What Is Data Analytics? [Beginner’s Guide 2023]
How can I grow my business? 
How do customers interact with my newly launched product?
How do I increase the productivity of my employees?
How do I know if my marketing efforts are working?
We have just two words for you...Data analytics!

On our data analytics category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around AI and data analytics. Technical and still easy to understand.

AI & Data Analytics Blogs | Category

Public relations and media relations can add impact to any marketing strategy. It’s an opportunity for brands to grow their reach beyond traditional sales messages. PR helps to shape the image you want people to have of your brand.
So, what is PR and how do you use it? This guide shows you everything you need to know to build a strong public relations foundation.

On our public relations (PR) category page, you find all our blogs covering public relations and communications topics. Step up your PR game.

Public Relations (PR) Blogs | Category

We all know exactly what the roles of sales or accounting are in a company, right? We might even have a slight idea of what the IT guys are doing.
But there is another business discipline, that plays a crucial role in organizations, even more so during the pandemic – internal communications!
But what exactly do we mean by that, what purpose does it serve and what steps can you take to ensure you and your employees will communicate effectively?

On our internal communications category page, you find all our blogs about internal comms topics. Learn about the intranet, internal newsletters, and more.

Internal Communications Blogs | Category

As the internet has taken root in more areas of our lives — everything from entertainment to shopping to paying bills and more — traditional marketing is becoming less impactful. As any marketer knows, you need to focus on where your audience is if you want to reach them. Since the average person spends about seven hours a day online, it’s no surprise that content has maintained its hold on marketers.

Here's a closer look at what content marketing is and why it matters more than ever in our digital-first economy.

On our content marketing category page, you find blogs about content marketing topics. Learn about strategies, KPIs, tips, and more. Make your content king!

Content Marketing Blogs | Category

The rise of the influencer marketing space – today a $10 billion industry, growing 50% per year – is one of the clearest examples of how social media is transforming traditional marketing. These days having a business website, presence on social, PR coverage, and your own content isn’t enough to compete.
We'll dive into the intricacies of influencer marketing to help ensure that you're equipped with the insights needed to be successful in this space.

On our influencer marketing category page, you find blogs about influencer marketing topics. Build your strategy, find influencers, and measure results.

Influencer Marketing Blogs | Category

Have you just launched a new product or service that you want to get the word out about? Maybe you want to share with consumers why it is awesome and how it is so much better than the one your competitors offer.

Well, then, there is one thing you can't do without...Marketing!

On our marketing category page, you find blogs about marketing topics. Learn about all the different angles and types of marketing and improve your results.

Marketing Blogs | Category

In this guide, we want to give you a peek into the definition of social media management, the daily schedule of a social media manager, social media platforms to promote your business, and the do’s & don’ts of social media management.
Are you ready to begin the journey of becoming a social media superstar?

On our social media management category page, you find blogs about social media management topics. Build and manage your online community.

Social Media Management Blogs | Category

Building a following and using social media platforms to reach a wider audience requires a well-planned social media marketing strategy. In this guide, we’ll be looking at why social media marketing is so essential and how you can make it work for your business.

On our social media marketing category page, you find blogs about social media marketing topics. Learn how to get the highest paid social ROI!

Social Media Marketing Blogs | Category

In the fast-evolving realm of digital marketing and public relations, utilizing the right tools is crucial for success. Our interdisciplinary category showcases all the pertinent tools for digital marketing & PR. These tools help in enhancing your online presence and effectively reaching target groups, whether through reputation management, influencer marketing, or social media management.

On our digital marketing and PR tools category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around mapping and understanding the customer journey.

Digital Marketing & PR Tools Blogs | Category

Whether or not you do it yourself, use a consultant, a PR agency, or have an in-house PR pro, every business stage needs public relations. Since businesses need to interact with the public, government, their competition, partners, and clients (whether that is other businesses or the public), managing relationships and perceived business value are essential. PR pro, Michelle Garrett outlines why PR is an essential line item, no matter what stage your business is at.

