If you position your media report as a valuable source of information regarding media monitoring and reputation, you will not only get attentive leaders – you will also gain a stronger internal position within your respective field as well.

4 tips and tricks to create an exciting media report

The content and overall look of a media report is dependent on the amount of time, resources and priority. The tips and tricks we have gathered for you apply no matter if you prefer to generate automated media reports through the Hypefactors platform or create them yourself through data extraction.

Even if you want to outsource your media reports to the Hypefactors analysis team, these tips and tricks remain relevant and worth considering.

1. Summary: Emphasize the most important conclusions and key figures

Most people do not have the time to dive deep into the many interesting analyses included in a media report. Therefore, it is a good idea to collect the most important key figures and conclusions in a nice, easy to read summary. In the summary, you can emphasize the same 3-4 key figures every time – this way, readers will be able to recognize and remember them.

The emphasized key figures must be easy to understand and they must correlate with your company’s overarching goal(s). For instance, if you wish to expand your business and generate more awareness about your brand(s) within a particular market, at least one of your key figures should provide insight into the ways in which your media monitoring efforts support this goal.

On the other hand, if you find it more important to position your spokespersons, it is more relevant to have key figures that provide insight into these individuals’ media coverage.

The insights provided in your media report become more relatable and subsequently more interesting for your colleagues when the most important key figures and conclusions are intertwined with your company’s overarching goals and strategies.

If you make use of automated media reports but wish to supplement the summary with your own key figures and conclusions, you can add the summary to the email itself.

Your main points should be written and presented in a live tone of voice where you describe to your colleagues the ways in which these results support your company’s branding and business strategy. Make sure to refer to specific page numbers as to include the media report in a proactive and concrete manner.

2. Describe what questions the media report answers

You must be clear about what questions your media report seeks to answer. As with anything else, a media report is much easier to relate to if the reader understands the questions in relation to the analyses presented.

Does it provide an answer to how much attention a product launch has yielded?

Is it a quarterly update on how strong your brand is positioned in the media?

Does it provide an answer to which stories have driven your media coverage forward the last month?

Advantageously, you can choose one overarching question and a couple of sub-questions.

The overarching question can provide an answer that fits perfectly on the front page of your media report. You can also use this question as an enticing email subject line.

The media report can provide answers to some exciting questions that instill a sense of suspense and interest in the reader when you emphasize them.

Tip: Make sure that the summary of the conclusions of the media report answers these questions.

3. Different versions for different target audiences

Not all parts of a media report are relevant for all stakeholders. To save time and effort, it is advantageous to create different versions / different templates of the same media report to send to different target audiences.

With the Hypefactors platform, you have the ability to save different customizable versions of your media report. Only relevant pages and analyses of your choice will be included in that particular version of the report.

An attentive media report with focus on the reader in question will make it even more relevant and interesting for them. Your team might be interested in the full analysis; a social media manager will probably want more focus on social media; top management is typically interested in overarching conclusions. Follow this guide to learn more about how to create different versions of automated media reports with the Hypefactors platform.

4. Be surprising! Send out media reports unexpectedly

Maybe you are only used to sending out yearly or quarterly media reports. But the conclusions from a media report can be both exciting and relevant for your colleagues all year.

You can surprise top management with good results when they are not expecting it.
One of the advantages of sharing insightful results more often is that people will start to look to comms teams and PR departments for valuable data-driven inputs. This can help increase interest from other departments and subsequently strengthen and solidify comms teams’ and PR departments’ place as an integral part of the organization.

If you are interested in exploring the features of the Hypefactors platform’s customizable media reports, we will gladly assist and advise you on how to optimize your setup and analyses. You can contact us here: info@hypefactors.com

Hypefactors CEO, Casper Janns, says:

“NOI is Hypefactors’ most important AI creation ever – developed over several years with lots of blood, sweat, media data and intelligence. By applying the NOI enrichments live and ongoingly on all global media data, Hypefactors lays a new technological foundation from which new levels of media monitoring precision can be achieved, new PR/comms product solutions can be built using NOI’s personalization and recommendations, and new solutions can be built for data-driven decision-making business segments like marketing and finance.”

The NOI distinctiveness comes from its state-of-the-art machine learning architecture that is codesigned to be scaled up using specialized AI hardware such that Hypefactors’ high-volume live updating global media data stream is enriched with NOIs. In combination with recent data enrichment additions to Hypefactors’ Atlastic media intelligence technology, incl. automated analysis of brand reputation and trust across earned media mentions, the inclusion of automated NER technology will be an important cornerstone of the total solution.

NOI is powered by AI-based NER developed by Hypefactors’ team of AI engineers and linguists. It builds upon our pre-existing multi-lingual AI construction methods also used for our Reputation-AI and our Presence-AI. The proprietary approach contributes to Hypefactors’ unique tech asset and IP base. NOI is the pivotal technology taking media intelligence to the next level, and it is the cornerstone for a sleeve of new innovative product features planned for later parts of 2022 and 2023.

As the first company in the media intelligence industry, Hypefactors have launched a brand new, advanced AI technology developed by professional and competent data scientists and linguists; a technology able to identify what each individual word refers to, whether it be a brand, product, person or event.

This technology is a big step for Hypefactors (and media intelligence in general), but it remains a small step for you when it comes to unlocking its full potential.

How-to guide:

When creating a new search within the Hypefactors platform, the “Main Search Term” is set to “Any”. This means that the search term you put in must be identified as either a person, a product, an organization, a location or an event. With this feature, you are able to filter out irrelevant search results that do not fall into these categories.

If you only want to search for e.g. an organization, you just need to click on “Any” and choose “Organization” from the drop down menu.

If the search term you want is e.g. both an organization and an event, you can add another search term to your original one. You just need to click on “Enable Alternative Spellings?”, change the search field from “Organization” to “Event” and then type in the search term again in the new field.

Choose between “Person”, “Product”, “Organization”, “Location” and “Event”

Our brand new AI technology makes it possible to differentiate between whether a word refers to a person, a product, an organization, a location or an event. You now have the ability to conduct a search within one specific context and filter out irrelevant results. This feature is both completely groundbreaking and unique within the media intelligence industry.

Classic media monitoring

You can, of course, still use our platform for more traditional media monitoring. You just need to choose “Free Text” in the drop-down menu and enter the search term in the search field as usual. Using “Free Text” allows you to search for all existing words that match your search term.

Does it sound too good to be true, and are you excited to get started? The brand new AI technology has already been launched and is ready for use in the Hypefactors platform.

If you want further information or help with setting up a new search, feel free to contact your key account manager or reach out to us via email: support@hypefactors.com

When a negative story hits the media, things often move very fast – sometimes so fast that there is no time for strategic consideration. The attention that follows can seem quite unmanageable and impossible to keep up with.

Luckily, you have the opportunity to prepare yourself in an effective and easy manner before the shitstorm hits and causes irreparable damage to your company or brand. You can use media monitoring as a preventive measure; a strategic tool that allows you to gain a clearer overview of the situation at hand, and provides you with crucial insights when you need them the most.

Is media monitoring a part of your crisis strategy? If not, you should definitely read our 3 concrete pieces of advice. These 3 pieces of advice will hopefully also serve as inspiration for those who already have a strategy but are interested in how others use media coverage and media monitoring to navigate our contemporary media landscape.

Read our 3 concrete pieces of advice about crisis communication here:

1) Be informed before the crisis explodes

Many PR- and communications managers already have a list of topics that could potentially lead to critical media stories. However, if you do not already have such a list of topics, this is the place to start. You must follow these topics closely and ensure that you get notified as soon as your company or brand is spoken of in relation to these particular topics.

