A widely known adage in business is, “What gets measured gets managed.” But perhaps we should go a step further. For measuring a seemingly intangible metric like reputation; it’s not just about what you measure but how you choose to measure it.
For Communications professionals navigating the pressures of demonstrating impact and effectiveness, with results once based on gut feel, traditional metrics like impressions or volume are no longer keeping pace. How should you measure success in a way that translates across teams, stakeholders, and decision-makers?
Meet Media Impact Scores - a comprehensive way to value the success of reputation, influence, and effectiveness of your PR and communications campaigns. In this article, we’ll explore what a media impact score is, how it’s calculated, the metrics involved, and why it can help you demonstrate success.
What is a Media Impact Score?
A Media Impact Score is a metric or KPI that offers a quantifiable measure of the impact of PR and communications efforts. Impact Scores are a great way to demonstrate a quantitive and comprehensive value of trends in your PR and Communications activity.
Some metrics to include within an impact score are sentiment, salience, and volume (though we’ll get into more detail below). When you combine these scores up to 100, you can use AI for dynamic weighting determined by the relevance to your company’s initiatives.
The benefit of an impact score is that it demonstrates trends, offers direct comparisons to peers and competitors, and highlights where the opportunities or weaknesses are in your communications strategy.
How are Media Impact Scores calculated and measured?
With an Impact Score, you can interpret volume, sentiment, and salience at scale using artificial intelligence with real-time, dynamic weighting.
At Signal AI, Reputation Impact Scores are powered by a framework and proprietary scoring algorithm that digests two billion news articles, social media posts, financial announcements, research reports, podcasts, and broadcasts annually to dive deep into what drives positive reputation. From there, we fuse multiple metrics, like share of voice and net positive sentiment. AI enables us to capture salience—or how prominent a company is featured in an article.
Because storylines shift daily, our Dynamic Weighting system changes the importance of a topic over a given period, ensuring a story’s importance (or irrelevance) is accurately factored into scores.
The ways to calculate an Impact Score can vary and should be bespoke. Ultimately, there is no one correct way to measure or industry benchmark, as the Impact Score should be proprietary based on your organization’s specific methodology and relevant to a particular use case. Let’s get into more detail on the metrics that can make up an Impact Score.
What metrics can make up a Media Impact Score?
Here are some traditional metrics that make up an Impact Score, depending on your objectives. This section also includes key questions you should answer before deciding how to calculate a Media Impact Score.
Sentiment analysis
Sentiment is an excellent indicator of the perception of your company or brand and is one of the key metrics powering your Impact Score, based on positive, neutral, or negative mentions.
However, sentiment can be subjective across different teams. Signal AI now offers sentiment analysis measured your way to meet your specific needs. The new Configurable Sentiment Analysis feature now allows communicators the flexibility to choose how to weigh positive, negative, or neutral sentiment, with five ways of aggregating sentiment.
Brand pillars or key messaging
Answering these questions helps better understand the brand pillar or messaging rubric to feed into Impact Scores:
- Are we leading the conversation about the things we care about?
- How do we compare to others on the same topics?
- Are we landing clear messages about who we are?
- Are these landing with target media?
Once you have the answers to these questions, you can use AI to track key reputation pillars, messages, and keywords relevant to your brand. AI (with human input) then calculates the number of messaging terms and assigns a point system.
Spokespeople cited as experts
This metric calculates whether a company, data, or person is cited or quoted in an article as an expert or leading voice on a topic or story. The scoring can also depend on the tone of the coverage.
- Do we have people that our audiences can associate with?
- How are they being received?
- Who is being mentioned?
- Is that person being quoted directly, or is this a passing mention?
Salience or mention prominence
AI can help you calculate scores based on whether your mention is a feature, prominent mature, or a passing mention.
- How dominant are we in coverage?
- Is our brand mentioned in the headline, summary, or full content?
- Are we only getting mentions towards the end of a story instead of in the opening lines?
- What is the number of syndications? What would you calculate as ‘virality’ on social or traditional media?
Salience or prominence against competitors
Similar to the above metric, you can also calculate your scores whether your competitors are mentioned within the same article.
Source authority or Key media tiers
Your source authority, or your source ranking, means one media outlet or publication “weighs” more than another, usually ranked in a Tier system. How you choose to rank certain media sources will impact the overall reputation impact score.
- Is this a priority outlet for your brand, one within your proactive pitch lists?
- Is this a trade publication or popular press?
- Is this a global publication or a local outlet?
- What is the audience reach or number of eyes that could be exposed to coverage?
At Signal AI, we can help you with real-time dynamic weighting based on your business objectives.
Customer story: How Mastercard uses Sentiment to Calculate their Earned Media Reputation Score
“The wrong metrics can lead you down the wrong path, so choose ones that matter.” - Carolyn Ksiazek, VP of Global Communications at Mastercard.
Mastercard’s Global Communications Team, led by Carolyn Ksiazek, is responsible for measuring, monitoring, and reporting on success. They focus on a measurement framework that revolves around their proprietary Earned Media Reputation Score, to move beyond vanity metrics such as impressions or reach.
Carolyn has seen how the nuance of sentiment impacts its measurement framework and their proprietary Earned Media Reputation Score.
In our webinar, ‘How Sentiment Helps Power MasterCard’s Earned Media Reputation Score,’ you can hear from Carolyn Ksiazek, VP of Global Communications, on how Mastercard measures their Earned Media Reputation score.
Why Media Impact Scores make a difference
Organizations can be at vastly different places along their measurement journey. Answering these questions can involve multiple stakeholders building a bespoke framework. Is the effort worth it? Why prioritize Impact Scores for your measurement framework?
A media impact or reputation score can influence your PR & communications campaigns, media strategy, and executive communications strategy based on the scoring your brand deems important.
With Impact Scores, you can:
- Better quantify and define what success looks like for you.
- Influence strategic decision-making and resource allocation.
- Measure the success of your campaigns and activations.
- Demonstrate PR’s value and showcase ROI to key leadership and stakeholders across the business.
Signal AI's Neil Morrison shared this perspective on impact scores:
"I've been working with PR & Comms professionals to build measurement frameworks for the last 20 years and it's always been a struggle to demonstrate real impact. Impact scores, where we take a composite metrics approach, enable us to determine what good looks like from the outset and then track this moving forward.
An Impact score focused on Quality over Quantity enables Comms leaders to drive the correct behaviour in their teams, to ensure that content is representing their brand or company in the most effective way towards specific stakeholders rather than just generating hits. It is incredibly important that this framework is not a black box methodology, where our clients can focus on the metrics that fit with their objectives and can weight each metric determined by its importance. AI is helping us build these frameworks not just for our clients, but for their competitors and peers. We are limiting the blind spots in measurement to provide a clear view of the reputation challenges within any industry."
Ready to learn more?
Measure your PR and Comms performance with minimal effort and high precision. Signal AI Media Impact Reports bring together the latest in cutting-edge AI and human expertise to deliver data-driven analyses on media impact and measurement.