While PR is experiencing a bit of a renaissance as the value of earned media and backlinks seems to be at the top of many brands’ list of digital marketing initiatives, there are still those companies who seem to feel they won’t benefit from public relations.

The truth is, companies at EVERY stage can benefit from PR.

Every business needs PR, even companies at the top of their game shouldn’t overlook the value of what public relations brings to their brands.

As ways to get the word out about your product or service increase with the proliferation of social media and consumers’ access to information, public relations still leads the pack. Why?

“PR, unlike paid marketing, creates a different dynamic,” says Peter Himler, founding principal, Flatiron Communications, and president of the Publicity Club of New York.

“Earned media coverage, as third-party validation, still has the greatest capacity to generate action.”

Why? “Positive news stories, amplified in social media, can serve as powerful endorsements and a boost to brand reputation,” Himler says. “Unfortunately, the reverse also holds true. Think of poor Papa John.”

And because the news cycle moves so quickly now, Himler says it’s vital that businesses persist—in good times or in bad—in engaging editorial decision-makers to maintain a positive branded footprint in the media.

Brands at Different Stages Benefit in Different Ways

Companies at various stages, such as those growing, struggling or succeeding, can all take advantage of what public relations helps them achieve.

Early and mid-stage companies need visibility. They benefit from media exposure and brand recognition. Well-timed articles can help boost efforts to launch new products or roll out solutions.

“Early on, PR creates crucial awareness for your company. A new business is like that tree in the forest that falls down with no one around it. If no one is talking about your business, does it even exist?” Jesse Ghiorzi, director of brand strategy at Charge.

Working with a PR firm can also help early-stage brands define messages that resonate with their target audiences. Public relations pros are skilled at helping clients position themselves for success.

Yet another benefit of PR can be drawing talent to a brand. If a company is growing, it needs to hire strong employees. If it appears in publications and on social media in a favorable light, it’s more likely to be compelling to potential new hires. Further, it can help retain employees who may take pride in seeing the name of the company they work for in lights.

For companies that are struggling, a PR pro can help uncover stories they can tell that will bring them more visibility.

“If your business is struggling, you might be cutting back on marketing and ad budgets. The right PR tactics can help you stretch that marketing budget by getting your business covered in key publications at a fraction of the cost compared to a paid placement,” says Ghiorzi.

And, if a brand has spent time in the past building a following, it can leverage that audience to help support it during tougher times. 

Brands with momentum may believe they have no need for PR. Quite the contrary, says Himler.

“Many esteemed brands with large followings on social media may have less of a need for traditional PR, i.e., media relations. They simply announce their news via their ‘owned’ channels and it propagates from there.”

Himler continues, “However, most companies—big and small—do not enjoy the same luxury as an Apple or Google or Amazon. They must engage the beat reporters who follow their industry, or company awareness and esteem can deteriorate. Then, they may just end up in the trash heap of brands that have lost their luster.”

“When the going is good, why not start telling your story to your audience? Because there will come a time when the economy is not so good, and you need customers to know who you are,” says Brad Marley, consultant, and owner of Yelram Media.

“When that happens, it’s not as if a brand can snap its fingers and generate momentum. if you’re waiting until the bust to invest in PR to generate publicity, you’ve waited too long.”

Every business needs PR, no matter their size or age. To craft a comprehensive PR brand strategy at any size, download our ebook on digital literacy for modern PR folks and when you’re ready to prove the success of your campaigns, make sure you know what PR KPIs prove PR ROI.

Why Every Business Needs PR While They Grow

You wouldn’t copy and paste a competitor’s press release, would you? So why do your PR job listings look the same as theirs? And the same as a hundred other PR job descriptions? Maybe it’s time to get the PR team more involved in crafting a compelling job description that better fits your brand.

Start by Introducing Your Brand Differentiator

Your job description is more than a checklist of attributes you are looking for in a prospective employee. It’s also your pitch to candidates on why they should work for you and not one of your competitors.