We also recommend that you get notified when your competitors are spoken of in relation to critical topics, as well as when media channels are discussing these critical topics in relation to your respective industry. This way, you will be able to avoid a communication crisis by staying ahead of the curve. Media monitoring is a particularly fast and effective way of doing this.

2) Understand the reactions

A communication crisis is not limited to staying within the field of editorial news. Opinion makers, stakeholders and the general public itself also have thoughts and opinions about your crisis. These opinions are expressed on social media in particular. Because of this, the act of following, listening and even planning a reaction to a critical debate concerning your company or brand on social media is of crucial importance.

Media monitoring should help you gain a faster and more accurate overview of critical debates as they appear on social media. You should especially follow debates on platforms such as Twitter, Reddit and other forums where discussions about current news take place.

3) Keep an eye on your most important stakeholders’ opinions and statements

A communication crisis is revitalized each time a new and important person addresses it in the media. As such, crisis management relies heavily on following the opinions and statements made by your most important stakeholders closely. In this way, you will be ready to react proactively to stories brought forth by the media.

Make a list of your stakeholders and make sure to establish proper media monitoring set-ups of both yours and their media coverage. Stakeholders can be partners, clients, owners, shareholders, politicians, competitors etc.

By strategically monitoring your stakeholders’ opinions on and involvement in your crisis, you will be able to save a lot of time. Moreover, having a strategic media monitoring set-up will allow you to react to important statements quickly, and you will be able to react to and prioritize the most crucial media stories about your communication crisis.

If you want to explore more about how media monitoring can help you before, during and after a communication crisis, we will gladly assist and advise you. You can contact us here: info@hypefactors.com

We have written a guide to help you measure and document the results of your PR and communication plan. A strategic setup of your media monitoring enables you to easily and continuously measure your objectives.

Four pieces of advice that will help you measure the effectiveness of your communication plan

1) Your objectives should be measurable

Your communication plan needs to have clear objectives. These objectives make it easier for you to prioritise your efforts, develop your content, and evaluate the results of your communication plan. That is why it is important to have objectives that are truly measurable, and that you plan exactly how you are going to measure the results.

Example: You can start with defining how your media monitoring can support you in concretising your measurement. If your goal is to increase your company’s visibility in your primary target group, you can create a list of media that addresses your preferred target group. This media list can help you prioritise which media you have extra focus on creating relationships with and getting brand mentions in. This goal is easy to both track and measure with the help of your media monitoring.

2) Identify your baseline and set realistic goals

Before you start setting up measurable goals for your communication plan, it is a really good idea to understand what your company’s baseline is. How much coverage do you get in your key media? How much coverage do you get in your markets? How often do your spokespersons appear in the media? How much coverage do you get if compared to your biggest competitors?

When you know your baseline, it becomes easier to create realistic and achievable goals. You can find the answers to the questions above in the Hypefactors platform where you are able to dive into your coverage and find your baseline.

3) Set subgoals and evaluate on an ongoing basis

You do not have to wait until the end of the year or until the timeline for your communication plan ends before diving into the data to evaluate the results. On the contrary, we encourage you to continuously check in and assess how the results are developing. We encourage this because ongoing assessments can reveal which parts of your communication plan you need to pay extra attention to in order to achieve the expected results.

On busy days, it is easy to downgrade or completely dismiss measurement, especially if there has not been allocated time for it in advance. As such, it is important that you set subgoals and schedule status meetings in your calendar so you have time to evaluate how far you are with your goals. You can among other things use Measure in the Hypefactors platform in order to get a great understanding of your media coverage.

4) Be inspired by the data – track your specific objectives

Media Intelligence data makes many things possible when it comes to measuring communication results and finding exciting insights about your brand(s). That is why we have created a unique function in the platform which allows you to set measurable goals and track the results in real time.

You can find the custom measurement of KPIs in the Hypefactors platform under Measure and KPIs. Among other things, these functions make it possible for you to measure if you get the number of clippings that you want, or if you get the exposure you want in your key media outlets.

If you would like to explore how you can measure the results of your communication plan, our advisors would be happy to guide you on how to optimise your setup and your analysis. You can contact us here: info@hypefactors.com

How did it all start?

“With a background in strategic marketing and advertising consulting, I have a deep appreciation for the importance of measuring and documenting the impact of implemented initiatives. I believe in a business-driven approach that emphasizes the link between strong marketing performance and strong business performance, and I have seen firsthand how digital solutions can help marketing teams prove this link. Before founding Hypefactors, I served as CEO at an agency that originally focused solely on marketing but eventually expanded to include communications and PR consulting as well. While marketing teams are primarily focused on driving brand awareness and sales through paid media channels such as advertising, communications teams are responsible for managing the company’s reputation through earned media, such as editorial mentions in the press.

Through my work with many large companies, I’ve observed that there are two main challenges facing communications teams today. First, the concepts of trust and reputation are critical to any business’s success, yet these are often managed less effectively than other important contributors to success. This is largely due to a lack of ability to document and measure results, which by the way can lead to a situation where the value of the work done by professional reputation and communications teams is underappreciated. Second, the increasing complexity of media and workload is not well-suited to manual processes such as old-school press clipping services, Powerpoint media reports, Excel, and reactive phone calls to international teams to stay informed about what’s happening.

I knew there had to be a better way, which is why I founded Hypefactors. Our platform provides a comprehensive solution for communications professionals, allowing them to manage their work more efficiently and effectively. With Hypefactors, users can easily monitor media coverage, measure and document the impact of their work, and collaborate with team members around the world in real-time. Our goal is to empower communications teams to build and maintain strong reputations for their companies, ultimately contributing to their overall success.”

What is the idea behind Hypefactors?

“My idea for Hypefactors was straightforward: To be the “digital wingman” for reputation professionals by providing them with 1) more concise and easily digestible relevant facts on media reputation and insights, and 2) making the entire process more efficient. In my opinion, “earned media” should be treated as important as “paid media.”

While basic media monitoring such as finding relevant mentions for a client is crucial, it is not enough. To provide deeper insights into media reputation and intelligence, we need to employ modern technology. We must also automate more processes to better assist PR departments and communications teams. At the same time, we must provide better support to professionals who work with communications, corporate reputation, and insights. By automating processes and workflows, we can make their daily work lives more manageable.”

What are the client’s benefits of using Hypefactors?

“There are several benefits that clients can enjoy by using Hypefactors. Firstly, our platform provides clients with real-time and relevant information on their media mentions from across the globe and various media types. This enables them to stay on top of their media reputation and respond promptly to any emerging issues.

Secondly, clients can gain deeper insights into their media performance, thanks to the enriched and aggregated data provided by our platform. This information can help clients to identify their strengths and weaknesses in their media strategy and adjust accordingly.

Thirdly, our platform is equipped with comprehensive analytics, KPIs, one-click media reports, news distribution, and press rooms, all of which make media intelligence and reputation management a lot easier and more efficient. Finally, we strive to make our platform and mobile app as user-friendly as possible, ensuring that clients can easily navigate and use the platform. Overall, by using Hypefactors, clients can make more informed decisions regarding their media intelligence and reputation management, leading to better outcomes for their business or organization.”

Why is media intelligence and reputation tracking relevant?

“For any organization, this is essential information. Our clients utilize the insights that we provide to identify opportunities, assess risks, evaluate product launches, and track ESG criteria. Whether it’s identifying potential issues with competitors or suppliers, or monitoring how a product launch is being received, our platform empowers organizations to make data-driven decisions and stay ahead of the game. ‘Media monitoring’ refers to the act of looking for and collecting third-party created information presented in the media, whether online, print, broadcast, social media or from reviews, which has the potential to impact a company in some way or form. The term “reputation management” refers to the act of managing the ways in which an organization or brand is perceived. As our contemporary media landscape continues to grow and evolve, media monitoring and reputation management simultaneously become increasingly integral parts of the success of any business. For example, a company’s product might be absolutely brilliant — but if people do not have a general sense of trust in the company that sells said product, the quality of it really does not matter that much at all.”

