He Said, She Said ... Reporting Media Coverage

Friday night I found myself sitting around a table with co-workers with a sangria in hand to ease myself into the weekend. We chatted about weekend plans, frustrations at the office and then we began to talk about one aspect of our job in particular - measuring media coverage for our clients.

Quick update for those of you who are not aware, I have stayed on at the agency at which I completed my internship. I continue to work with tech clients and I do mostly consumer-ish type PR for them.

One of my daily tasks is to monitor the media coverage our clients have in Canadian outlets. Each month, I compile a competitive report outlining my client's coverage in addition to their competitors coverage for the past month. In addition to simply stating the number of hits, I analyze the coverage to determine how each party fared in regards to the tone of the media mentions among other analytics. In the end, the client is usually happy to see that their company has the most number of positive media mentions.

This report is a great way to track what the media is saying about our client and if media coverage has increased as a result of our media relations efforts. However, I struggle when sending this report off to the client because of how we report the findings.

First, I am the individual who rates the mentions in terms of being positive, neutral or negative on a daily basis. Therefore, another individual might rate the same mentions I have seen differently.

Second, who is to say that the competitors we track in our monthly report are tracking their media mentions the exact same way? We know that they are most likely not using identical methods to track coverage and therefore, how can we confidently report that we have gained more positive coverage than they have in the past month?

Now, programs have been developed in an effort to consolidate methods of media relations reporting across the industry (Ex. Media Relations Rating Points developed by the CPRS). However, I have yet to see this method used within my workplace.

I am new to the agency world and to analyzing media coverage, but I know that this issue with media reporting will irk me every time I make that report. Although the client is usually happy to see a slew of positive coverage for their company, I truly believe that we need to flag that our method may determine much different results than others. Perhaps using MRdfP is the answer; perhaps using multiple analytical tools to determine consistency would be appropriate.

In the end, I think it is crucial that as PR professionals in an agency setting communicate our analytical methods to our clients so that they can understand the subjectivity of reporting media coverage.