The best job descriptions start by setting the stage for who the company is, what their high-level vision is, and how the PR team—and this specific role—help bring that vision to life.

Here are two examples of companies doing this right:

Facebook’s recent PR Director job listing does a good job of selling the candidate on the company, then describing who will thrive in the role.

This PR and Communications Manager job from Telenav does a good job introducing their company and painting the picture of who their ideal candidate is, and the impact their work will make.

While it is important for a candidate to have a clear understanding of the role and its requirements, some job descriptions go too far. If a page of the listing is all job duties, you can cause one of two problems to arise:

Female candidates, who may not feel they are already qualified to do 100% of the activities listed may not apply.

Applicants may get the impression you’ve combined several roles into one, to get more work for less salary.

Instead of an endless bulleted list of job requirements and responsibilities, consider giving a picture of a day-in-the-life for a person in this role. This allows the candidate to put themselves into the picture and visualize how they could contribute in the role.

When business owners note the difficulty they have in finding qualified candidates, it’s not always just a lack of good applicants that’s the issue. Is your hiring process like this: solicit resumes → run them through an applicant screening tool → schedule phone interviews → schedule in-person interviews → make a job offer?

Applicant screening tools can be an effective way to winnow down the number of applicants you manually evaluate. But they are only as good as the data used to set up their filters. If you instead build in a screening process into the job listing itself, you can cut down on the number of irrelevant applicants while giving your team more information to use in evaluating the candidate.

For an entry-level PR position, the screening process could include requesting that they submit a cover letter that includes what interests them most about working in a PR role for your company, and what they’d like to learn from the position. For a more senior PR professional, you could ask for the cover letter to include a brief summary of the PR campaign they’re most proud of and the results it drove for the company.

If someone is applying for every job that has PR in the title, including a specific screening question in your job listing can help weed out applicants who aren’t actually interested in your company. This also will weed out applicants who lack the attention to detail necessary in corporate communications. And as a bonus, including a question that illuminates the skills necessary for being successful in the position, gives candidates the ability to show they know their stuff instead of being judged exclusively on their resume-writing ability.

If you’re recycling the same PR job listings you’ve been using for the past five years, it’s making your PR team look dated. And that’s not how you’ll attract the best and brightest PR pros to your team.

Before posting your next job listing, talk to the team members who will work with this person and ask how the role has changed since the last time you recruited for it. It’s likely that the technology you use has changed, as have many of the day-to-day responsibilities and team interdependencies.

If the most recent person in the role is leaving amicably, you can ask for feedback on the job requirements as part of their exit interview. After all, who is more acutely aware of the challenges of the role than the person who has most recently been in it? That said, understand this feedback may sometimes say more about the outgoing employee than the role itself. It’s important to make sure to clarify and validate their feedback before making significant changes to the job listing.

Hiring the right candidate for your PR team can be tough. But if you follow these tips, you’ll create a job requisition that will do the heavy lifting for you, and help match the right candidates to the job.

And given that the state of PR has changed in the last decade, make sure your candidates have the digital skills to accompany their soft skills and culture fit. Download our ebook on digital competency for the modern PR pro.

How to Draft a PR Job Description That Fits Your Brand

Any PR pro worth their salt knows traditional media coverage is still a core part of an excellent PR strategy. Yet some PR pros seem to be better at getting their clients placements than others. It may seem like magic, but it’s really all about finding, building, and maintaining relationships with media: aka Media Relations. If you are new to PR, or if you have concentrated on digital media until now and need to branch out, you may be wondering how you can work this magic for yourself. We have tips (and tools) to help.

One quick way to find the best journalists, personalities, and influencers to start and grow relationships with is to use keyword research to generate lists of highly targeted media professionals. This can be done in a few ways: through search engines that allow boolean targeted search strings, through influencer specific list purchases, or through tools designed to coordinate, nurture, and sort media relationships by keyword, history, and angle.

Search Engines and Media Professional Discovery

Using boolean search strings like “AND”, “OR”, “site:KEYWORD” etc. can dramatically narrow your searches. This is much more useful than simply tossing a journalist’s name in Google and seeing what comes up. 