What will tools like ChatGPT mean for communications and media intelligence?

“The most recent rollouts of more general AI tools like ChatGPT clearly shows how AI will change a lot of the current ways of working in different sectors. Including communications. Although early AI-generated content was criticized for being inaccurate or poorly written, the potential of AI in writing is becoming increasingly evident. Today, AI-generated writing already exceeds the quality of the average copywriter and journalist, and it is only a matter of time before it reaches the level of the best professionals in the field.

For media intelligence providers, the question is whether they are equipped to work with modern AI technology. AI has the potential to revolutionize media monitoring and analysis, providing deeper insights and faster processing than ever before. Providers that embrace AI will have a competitive edge in the market.

On the other hand, traditional press clipping services may struggle to remain relevant in a world where AI is increasingly dominant. As AI technology continues to advance and improve, it may render traditional methods of media monitoring and analysis obsolete. It is essential for businesses in the media intelligence industry to adapt to these changes and stay ahead of the curve to remain competitive.”

What is the relationship between Atlastic.ai and Hypefactors?

“Atlastic.ai is a part of Hypefactors. It is our core AI proprietary technology powering the Hypefactors platform. At the same time, it can power other IT systems with enriched media data adding a lot of potential business opportunities.”

What is the business model?

“We are a SaaS based company. SaaS means “Software as a Service” and can be explained as subscription based. This means that clients signup for a pre-defined initial license period, e.g. 12 months and if they are happy with the solution, they will continue using and paying for the solution also after the first period. The license fee is also called ‘recurring revenue’. For winning new clients our commercial team presents our solution to the prospects, which is often done in virtual meetings. When a new client is signed, our customer success team takes over and handle the onboarding process and the continuously support of the clients.”

What differentiates Hypefactors from competitors?

“One of the things that differentiate Hypefactors from competitors is better insights for better decision-making combined with ease-of-use to support communications and reputation specialists. Our core technology, including our AIs, is Hypefactors property, which puts us in a strong position to add even more functionalities for the benefit of the users on top.”

Who are the main competitors?

“In the global market for media intelligence solutions, I would mention Cision, Meltwater and Signal-AI as the most important competitors.”

What does the future look like?

“It looks good! With our proprietary AI-based technology, we are in the right position to be one of the winners in our market. We believe that our continued focus on innovation and leveraging new technologies will allow us to stay ahead of the curve and deliver even greater value to our clients. We anticipate that the media intelligence landscape will continue to evolve rapidly, and we are committed to staying at the forefront of these changes. With a dedicated team and a strong vision, we are excited about the future and the opportunities that lie ahead. On the commercial side, our focus is to improve the performance and increase the number of clients and the revenue and to be profitable.”

Many companies wish to position themselves as leaders in certain areas in order to stand out as market leaders. By being present in the media, these companies increase their exposure to relevant stakeholders, thereby increasing their relevance among journalists and other influencers.

The important topics you choose to focus on in your communications strategy is typically closely connected to your company’s overall business goals. This is vital because it connects your PR- and communication efforts to the general development of your company. This connection is an advantage when you have to showcase the ways in which your communication and press coverage contribute to the business’ fundamental objectives.

“Share of Voice”: A focused benchmark analysis that shows who dominates the important media agenda

The Hypefactors’ platform can help you evaluate how strong your brand is positioned in certain media agendas. We recommend that you measure your positioning by comparing the coverage you have on selected topics against your competitors’ coverage on the same topics.

You can measure your “Share of Voice” within a certain topic. When you keep track of and measure your Share of Voice, you will be able to exhibit developments to your colleagues and management. You will also be able to show how your company’s Share of Voice has increased significantly within the key media agendas as a result of your successful communication strategy.

This is how you measure the “Share of Voice”

1) Update your search terms:
In the Hypefactors platform, you can easily add more search terms to the media monitoring of your competitors’ media coverage. Just find the search streams created to monitor your competitors and add relevant keywords in the field “Only show mentions that include at least one of these words”. This way, you will be able to narrow the monitoring of competitors to only include media coverage that covers a specific topic.

2) Find the Share of Voice Analysis:
Click on “Dashboard” on the top menu bar. Select relevant competitors under “Brands”. You will then find the analysis “Share of Voice” with an interactive pie chart at the bottom of the page. When you hold the cursor over a specific part of the chart – Company B, for example – you will see the key numbers for Company B, including its Share of Voice in percentage and number of clippings.

It is also possible to gain insight into how your competitors’ media exposure develops over time in relation to a specific topic. You can change the time period by clicking on the dates at the top of the page.

We recommend that you either investigate your competitors’ positioning when you work on your new communication strategy, or re-evaluate the strategic topics that your company chooses to engage in. A benchmark analysis that focuses on certain topics will provide you with important knowledge about which topics are neglected by your competitors. These neglected topics could be valuable opportunities for you to take advantage of.

Important considerations: If your communication strategy is focused on general or wide topics such as “sustainability”, it would be advantageous for you to identify which subtopics could be relevant for your company “to own” in the media. If we take “sustainability” as an example, a subtopic could be ”climate change” or, to be even more specific, “sea levels”.

Are you interested in exploring the opportunities with an in-depth benchmark analysis? If so, our team of advisors can show you the benefits of a customized Benchmark Analysis Report. You can get in touch with us here: lot@hypefactors.com

Hypefactors announces that its tech department will start rolling out a further improved version of the company’s audience data technology this week.

Since Hypefactors’ ‘Intelligent Media Reputation Crawler’ vers. 4.0 was launched in November, more advancements have been developed. Now, more than 6 million relevant websites are continuously being crawled in near real-time, enabling users to always be on top of both the global and the local media landscape.

Comprehensive monitoring of the news is the foundation for media intelligence. Where Hypefactors stands out further is by enriching data into information, making it possible to provide users with the most accurate media reputation tracking. A crucial information point is the estimation of the audience size (readership/viewership) for different media outlets and news stories. No one can provide the exact numbers at a global scale, so it is imperative to have the highest fidelity data, algorithms and calculation model for the most accurate estimation.

For this, Hypefactors ingests third-party audience data streams and augments it with its proprietary media statistics distilled from its big data pipelines. This smart approach brings unmatched accuracy in estimating the audience and enriches media reputation tracking for our users. This rollout incorporates improvements in this area yielding vers. 4.1 of the Hypefactors’ Intelligent Media Reputation Crawler. The advances include drastically expanded applicability (i.e. recall in machine-learning) through smarter extrapolation and enhanced country classification.

CEO Casper Janns adds:

“Hypefactors’ number one priority is to keep progressing the user experience and accuracy for current and future users of organizations interested in taking advantage of powerful media intelligence to improve their media reputation. This is one more step ahead, and we will keep on moving.”

Vers. 4.1. strengthens the company’s platform and technological asset base and is expected to make a positive contribution to the commercial development of the company.

About Hypefactors A/S

Hypefactors is an integrated AI powered Earned Media tech platform to support better media intelligence and reputation management. Hypefactors combine data, analytics, technology and tools to provide a unified and easy-to-use experience. With all the tools to automate and ease the work, and all the facts to document the results. In addition to media monitoring across the different media channels, the platform provides access to a number of facts, incl. automated documentation of the monetary value and quality assessment of each third party media mention. The platform also contains other time-saving tools such as automatically generated media reports and a mobile app giving access to real-time media mentions. The company is listed at Nasdaq Growth Market in Copenhagen, Denmark.

For more information, please contact:
Casper Janns, CEO:
Tlf.: +45 20167481, e-mail: cj@hypefactors.com

Pierre André Montjovet, Chairman of the Board:
Tlf: +41 (0)78 922 33 0, e-mail: p.montjovet@heritage.ch

Hypefactors is listed at Nasdaq Growth Market in Copenhagen. This is an announcement to the stock market (no. 9-2020). Copenhagen, 26. November 2020.

After extensive and successful testing, Hypefactors will launch version 4.0 of the Intelligent Media Reputation Crawler in the Hypefactors tech platform. This will benefit all current and future customers as well as open up new business segments and opportunities. The launch is planned for Monday 30. November 2020.

As one of few media intelligence companies in the world, Hypefactors has developed a proprietary advanced crawler technology, searching, finding and enriching relevant media mentions in near realtime.

With version 4.0, more than 4 million articles are being streamed in continuously as big data, and enriched using custom-built automated machine learning (ML) solutions. Add to this that more than 2 million social media posts, pictures and videos are processed daily. The machine-learning based Artificial Intelligence (AI) enables a unique level of automation, scale and precision combined that is unreported of in science and business. This specialized application of AI on media data turns our big data into smart data for the users.

Highlights of version 4.0 are:

• Machine-learned advertisement detector
• AI-assisted automated detection of new relevant media sources
• Global media impact indicators
• Time-series analysis using AI-based publication date recognition across all languages
• More accurate impression/readership estimation
• Unmatched machine-learned reputation assessment

Through these updates, more media sources from non-Western regions have been added, incl. from Latin America, Middle East and Asia. Also more niche sites and blogs have been added. This has significantly expanded our global media coverage.

The development providing users with the market’s most accurate streams of relevant media data, has been made possible using recent theoretical advances in machine learning, and supported by Google and Amazon cloud solutions through the Silicon Valley-based accelerator Founder Friendly Labs, in which Hypefactors was invited to join in 2019.

The milestone implementation will provide new business potential beyond the communications departments. R&D, Business Intelligence, Marketing and Sales could benefit from injecting relevant and smart media intelligence data into their operations.

Hypefactors’ unique tech assets are now even stronger. The Intelligent Media Reputation Crawler vers. 4.0 strengthens the company’s platform and technological asset base and is expected to make a positive contribution to the commercial development of the company.

About Hypefactors A/S

Hypefactors is an integrated AI powered Earned Media tech platform to support better media intelligence and reputation management. Hypefactors combine data, analytics, technology and tools to provide a unified and easy-to-use experience. With all the tools to automate and ease the work, and all the facts to document the results. In addition to media monitoring across the different media channels, the platform provides access to a number of facts, incl. automated documentation of the monetary value and quality assessment of each third party media mention. The platform also contains other time-saving tools such as automatically generated media reports and a mobile app giving access to real-time media mentions. The company is listed at Nasdaq Growth Market in Copenhagen, Denmark.

For more information, please contact:
Casper Janns, CEO:
Tlf.: +45 20167481, e-mail: cj@hypefactors.com

Pierre André Montjovet, Chairman of the Board:
Tlf: +41 (0)78 922 33 0, e-mail: p.montjovet@heritage.ch

Public relations is a communication strategy that depends on building mutually beneficial relationships between the organization and the public.

What used to be physical meetings and chats are now replaced by online meetings. Relationships are not built and long-lasting without contact, and therefore this should be embraced. The virtual and physical feelings will not be replaced by email and calls, and the online new meetings are important. Regardless of this, relations need to be easy and convenient. Journalists need to get access to relevant material, and this should be easy. Therefore, by gathering your portfolio of journalists, sending out and pitching news to them, as well as giving access to a well-established media kit, will promote relationships that last.

Easy access to content – Media kit

Make it easy and convenient for your media relations to write about you with a media kit. A media kit is a package of information to reporters and influencers that companies create to provide easy access to basic and relevant information about the company. An online and integrated newsroom is one way of giving easy access to content for a journalist to pick from when choosing to write about you. Read more about our online newsroom hype.news here.

Send out and pitch – Journalists

Pitching your content, being creative, and capturing the journalist’s attention is important when reaching out to your relations. Unlike advertising, a media mention cannot be bought and is therefore a third-party validation for your story. Therefore, selling your story is very important when sending out press releases, and reaching your targeted media relations. Different stories should go out to different media contacts, so it’s important to differentiate between your relations. It’s much better to send your story to a few relevant relations with a personal message than as a generic message to many relations. Sending a good PR contact irrelevant content also runs the risk of damaging the established relationship.

Media Relations with Hypefactors – Connect

With Hypefactors PR CRM (Media relation management system) you can nurture and track your current media relations while building up new ones. With the Hypefactors database, you can add your own contacts, find and create new relations with other contacts, and also easily keep in touch with them. Create content and send out to your established or new contacts. Group your relations based on any criteria and track the opening rate from all the press releases you send out.

Publish your story to your online newsroom and get it integrated into your own webpage. This gives journalists easy access to your news stories and can easily get in touch when they want to write about you.

The new Barcelona principles 3.0 offers a new take on the media monitoring landscape and reflects a broader standard for measurement. The new principles focus not only on measuring the value of communication but also on what drives the continuous improvement of a company’s PR value. PR measurement shall focus on how you can reach your business goals and a more holistic approach is suggested, where social media also is included in the measurement. By setting the right KPIs, you will be able to track your PR activities and illustrate how PR contributes to your company’s overall business goal.

Key Performance Indicators

There are different ways to interpret and measure the performance of your PR.

Impressions

Impressions express the number of people that are presented with news about your brand when you are mentioned in the media and therefore indicate the total reach that a particular mention gives you.

Media mentions

Media mentions are counted as a mention of your brand or product in a media outlet, whether it’s online, print, or social media and evaluated on the quality of content. The number of times you are mentioned and the tonality of these mentions can be used to indicate if your audience is generally presented with a positive or negative brand story, this has a great effect on the value that the mentions and impressions represent for your brand and how it affects your brand reputation. Stories in media with an audience matching your own target audience “A tiers”, naturally present the message to a more relevant audience than an outlet with less similar readers. This also affects the value of the impressions generated from mentions in the different media.

The quality and effectiveness of the content can also be evaluated by the length of the article, and whether there is a brand associated image or logo in the article, or whether it is an exclusive mention or you are sharing the “spotlight” with other brands and subjects.

Another critical factor when evaluating the value of PR is the value of comparison. How are you performing compared to your competitors? How many mentions are there about other brands in the market and are they more or less positive than yours? With insights about your competitors, you will get a better understanding of your market position and goal for future PR strategy.

PR strategy

The questions to ask, regarding your PR strategy is, which audience do you want to reach – who do you want your PR to influence? This should correlate with your overall business goals and the type of reputation that you want to establish and nurture for your organization. This will help establish what media outlets you should focus your PR activities on (your A tiers), and if it’s more important for you to get fewer mentions in highly relevant media or many mentions on a broad, but less brand relevant, selection of outlets.

Through insights about the number of impressions, media mentions, quality of content, and value of comparison, you can establish the value of your PR activities.

That summarized, KPI should evaluate your PR value, and this should be quantified and tangible. By comparing different markets and the performance in the previous months, last year, or across campaigns, a company will be able to evaluate, set goals, and measure the way PR contributes to the overall reach of business goals over time. This lets you see if the effort, time, and money that is put into your PR actually pays off enough to justify the spendings.

KPIs with Hypefactors

In Hypefactors you add in your PR spendings, your goals for the different KPI’s and the platform will then automatically keep track of your progress and calculate your values. The Hypefactors Value gives you an indication of the value of your PR. Furthermore, impressions and clippings will indicate the reach of your content and the range of your earned media.