By using search strings you can search keywords, topics, and angles and find journalists writing about the topics that are most closely aligned to your clients’ needs. This can get cumbersome, however. You can’t automatically build your lists using searches like this. You have to manually track your contacts through your email, your CRM, or some other external program.

This is the most expensive and the least direct method of finding and nurturing journalist relationships. Because you don’t have much input into how the lists are sorted, you are stuck with too many names that aren’t closely tied to what your clients want and need. 

Since these lists are often in an excel sheet and emailed to those who purchase them, they aren’t a living updated document. These lists can occasionally be useful for one-time events like trade shows but support a more “spray and pray” strategy. It might be a component of your larger media strategy, but it wouldn’t make a great cornerstone.

Media Specific Nurturing and Discovery Tools

These give you the biggest bang for your buck, and for your effort. With the right keyword tool you can create useful lists of media professionals that you can then build relationships from. Before you dive in, understand what topics your clients are most aligned with, then use those to ferret out the journalists that cover them most often. 

Tools like this give you insight into the topics each journalist engages with more often, so you don’t waste your time. Additionally, with access to an influencer and media database you can sort by date range, keyword, topic, angle, location, beat, role, publication, media channel or name. This allows you to finely hone which media you are approaching. Not only that, you can track your contact with each media influencer inside these tools, and share the lists you build with your team. This makes getting media placement for your client much easier, and enables you to build relationships with media over time much more easily.

What Else Can You Do to Build Great Media Relationships and Get More Coverage?

Keep an eye on the publications and channels of the journalists you want to reach. Are they struggling to keep up in some areas? Are they having to work with a reduced staff? Do you see openings where you can offer to help them with content from your clients? This is one easy way to stay front of mind for media you want to reach – and being helpful costs you nothing but time. You can also make it easy and clear how to connect with your clients for stories. Don’t make the media search for what to do next. In this short attention span economy, you want their attention on you to be sustained. If you keep your media searches and relationship building tightly focused and look for openings for your clients to be useful, you’ll find great success in mastering media relations.

If you’re ready for the next step in nurturing media relationships for future coverage, download our ebook about extending your PR capabilities with pointers from content marketing.

How to Nurture Media Relationships for Better Outreach

A tendency to be outspoken can be a great quality in a leader, but even the best leaders slip up. Does that mean an inevitable crisis? Not if you've prepared ahead and built trust between PR and executives. Read on for real-world examples on navigating executive mishaps. For a complete guide to crisis management, read our ebook on using media intelligence to prepare for a crisis—or better yet, avoid it altogether.

When CEOs of corporations make major mistakes or utter unfortunate remarks that harm the organization’s reputation, it’s usually PR that must find a way to fix the situation. Within the past few years, leaders from large companies, including Uber, Papa John’s Pizza, and most recently, Amazon, have all negatively impacted their business through cringe-worthy comments and questionable decisions. All of these situations caused their PR team to mobilize into crisis mode quickly.

Although most PR people may not be dealing with CEOs who are household names, there are plenty of business leaders whose slip-ups can lead to an unexpected issue. But what can a PR professional do to avoid or lessen the fallout? And how do you guide a rogue CEO when it’s time to respond to the crisis?

According to Kim Marshall, a seasoned PR pro and co-founder of S’Well Public Relations, it is important for CEOs to be fully media-trained and ready for anything. Although she was not connected with any of the companies mentioned above, she explained that lessons can be learned when it comes to all crisis situations. She said, “CEOs need to understand that in the business world, anything that’s personal becomes instantly public. And a personal crisis can be incredibly embarrassing. But honesty is always the best policy—because you need to show that you are human.”

She pointed out that frequently, a CEO may want to “hide” a crisis or a bad decision. A true PR pro must convince a CEO that a decision was wrong and he or she must change tactics and their response to the media—quickly. She added, “Don’t hide or wait. It’s important to address the issue immediately. Some of the most common mistakes I’ve have seen CEOs make in terms of public relations are not listening to their PR team, not preparing for an interview, not realizing that nothing is really ‘off the record,’ and not understanding the on-the-ground reality of what their front-of-the-line employees are going through during a crisis.”   

Known for her extensive experience in crisis management, Marshall has dealt with a number of crisis where the CEOs did not handle a situation well. In one instance, she was working at a major resort when a tragedy occurred. “The resort featured a “swim with the dolphin” program, and unfortunately, two of the dolphins suddenly died. The backlash was so huge, even Greenpeace was protesting outside the resort. But instead of dealing with this honestly, the CEO recommended avoiding showing the dolphin area to any journalists—a true impossibility since their lagoon was a focal point of the resort.”

She continued, “If we followed this bad advice, it would have caused the resort’s problems to worsen, but I had to convince them to tell the truth and show that we care about the dolphins and the environment. We then launched an educational program and found the cause of the dolphin deaths was from a toxin from a nearby golf course. After we identified the problem, we were able to clean the area and ensure the other dolphins were healthy.”

Marshall shared another example from years later when she was working with a luxury resort that hosted a group of influencers. She explained, “We held a dinner in the hotel’s restaurant and unfortunately almost everyone had food poisoning the next day. But instead of doing the right thing, taking the blame and showing remorse, the CEO remarked that they probably caught the flu and didn’t apologize. I did everything I could to help the group and wrote an apology letter to each person myself. It was seriously a miracle that nothing bad was written about that experience, but I’m sure those influencers won’t be returning to that resort. If the CEO had responded in a kinder way, those individuals would have felt like we cared about their well-being.”

Marshall believes that CEOs should choose wisely when selecting their public relations directors or agencies, as those are the people who will be guiding them during a crisis. She said, “You definitely don’t want a ‘yes’ person or someone who is inexperienced. A tough, smart PR person can save you from a major crisis or a great embarrassment. A professional PR pro is always prepared for anything—and provides the most valuable advice.”

Don’t wait until hell breaks loose to get your CEO thinking about the public impact of their words and actions.

Preparation: Your CEO is by default a brand spokesperson. Make sure that she or he understands this, and takes it seriously, especially if your executive is on social or interacting with journalists and influencers. 

Trust: Everyone can slip up, but not everyone is prepared to take accountability for it. Sometimes ever. Let your executive know that you’re here to fix messes, and are prepared to take the lead when that happens.

For a complete guide to crisis management, read our ebook on using media intelligence to prepare for a crisis—or better yet, avoid it altogether.

Rogue CEOs: Tips on Building Trust Between PR and Top Executives

It used to be that one of the biggest challenges PR pros faced was faxing a press release to 100 reporters—one at a time. (Yes, some of us remember those days.)

Today, everyone is online 24/7, creating a completely different environment for those of us who communicate for a living. While the Internet has made many facets of our jobs so much easier—like getting those press releases out—it’s also created an entirely new set of challenges.

Here, we take a look at how the digital world has changed some of our challenges as PR pros.

Crisis Communications – No Longer the Luxury of Time to Plan a Course of Action

Gone are the days when you had the time to prepare a statement in the event of a crisis.

John Thompson, founder, and principal of Critical Communications and assistant professor at Southwestern University just north of Austin, has worked with some of the biggest tech companies in the world, including Intel, Dell and Motorola. He was at ground zero in one of the first Internet-driven scandals, the Pentium processor crisis at Intel in the 1990s.

“In those days, we had hours we could work with in getting back to the media. Today, time is compressed to minutes, and that puts a premium on both truthfulness and reasoning that isn’t necessarily understood,” Thompson says.

A crisis communications plan is imperative for businesses to have prepared in advance. It takes forethought to have a framework in place for communicating in any crisis, be it fake news, an accident or a social media misstep. And, brands often don’t get a second chance to make it right—with social media, judgment by consumers can be swift—and at times, harsh.