Your most important media outlets can be marked as ‘A Tiers’ – this will then be accounted for when the Hypefactors value is calculated, ultimately giving a higher value than a similar mention in a less important outlet, this also lets you distinguish your important mentions from the lesser ones. Hypefactors also lets you differ between countries so that you can benchmark and adjust your efforts in different markets accordingly.

Based on all the different factors, a calculated ROI can tell you how much value your PR generates compared to the money you spend on it.

Hypefactors

Want to know more about what Hypefactors PR software can do for you? Book a demo here: Hypefactors demonstration

Referring to our previous post about AVE versus Barcelona Principles – the argument is that none of these alternatives is both a sophisticated and operational relevant PR measurement method. Therefore, Hypefactors have replaced AVE with ‘Hypefactors Value’. The Value is calculated from a unique measurement algorithm based on 10 different parameters and presents an operational and sophisticated way for businesses to measure their PR.

How to make it operational

Operational PR measurement should recognize the importance of negative PR, measuring outcomes instead of outputs, and also be transparent and valid.

Sentiment analysis

The Barcelona principles reject the AVE model as the advertising cost, does not reflect the value of PR. This is easily demonstrated by negative PR. Not all mentions are adding value to your brand, what about the negative effect of earned media? This is not included in the AVE model. Sentiment analysis illustrates the negative effect of PR. Furthermore, successful sentiment analysis is quite complex, and understanding the underlying tone of the text can be quite difficult. Hypefactors’ systems are based on a statistical approach (machine learning) that attempts to learn what positive, negative, or neutral sentiment means, in order to identify the tone of the article. Read more about sentiment analysis.

Reaching goals and measuring outcomes

What Barcelona principles highlights are the importance of reaching goals and measuring the outcomes instead of output. The output of your communication work is not necessarily the same as the outcomes. When communicating, it is not the message that should be measured, but the result of the message expressed by consumers. This is exactly what Hypefactors focuses on. In addition to measuring outcomes, these outcomes should also be measured against the overall business goal, in order to keep their budget and reach their target. The Hypefactors value calculates the financial value of your PR and by setting your targeted key performance indicators (KPIs) you can see if you have reached your final goal.

Transparent measurement

Measurement and evaluation should be transparent, consistent, and valid. Hypefactors’ sophisticated AI-driven algorithm calculates the value of your media coverage based on different relevant media parameters. The way we measure our Hypefactors value includes the number of impressions, type of mention, type of media, size of media, in addition to sentiments evaluation, and other parameters. How extensive is the article and is the mention exclusively about your brand? Who is the target group of the magazine and are they relevant to you? Decide which medium that are more relevant for your brand. The relevance and extent of the exposure of your brand are evaluated and affect the Hypefactors Value.

What is the value of your social media?

When referring to earned media, the focus is not only on journalistic writing in newspapers and online, what about social media? More consumers are using social media as a new platform for both mentions, recommendations, and reviews for your products. So how do you discover what people say about you in the media? With Hypefactors, you have the opportunity to discover all media platforms and monitor both print, online, and social media and therefore manage your overall reputation.

Hypefactors lets you compare markets, benchmark, and keep your PR strategy on track in an easy and operational manner. Improve your reputation with the right PR measurement. Hypefactors focuses on giving you the correct value of your PR.

How do you send out press releases, keep in touch with journalists, and inform clients about your product updates? The biggest challenge companies are facing today is that they spend hours updating their website, creating content for press releases and the media, without it being worth the time spent doing it. By establishing your own publishing platform through an online integrated newsroom, you can take control of your public relations and make the journalists write about you. Not only can this benefit your contact with the public, but it will also benefit your online brand.

Five benefits

How can you benefit from Hypefactors online integrated newsroom – become a trustworthy and relevant source in your industry. Own your content and brand. Here are five ways you can benefit from having an integrated online newsroom on your website.

1. Take control. Take control over what is said about your brand. An online newsroom can be your voice in the media. By updating your media channel with relevant and new content about your brand, you can influence what is said about it and your reputation. Information coming directly from the source, your website, increase credibility, and lets you take control over the news surrounding your brand.

2. Build relationships. Building a professional press platform gives your brand a credible and trustworthy source for journalists and other stakeholders to be informed. Under a crisis like COVID-19, journalists need valid and reliable information about your brand. Stakeholders are worried and need information and assurance about what is going on with your brand. An integrated newsroom is a good way for companies to build a communication channel that keeps customers happy and informed. Stakeholders are not feeling left out, but instead informed, and this is the right way to build relationships.

3. Credible information. By building a trustworthy platform, you can be the face of credible information in your industry. Get people to visit your page to find the right information about your industry. More traffic on your website means better awareness and engagement, which leads to more potential customers visiting your page.

4. Every journalist’s favourite source. Journalists want it easy. If they are going to write about your business, they need relevant information and a contact person, and this should be convenient. Happy journalists mean more earned media for the company.

5. Time-saving. Inform all relevant parties at once. Save time by making your newsroom the contact point for your investors, journalists, and customers. That way you can save time by sending out to journalists, internal contacts, and external interest at the same time. Especially relevant now in the times of COVID-19. And journalists writing about you is earned media for your company.

The Hypefactors-way

There are different ways to go about creating a newsfeed for your company. Hypefactors make it easy for you by giving you access to build your own integrated newsfeed and at the same time provides you with an online distribution platform. Quickly sign up for a Hype.News newsroom for free, to test out our distribution channel. That way, you can take control of your reputation, build credible relationships with your stakeholders, and at the same time be every journalist’s favourite brand while you spend less time and save money.

Housing all your PR information in one place, it’s available and convenient – not only for your stakeholders but also for your PR team.

Earned media and branding are essential now that budgets are tight and people spend more time online. What are people saying about your brand in the media? With Hypefactors you can monitor coverage and conversations for different brands, for specific markets and for specific types of media. Hypefactors monitor all relevant media coverage including web and print plus all social media channels in real-time. The monitoring is tailor-made to fit the individual PR professional. Learn some new tips and tricks on how to set up and optimize your media monitoring stream.

How to set up a media monitoring stream the Hypefactors-way?

What would you like to monitor: mentions about your company, for a brand or product, or would you like to know more about your competitors? Set up your stream by choosing relevant terms and specific keywords to monitor.

The first tip is: have multiple streams for one brand. Start by deciding what brand you want to measure. Each brand can have one or more streams, covering different topics and media outlets. Choosing the type of media you would like to monitor. Do you want to know what people are saying about your brand in social media? Choose Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, etc. Would you also like to know what people are saying about you in your relevant newspapers? Choose print and web. Different topics and media outlets have different search words, and you might want different streams when monitoring Instagram versus the local newspaper.

Search words

Finding the right content requires the right search words. Start by adding the basics information about your brand. Is there an alternative spelling or abbreviation of your brand? Make sure you cover it all.

The second tip is: Additional information about your brand should be added to specify your search. Are there other brands with the same name? Include associated search words that are relevant to your brand and exclude words that are generating irrelevant content to your brand. Narrow your search by adding extra criteria and include countries or language variations- as Hypefactors monitor worldwide.

Final tips and tricks: Advanced settings

After adding the number of streams and relevant search words, there are some final tips and tricks you should know about in order to optimize your media monitoring stream.

Auto clippings. Are you handling hundreds of clippings each day? This can be time-consuming and it is hard to keep track of all the mentions. Hypefactors’ AI automatically saves all your mentions to measure and gives you the opportunity to gather data and generate reports. If you only care about some specific news, you can manually decide which mentions to include. Otherwise, all clippings will be autosaved to measure, by turning on autosaving in your stream.