Cameron Craig, head of global corporate communications at Polycom who spent ten years on Apple’s PR team and is also a speaker and consultant, cites Zappos as an example of how to handle bad news well. When Zappos announced extensive layoffs, they did something unique. The company put all its internal messaging on its external site.  

“While layoffs are never good news, the way they handled it strengthened their brand over time,” says Craig. “People appreciated their transparency.”

Craig also points out that in the Internet age, it’s tougher to keep secrets—if you can keep them at all.

In his days at Apple, Craig says they’d plan big launch events to unveil new technology. In most instances, the team was able to keep the news a secret until the big unveil.

“Today, when you have products that take a long time to develop, it’s much harder to keep them under wraps,” Craig explains.

In these cases, he suggested it may be better to “embrace the leak.” Yes, some brands will release information internally, expecting that it will leak.

An example Craig cites occurred when Tim Cook of Apple recently shared some news first on the employee intranet. It was then leaked, ending up on TechCrunch and other online publications—but the information was written in a way that seemed as if Apple understood there’d be a leak.

Craig suggests this may be a wiser way to approach situations such as these.

“If you understand that the wall between internal and external communications is coming down, you can communicate differently,” he says.

What About the Ethical Dilemmas PR Pros Face—Do They Differ Today?

When it comes to ethical dilemmas, how have times changed? Not as much as one might think.

“PR people have always dealt with issues of defending controversial positions, or finding a way of delivering a position they disagree with after losing an internal battle,” Thompson says.

Craig adds, “While it’s changed in some ways, it’s still kind of the same. On any given day, reporters are coming to companies asking us for our opinion on politics, scandals and so on. We’ve always had to look at each case and consider the ramifications for our brand.”

“Those issues still exist, but they now take place in a world that is described as ‘post-truth’ or ‘post-fact’ where the social underpinnings of reality appear to be open to debate,” Thompson continued. “That isn’t a PR person’s dream—it’s a nightmare.”

Thompson believes that PR pros have to step up to enforce ethics more than ever before. “Given their unique position in understanding the implications of corporate initiatives and possessing the communication skills that corporations need to win in a fast-changing marketplace where driving transitions are everything, PR pros have an opportunity here.”

The Internet Has Made It Easier to Self-Publish

While the Internet may have created new challenges for the modern-day PR pro, it’s also created its share of advantages. Self-publishing is one both Craig and Thompson cited.

“It’s easier than ever to self-publish through platforms like LinkedIn, Medium and the Huffington Post,” says Craig. “By using them properly, you can reach a pre-existing audience, rather than build one from scratch.”  

Thompson says a lot of enterprises are still working to connect the ability to self-publish with their corporate strategy.

“There’s a tendency among many to devolve the strategy to counting clicks rather than building a position in the marketplace,” he cautions. “If you post pictures of the latest Marvel superheroes, you will likely get clicks. You will not get a position in the marketplace.”

And so, the role of the PR practitioner is evolving.

“Today’s PR pro is responsible for striking the right journalistic tone in the content produced by a firm so that someone truly wants to read a blog or contributed article in an executive’s name and will find something compelling about it beyond a product pitch,” Thompson says.

Sure, the evolution of technology creates new dilemmas—but it also helps us move in valuable new directions.

Ultimately, being a modern PR pro requires learning new lessons—and sometimes it requires unlearning old ones. To keep up on the skills needed, download our ebook, 11 Lessons That PR Professionals Need to Learn in a Digital World.

Challenges of Modern Day PR Pros Versus Those of Decades Past

Whether you work in-house, at an agency or are servicing several clients in an independent capacity, one thing is certain – regular reporting back to your customers, be they internal or external, is a vital part of any PR manager’s job.

Taking time to quantify the ROI your activities generate, as well as reflecting on successes and shortcomings in your strategy, is a crucial component in the consummate PRO’s journey. How else are we meant to learn and develop our ideas, not to mention, validate the efficacy of our PR efforts?

The question of which metrics to address is one that comes up regularly in the PR community and is often the basis of highly-contentious debates as people argue for or against a variety of typical public relations KPIs such as AVE, impressions and social media engagement. Many agree that some traditional PR metrics are like putting lipstick on a pig – AVE, for example, is a known vanity metric which has zero bearings on the value PR adds to brands and how they are perceived by the public. It’s outdatedness as a PR metric is further exposed in the context of a shifting, digitally-powered public relations landscape where quantitative data enlightens PR people of their successes and failures.

In this post, we’ll share some different public relations metrics and tell you why they should form part of your reporting framework. While measurement is critical, it is insufficient in a silo and data is useless unless you can extract insights that offer real value – these insights are found in the dynamic cause-and-effect relationships entrenched in data. Data that enrich a report should correlate with organisational objectives and should be mappable to sustainable, real-world outcomes.

It must be noted that the indicators which follow aren’t intended as a one-size-fits-all silver bullet for PR measurement and evaluation; some apply to earned media while others are better suited for tracking the effectiveness of a content marketing campaign; all of them work in unison for more intelligent PR reporting. Here are five alternative PR metrics that should matter more in 2019 and beyond.

Placement Rate as a Metric for Measuring Pitches

Evaluating your placement rate – that is the pitches and stories you reach out with in relation to those that “land” successfully – can help you assess the effectiveness of your outreach and, if necessary, empower you to level-up your pitch strategy before you exhaust your media list on a single earned media initiative. Much like an optimisation specialist will calculate conversion rate, PRs can calculate placement rate by dividing the number of targets (media, bloggers or otherwise) they’ve pitched by the number of stories they place successfully. Placement rate is useful to gauge the performance of pitches and outreach in public relations, content marketing and earned media activities.

Share of Voice to Ascertain Your Influence

Measuring Share of Voice will help you keep your finger on the pulse of how much of the conversation your brand dominates among target audiences. It’s a useful metric for determining the value you derive from how people perceive your brand and, more importantly, it offers a practical benchmarking exercise to find out how your slice of the conversation stacks up against competitors in your field. Regular monitoring of your brand’s share of voice will give you an edge over competitors – if you see your share of voice decreasing, it could signal areas you’ve neglected to focus on.

Using the largest inventory of social media and online content in the business, Meltwater’s media intelligence tools use Share of Voice as one of the many available PR metrics, making it easy to track and manage conversations related to your brand, in real-time.

Brand Sentiment to Keep Tabs on Real Conversations

Sentiment analysis looks at the tone of media and conversations about your brand and is a reliable methodology for gauging how people feel about your brand be it positive, negative or neutral. After consolidating the brand and product mentions you create from a PR, content marketing or earned media campaign, analysis of the resultant content can help you understand your brand’s position in the overarching conversation related to your niche. Realistically, brand sentiment will never be one hundred percent positive. As such, it can be used to identify areas of improvement and linked to organisational outcomes in a way that sparks change in negative opinions about your brand, products or services.

Meltwater’s Media Intelligence tools help you combine rich digital metrics with media mentions to accurately measure how your brand resonates with your core audience.

Measuring the clarity of the stories you publish can be trickier to pin down than most PR metrics. Ultimately, effective storytelling is about making an emotional and memorable connection with the recipient; as a result, it can be difficult to be precise in gauging a target audience’s understanding of a story. Clear stories will resonate with an audience and inspire them to take a desired action, however, to measure this per initiative can make for inexact reporting which is why it’s better to take a holistic view and measure the effectiveness of a story arc and the momentum it builds over time.

In PR peoples’ panic to prove their value, historical data is often overlooked as a practical means of analysing the quality and impact of our work. Sometimes, you don’t have to look too far to take stock of your PR efforts … looking at the data you already have at your disposal is a metric which aligns with this way of thinking. Owned data is only viable as a PR metric if you have a history to compare the current view against. Therefore, only consistent and meticulous reporting built-up over time will enable you to incorporate it into a broader picture of what goes into your public relations and content marketing and the outcomes thereof.