Clone or copy stream. Are you happy about your current stream for a brand or topic, and would you like to clone it? No problem. You can easily clone or copy your favorite stream to another brand or the same brand. By simply clicking on “edit stream” on a previous stream, two options are displayed down in the left corner: “change brand” or “clone”. By clicking on either of them, you will have the option to use your current stream again.

Use tags. Do you have several streams under one brand, but only want to make a report on one stream? Add tags under “advanced” when creating or editing a stream. You can filter by tags when generating reports and extract content from that specific stream in your report.

RSS feed. Would you like for more people in your office to know what’s been written about your brand? Create an auto RSS feed to your intranet. That way, colleagues can engage and learn more about the company’s earned media. Read our blog-post about RSS-feed to learn more about it.

Be smart about your media monitoring streams. These tips and tricks will help gather the most specific and optimized content about your brand. You are always welcome to contact our Hypefactors Customer Success Team if you need help with optimizing your monitoring streams: support@hypefactors.com

What is an RSS feed?
Without getting too technical, one could say that an RSS feed is a standardized system to distribute content from online publishers to internet users. The system or feed will update itself automatically. This is beneficial for users that very easily can follow updates. Hypefactors’ RSS feeds display a headline and a brief description of the mention with a link directly to the article, which provides the reader with a simplistic yet sophisticated way of getting an overview of the latest mentions.

How to create an RSS feed in Hypefactors
Hypefactors have made it even easier to set up an RSS feed. Simply go to settings, first click ‘Brand’ and then click the RSS symbol. Here you can create, view and edit your feeds. Press ‘Create RSS feed’, give it a catchy name and save it.

If you have several feeds, you can select which feed you would like to take a look at by clicking ‘Select RSS feed to view´. Click ‘View RSS Feed’ to fetch the URL.

Select mentions for your feed
The next step is to gather mentions to your feed, which you do under ‘Monitor’. Here you can press ‘Select multiple mentions’ and check the checkboxes to select your mentions. You can choose mentions across all your streams that are monitoring online media outlets.

Here you choose which feed you would like to add mentions to.

You can also view, change order and delete mentions.

The easiest way to add the feed to your website is by adding the XML/URL through a plug-in. If your site is running any of the common CRM systems, chances are that it provides a good plugin that covers your needs. For WordPress users, we suggest RSS Aggregator by Feedzy or WP RSS Aggregator.

Add all mentions from a stream
If you prefer to add an entire media monitoring stream with all of its mentions to your website, you can do so when creating or editing a stream in Monitor.

Make sure your stream only includes online media outlets and scroll down to ‘Advanced’ and press ‘Enable Auto RSS feed’. Click the RSS icon, it takes you to the XML/URL file that you can add to your website just like described above.

If you have questions about Hypefactors RSS feeds, you are always welcome to contact our Customer Success Team: support@hypefactors.com

Even though the web version of Hypefactors is better than ever, there are (hopefully) times when you’re not sitting in front of the computer, but you still want to take a brief look at your media coverage. No matter if it’s to track your freshly released campaign at all times or to prevent a shitstorm even faster – it’s nice to have instant mobile access.

What features can you use in the new app?

Just like with the old app, you can use both Measure and Monitor to view current brands and streams. The new version also offers improved access to the monitoring results and adds the full scope of our media analytics.

Under Monitor, you can access all your mentions and the specific information of each clipping, such as impressions made, sentiment, country etc. Additionally, you can look at the analytics of a specific stream and see the total mentions you’ve had, in what media outlets, as well as the total impressions made under a 14-day period.

In Measure, you’re given an overview of all of your brands but can also go in-depth with the specific facts we have gathered.

How to use the app

Follow the quick guide on how to get started with media monitoring and analytics on the go!

Once you have downloaded the app, you simply sign in with the email and password connected to your Hypefactors account. When you have signed in, the menu with Monitor, Measure and Settings is at the bottom of the screen.

Select a brand

On the top of the screen, you can see all your available brands. If you have more than five brands you can drag them sideways and click the one you would like to view.

Monitor streams and clippings

In the Monitoring section, you can view all your mentions for the selected stream. If you want to change the stream, you click the top section and can from there choose to view another stream.

Stream analytics

While in Monitoring, you can click “Reports” in the top section next to the stream selector and see the 14-day analysis over the number of mentions and impressions made, as well as the distribution in media outlets.

Measure the value

To view your analytics, you click the graph at the bottom of the screen.
Here you can filter the view from the filter bar at the top, choosing what dates, tiers, media outlets, countries etc. that you’d like to analyze.

You’ll be met by a familiar overview of the analytics at the top to get a brief understanding of your media coverage in the period. If you continue to scroll down, you can see the split between different media types and categories, the reputation analysis, the branding facts, the top clippings, etc.

Download the app

Even if you’re already an existing user on the previous version of the mobile app, to use the new version you need to update/download it from.

You can download it here:

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hypefactors.mobile

Apple: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1501325628

Media coverage reports are key to proving the value of your earned media efforts. However, creating reports tend to be quite tedious, rather time-consuming and something a lot of communications professionals dread to do. Although, not showing the results of your PR efforts to top management reduces the power of the communications department and could potentially lead to a decrease in funds.

Luckily, with Hypefactors you can ease the pain of doing it by getting ready-made coverage and performance reports made by automation in seconds, without losing the personal touch of the report.

How do you create reports the Hypefactors-way?

If you were to create a media coverage report the traditional way of using Powerpoint or similar tools, you would definitely need a longer step-by-step manual than this brief blog post. Alternatively, you might have tried a tool where you need to insert all the links or clippings yourself. A bit better than the 100% manual solution, but still not what you need.

The pain-relieving thing with creating a report the Hypefactors-way is that there is no need for lengthy guides – It’s that simple and intuitive. And you do not need to upload the clippings – it’s all done by automation.

By clicking on the heading “Reports” you can create your own customised reports from parameters such as brands, markets, time periods, activities, and media type thanks to easy filters.

Updates tastier than morning coffee

Instead of having reports looking like they came straight out of Hypefactors, you can now make them look like you made them yourselves from scratch! Keep the professional and accurate content but with a personalised design. You now have the possibility to choose a colour scheme that matches your company’s design, pick a nice-looking font and insert your logo into the report.

Another way to personalise your report is to “hide pages”, which allows you to further emphasize the most important facts and choose your centre of attention. But don’t worry, by hiding pages you’re not deleting any facts and you can choose to include them in another report. That way, you can customize the reports depending on who’s the recipient.

When you have designed your masterpiece you can make this a template for future reports – making it even faster and simpler to generate reports.

Similarly, all your reports are saved in the “Report Archive”, where you can, later on, download old reports if you’d like.

This is the fourth post in a series of posts discussing AI techniques for reputation management. Find the previous post in this series.

In this blog post we will look at how Hypefactors is pushing the-state-of-the-art of AI assisted reputation management by going beyond the limitations of sentiment analysis as discussed in a previous post.

As discussed in the previous post, we have identified several shortcomings of traditional sentiment analysis systems offered by most PR and reputation management platforms in the market today:

• Sentiment analysis systems are fundamentally incapable of identifying statements that impact your reputation positively or negatively without expressing feelings and opinions.
• Many sentiment systems in use today does not take into account mentions of your brand that express sentiment towards something or someone else, and will in many cases imprecisely assign sentiment to the mention overall.
• The performance of many sentiment systems degrade when applied to news or social media data because these sources are linguistically different from the available training data sources.

In response to these shortcomings we have researched and redesigned an alternative approach which we believe will deliver much greater value than what is possible for other PR management products in the market. The core features of this AI system is:

• Ability to predict whether or not a particular statement will impact your brand’s reputation negatively or positively even when the statement expresses no sentiment.
• Ability to distinguish between different targets of reputation polarity within the same text, and assign labels to them independently.
• Ability to assign reputation polarity labels to text sources in 104 different languages
• Trained on our in house curated datasets to provide accurate predictions on the media sources that are relevant to your brand.