5 Alternative PR Metrics Worth Monitoring

For some, the line between a PR campaign and an advertising campaign remains unclear, so we’ve decided to clear things up by demonstrating the differences.

Advertising is a form of Paid Media. It’s a method of promoting content and increasing your visibility by parting ways with cash. Advertising can take various forms including pay per click ads, advertorials, banner ads, endorsements etc.

One of the key benefits of ad campaigns is that marketing professionals have much more control over when, where, and how a message is sent. This level of control means advertising campaigns are a great way to craft perception amongst a target pool of consumers since we can ensure that content is 'on brand' and favourable- however, it's worth keeping in mind that this does come at a price. Advertising, regardless of the medium, is not cheap!

Much to the joy of ad and marketing professionals, advertising targeting capabilities have come some way in the past few years. We can now get as granular as targeting ads based on the search engine our target audience is using or targeting ads based on similar Twitter accounts consumers are following. This avoidance of a 'spray and pray' approach often balances out of the cost.

A PR campaign produces earned visibility, usually through a third party. For example, the cab company Uber took advantage of a vast amount of positive and negative public relations coverage around the brand. This directly impacted the perception of the company, its reputation and its brand story. If influential newspapers speak of us in a positive light, we’ve hit PR campaign jackpot! It is therefore important to build strong relationships with journalists before we roll out a PR campaign so that we can increase the chances of positive coverage around our brand.

Whereas budget is a factor which largely affects the impact of advertising campaigns, in the case of PR campaigns, relationship building is at the forefront in determining the quality of coverage and whether the PR mention is more favourable. 

How does a PR campaign differ from an Advertising Campaign?

Third-party endorsement of our brand is the desired result from a PR campaign. The audience is much more likely to accept a message from a third party than when the message comes from the brand itself as it seems more trustworthy. As such, audiences find PR campaigns more credible than advertising. In terms of image and reputation, a successfully built PR campaign is the ultimate weapon. Advertising conversely provides opportunities for targeting. An advertising campaign offers reach, whilst a PR campaign offers credibility.

The Importance of Thinking about Public Relations and Advertising in Tandem

While there is a clear difference between public relations and advertising, bear in mind they do impact each other too, thus it doesn't always make sense to view PR and advertising as who separate identifies. For example, advertising can cause a knock-on effect on PR. When we pay celebrities to endorse a brand, their appearance tends to generate a wave of interest from publications. Take Romeo Beckham’s appearance in a Burberry advert as an example. Meltwater’s Media Intelligence platform found that Burberry received 1,774 press mentions in one month (October) compared to 2,334 press mentions in November, the month the advert was aired.

Here are some other ways that PR impacts advertising and vice versa:

• Use advertising to increase the reach of PR coverage, for example, invest in Twitter ads to drive targeted audiences to view cool public relation features

• Pay influencers to collaborate with your brand and increase PR mentions (like the example mentioned above)

• Use a media intelligence tool to analyse PR coverage, for example, trending themes, and use insights to inform PPC landing page content and communicate a cohesive message

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Challenges of Modern Day PR Pros Versus Those of Decades Past

5 Alternative PR Metrics Worth Monitoring

PR Campaign vs. Advertising Campaign Differences

How to Use Visuals To Get More Social Media Engagement, Shares and PR

PR in the Boardroom: Winning Over The C-Suite

How Far We Have Come in Teaching Communications

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PR & Communications

Why Every Business Needs PR While They Grow

How to Draft a PR Job Description That Fits Your Brand

How to Nurture Media Relationships for Better Outreach

Rogue CEOs: Tips on Building Trust Between PR and Top Executives

Challenges of Modern Day PR Pros Versus Those of Decades Past

5 Alternative PR Metrics Worth Monitoring

PR Campaign vs. Advertising Campaign Differences

How to Use Visuals To Get More Social Media Engagement, Shares and PR

PR in the Boardroom: Winning Over The C-Suite

How Far We Have Come in Teaching Communications

Know Your Options as a PR Consultant

Want Big Global PR Results? Time to Think Small

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