Concretely, consider the following statement taken from a news article describing how Grundfos Lifelink is delivering technology that enables clean drinking water in Africa:

“There is plenty of water underground in most areas. The challenge is to make a system which is sustainable. There is no point setting up a system to supply people with water if they cannot afford to maintain it. It will simply fall into disrepair and very quickly be shut down. This is not a viable approach,” says Peter Todbjerg Hansen, Managing Director of Grundfos Lifelink.

Most conventional sentiment analysis systems label the above statement as negative because of the presence of phrases such as fall into disrepair, be shut down and not a viable approach. Imagine that you are a PR manager at Grundfos Lifelink. The label you are provided by a state-of-the-art sentiment analysis system is technically correct, but it’s not useful for you to understand how the mention impacts the reputation of Grundfos Lifelink since this is the exact opposite of the sentiment analysis label, namely positive.

First and foremost, we are building our own curated datasets for training machine learning systems to label natural language, not with sentiment, but with what is generally known as reputation polarity.

Reputation polarity analysis (RPA) is concerned with labelling text with the expected impact on the reader’s perception of brand reputation in a negative, neutral or positive direction. In contrast to sentiment analysis, RPA captures most of what you care about for the purpose of reputation management.

Challenges of Reputation Polarity Analysis

From an engineering perspective, RPA is a much more difficult problem than sentiment analysis. An RPA system must be able to do everything a sentiment analysis system can do, since the expression of positive and negative feelings and opinions toward a brand is likely to impact the reader’s perception of its reputation. In addition, an AI system for predicting reputation polarity must also be able to recognize events that are generally associated with negative changes in reputation perception such as product recalls, or events associated with positive changes in reputation perception such as charity contributions.

Finally, the impact of certain events on the reputation of your organization can depend on the type of your organization or brand. For example, if you are a tax-funded organization, throwing an extravagant party may influence your reputation negatively. If you are a private company on the other hand, the same event may not impact your reputation or may perhaps even impact it positively. A successful RPA system must learn to make these complicated distinctions as well, which requires a model of facts that are often not immediately expressed in the text itself.

Targeted Reputation Polarity Analysis

In addition to tackling these difficult problems, our AI system is designed to make distinctions about different targets of reputation polarity within the same piece of text. This enables us to provide correct labels for the United Airlines example in the previous section, depending on whether the target is considered to be United Airlines or Donald Trump.

Finally we are using state-of-the-art techniques within a field of machine learning called transfer learning to provide reputation polarity analysis for 104 languages. This allows our customers to get the value of our AI systems even for truly global brands.

The Hypefactors RPA system is designed to label text with precisely this information. We believe that this improvement makes our AI system far more useful than existing solutions.

Conclusion

In this final post in our series about AI techniques for reputation management, we have seen how reputation polarity analysis gives you much more relevant information about the reputation of your brand when compared to the more common approach of sentiment analysis.

We have also discussed how Hypefactors is pushing the state-of-the-art in this field, by building AI systems that can distinguish between several targets of reputation polarity within the same piece of text which improves the accuracy of our solution in many cases.

If you want to know more about how Hypefactors can help you manage your brand’s reputation and public relations, contact us today.

This is the third post in a series of blog posts about AI techniques for media reputation management. See the previous post in the series. In the last post we discussed sentiment analysis and how it can assist you with media reputation management. In this post we will look at the limitations of sentiment analysis in the context of reputation management.

Because of the abundance of review data available online, most machine learning systems for sentiment analysis are trained on language data from this domain. Consequently, most software tools for media monitoring and reputation management provide automatic sentiment analysis of brand mentions using machine models trained on review data.

These sentiment analysis systems have a number of huge shortcomings as a tool for reputation management however. Firstly, subjective opinions and feelings expressed towards your brand represent only a fraction of the information you care about when managing the reputation of your organization. Very often, online mentions of your brand will have an impact on your reputation regardless of whether any sentiment is expressed in the text.

Sentiment Neutral Statements with Negative or Positive Reputational Impact

Consider for example the following sentence taken from a news article about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010:

Lingering oil residues have altered the basic building blocks of life in the ocean by reducing biodiversity in sites closest to the spill, which occurred when a BP drilling rig exploded in April 2010, killing 11 workers and spewing about 4m barrels of oil into the Gulf.

The sentiment of the above phrase is close to neutral: no positive or negative feelings or opinions are directly expressed by the author or any other sources, it is simply a statement of facts. However, the reported facts clearly have a negative impact on the reputation of British Petroleum (BP), and obviously it would be extremely useful if their reputation management software platform could alert them to such mentions. Traditional sentiment analysis is fundamentally useless in this situation.

Incorrectly Targeted Sentiment

Since the target of reviewer sentiment is so easily identified in a review, most machine learning systems trained on data from this domain make no special effort to distinguish between different targets of sentiment. For this reason, the analysis provided by these models when applied to data outside of the review domain, for example news or social media data, is not granular enough to be useful for reputation management.

As an illustration, consider the following phrase taken from a news article about the incident in which a United Airlines passenger was forcibly removed from an overbooked flight in 2017:

After a further uproar, (even President Trump described United’s treatment of [the passenger] as “horrible”), United issued what was perceived as a more sincere apology, with [United’s CEO] promising such an incident would never happen again on United.

Both United Airlines and Donald Trump are mentioned in this sentence. A sentiment analysis system that does not distinguish between sentiment expressed towards different targets would most likely classify the sentence as expressing negative sentiment because of the presence of words such as horrible and uproar. This is correct if the target is considered to be United Airlines, but not if the target is considered to be Donald Trump. As a consequence, a reputation management system that assigns sentiment irrespective of which target is considered would give misleading information about Donald Trump in this case.

Sentiment analysis systems trained on review data are often much less accurate when applied to data from other domains such as news or social media because of the differences in how people express themselves in these domains: journalists generally do not express sentiment in the same way a reviewer does, which are both different from how a poster on social media expresses sentiment. As a consequence, the patterns a machine learning system trained on review data has learnt to recognize as evidence for predicting sentiment in this domain will generally not be useful for predicting sentiment in other domains.

Review Language is Dissimilar to Social Media and News Language

Even more problematically, most online review data is in English. For global organizations, successful reputation management requires monitoring media sources in many languages. In order to use sentiment analysis systems trained on English data exclusively, special steps must be taken that either involve costly translation of all relevant news articles and social media posts, or complex, state-of-the-art methods that allow the trained system to transfer what it has learned from one language to another. As a consequence, most reputation management systems support sentiment analysis of sources only in a small number of languages.

Conclusion

In this post we have looked at the limits of sentiment analysis for media reputation management. We have seen that sentiment analysis produces only a subset of the information you need to effectively manage your brands’ media reputation. We also discussed how many sentiment systems do not differentiate between different targets of sentiment within the same text, and that sentiment analysis systems that are based on english review data often produces low quality analysis when applied to news or social media data.

In the next post we will discuss how Hypefactors is working to develop solutions that overcomes these limitations.

This is the second post in a series of posts discussing AI techniques for reputation management.

In this post we will look at sentiment analysis, a very common AI technique that can help your organization identify online mentions of your brand that you want to react to. Sentiment analysis is very useful in a media monitoring context because even with automatic detection of your brand mentions, it is still challenging to identify mentions that require your attention when your brand generates thousands of mentions daily.

We’ll start with a brief description of what sentiment analysis is, followed by an explanation of modern AI techniques for sentiment analysis.

What is Sentiment Analysis?

Sentiment analysis is a collection of techniques for automatically detecting subjective opinions and feelings expressed by some source towards some target in natural language. Online product and service reviews is a good example of a domain where sentiment analysis can be made useful, since the source and the target are easily identified as the author and the subject of the review respectively.

Take for example the following review of the Hypefactors app taken from the review site capterra.com:

Really easy interface and configuration. The customer service team is very helpful and the set-up was done in one day.

The subjective opinion expressed by the author towards Hypefactors is positive in this case, as indicated by phrases such as easy interface and configuration and helpful customer service team.

Sentiment analysis is a challenging problem. Simple rule based systems often fail because of the huge variability of natural language. Consider for example the simple sentence:

The movie is surprising with plenty of unsettling plot twists.

A successful sentiment analysis system must understand that the normally negative word unsettling is actually positive in the context of movie reviews. Add to this the complexities of negation (I don’t hate that movie) and sarcasm, and it’s clear to see that coming up with a list of rules that determines the sentiment of a phrase is close to impossible.

For this reason most modern systems are based on a statistical approach that attempts to learn what positive, negative or neutral sentiment means. These techniques are collectively known as machine learning.

Machine Learning techniques for Sentiment Analysis

Using a large collection of reviews and associated sentiment labels, it’s possible to train a machine learning system to recognize such linguistic indicators of sentiment, and use them to accurately predict whether the sentiment of any review is negative, neutral or positive. Most modern sentiment analysis systems are based on a machine learning technique called supervised learning. In this learning paradigm, the system is produced by a process referred to as training in which a training algorithm is applied to a large collection of inputs (text in this case) and desired associated outputs. The output of training is a model. The process is illustrated below.

The model is a mapping from text to its most likely label. Once the model is trained it can be used to classify new, unlabeled data without human input.

Today, deep learning models are by far the most common models used in supervised learning for natural language processing problems such as sentiment analysis. Deep learning is an umbrella term that covers a number of different techniques with the common trait that the model consists of a series of nonlinear vector-to-vector transformations of the input, until the output of the final vector transformation is used as input to a classification algorithm.

The training algorithm for deep learning models is called backpropagation. It works by adjusting relevant parameters of the model’s vector transformation layers and classification layer in a direction that improves the accuracy of the model on the labeled input data. In other words, the model learns to recognize patterns in the training data that are evidence of negative, neutral or positive sentiment.

Conclusion

In this post we have looked at sentiment analysis as a tool for reputation management. We have seen how sentiment analysis can in some cases alert you to mentions that carry negative or positive sentiment. We have also discussed why building a sentiment analysis system pose many challenges because of the variability of natural language.

In the next post in the series, we will discuss how Hypefactors is improving the state-of-the-art in sentiment analysis, by addressing the shortcomings of sentiment analysis of reputation management.

For many years, the PR industry has measured its outcomes using a metric called AVE – Advertising Value Equivalent. AVEs are measured by multiplying the size of a press clipping with the price rate for a full-page ad in a particular medium. Often a multiplier is added – frequently in the range of 3 to 10 – to allow for the integrity factor of news copy over advertising.

They refer to how much an advertisement of equivalent size and circulation would be worth. But in recent years, marketers have shunned AVEs as a valid tool for measuring PR value, for many reasons. The two essential reasons are these:

1. AVE’s values are often unrealistically high
The strength of AVE as a measuring method is that it offers an indication of how much cost your PR department saves you on advertising, and that it is very easy to apply. But, when calculating AVEs, professionals often end up with values that are way too high. The official price rates for advertising don’t necessarily reflect the price rates – because agencies often negotiate much lower prices. Add the multiplier, and you will end up with a metric that is simply too inaccurate.

2. AVEs don’t distinguish between good and bad press
Since AVEs are purely quantitative, they cannot measure the quality of each press clipping. They don’t take into account the character of the coverage, whether or not the media’s readership fits in the brand’s target group, or if the mentioning is just secondary. Thus, negative or irrelevant press might still add positive values to a company’s overall evaluation of their PR work.

In other words, AVEs can be highly misleading. Consequently, they have been criticised by “Measurement queen” Katie Paine, for obvious reasons: they’re good for making PR outcomes look fantastic – without really being so.

The Barcelona Principles
But let’s quit the name-calling for a moment and look into what alternatives PR pros really have. AMEC, the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, published their 7 Barcelona Principles in 2010 as a new approach for better and more valid ways of measuring PR value, according to the organisation.

1. Importance of goal setting and measurement
Apart from setting clear goals (which should be a part of every PR strategy), the people behind the Barcelona Principles value a holistic approach to measurement. That means including representative media, as well as changes in awareness among key stakeholders, comprehension, attitude, and behaviour in the analysis.

2. Measuring the effect on outcomes is preferred to measuring outputs
To AMEC, measuring outcomes means to measure shifts in awareness, comprehension, attitude and behaviour regarding products and the company itself, in addition to the stakeholders’ own beliefs and behaviours.

3. The effect on business results can and should be measured where possible
AMEC puts emphasis on market mix models when measuring PR’s effect on business results. That means including every parameter you can think of that might be influencing your results. They also state a need for developing these models among PR professionals, as it is still an undeveloped field in the business.

4. Media measurement requires quantity and quality
According to AMEC, professionals should take into account the impressions among stakeholders and target audiences in particular when measuring media – not just the general numbers of impressions. They should also look into the actual content of clippings – the tone, credibility and relevance, message delivery and relevance to the specific medium.

5. AVEs are not the value of public relations
AMEC rejects the use of AVEs as a metric for evaluating Public Relations, as mentioned above. They are only accepted (although in a revised form) in cases where there is a particular need to compare the cost of space from earned versus paid media.

6. Social media can and should be measured
There is no ‘single metric’ for measuring social media, AMEC states. They recommend measuring through several different channels, such as web and search analytics, sales and CRM data, and survey data. No completely reliable sources for this type of measurement is accessible at this point (as user accounts are still relatively private), and must be experimented with and developed according to the company’s goals.

7. Transparency and replicability are paramount to sound measurement
AMEC underlines, in true academic manner, that the sources of data, interview methods, and analysis methodology should be stated loud and clear, and included in the measurement reports.

So far, so good.

Does it work?
The question is, however, if PR professionals can really measure PR value on the grounds of these principles. First of all, to live up to the principles, it would be necessary to develop your own models of measurement, and developing them as you go. Being generally qualitative, an approach like that is more time consuming than what many companies care for.

Second, what the Barcelona Principles seem to evolve around is in fact companies’ reputation – which is great, though something completely different than measuring the concrete value of concrete PR performances.

Third, we would argue that these principles are more of an academic statement, than it is an actual operational measurement method – AMEC want to demonstrate that AVEs are pointless, but they’re not presenting a genuine alternative.

To sum up, the answer to the question in the headline is this: Neither AVE or the Barcelona Principles will measure your PR value.
So what are PR pros to do, you might be asking, evaluate their efforts ad hoc?!

The Next Generation
Fortunately no. Measuring PR value is complicated. Both AVEs and the Barcelona Principles have major issues that are hard to overlook for companies that want to improve by measuring the value of their PR performances. That’s why we, at Hypefactors, have worked so hard with developing a metric for measuring real PR value. A metric that balances both quantitative and qualitative data by including factors like the type of media and number of impressions, as well as the tone and relevance of press clippings – while still being simple and user-friendly.

Hypefactors lets you compare markets, benchmark, and keep your PR strategy on track in an easy and operational manner.

Though there’s no perfect way for professionals to measure the outcome of their PR, this might still be the one that comes closest. With a minimum of efforts, it can paint a quantitative picture of whether your hard work is moving pebbles or mountains, and thus be a valuable assistant in reaching your PR goals.