Here’s a quick six-minute video explaining how to use social intelligence for news media analysis and more importantly, the context of their coverage. Enjoy the video and subscribe to my Youtube channel to be the notified when new videos are added.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

You know I read somewhere that it takes 21 days to build a habit, and this is video #3 so I have quite always to go.

But I am excited because today I am going to talk about social intelligence and I am going to focus specifically on using social intelligence for news media analysis and mine what the news media is writing about as it relates to specific topics that might be important to your business.

Now there are a lot of media intelligence platforms out there, to name a few there’s Muckrack which is a very good platform which allows you to monitor media and it also pulls in engagement numbers and unique monthly visitors.

There’s also Trendkite, which was acquired by Cision a coupe of years ago. And you know they are probably the most innovative. They are adding new features in. They are integrating with the legacy Cision platform.

But the only thing that those platforms don’t do for you is that it doesn’t give you the context of the news coverage that is happening when thinking about news media analysis.

And so this video is important, especially for those who work in PR, because it’ll give you some insight and some data to make decisions and prioritize which media that you want to go after.

Now, in most audience intelligence platforms, you have the ability to specify a specific URL or specific media that you want to analyze.

And so, you can have your top 25 media, it could be all tech media, all business media, or all travel media, or if its just one site that you want to understand you can do so and the reason why I like website filters, is because it really does eliminate the spam, because as I said in the first video, typically when you are looking at the media and trying to understand what the world is saying about a topic, you are puling in things from everywhere.

You are pulling in sites that don’t matter to you. I don’t know about you but I have seen reports after reports with Benzinga on it. Benzinga is this distribution platform for press releases and nobody reads it but it does skew the data when you are looking at it from a volume perspective.

So I have two examples that I want to share with you today. The first is in the business context and its assuming that you understand already which publications that you want to after.

So we are going to analyze the context of a particular topic on that publication.

The second is more consumer focused and its assuming you don’t know which publication you want to go after and you are trying to find and understand which media publications are really driving the conversation and coverage about a topic that’s important to you business.

Ok this first example, we are looking at one specific publication, we are using website filters to analyze just Vox and we are trying to understand within 2019 how often they have covered artificial intelligence.

Let’s assume that you aren’t sure that it’s a relevant publication and you want to dig a little bit deeper.

Now here we can see that over the course of 2019, Vox covered or at least talked about artificial intelligence about 582 times.  Of that there were 132 mentions of AI in the headlines.

Now that’s key because now you know that’s a story that they are leading with and that’s something about artificial intelligence.

Now volume is great but there’s nothing insightful here other than its a topic of relevance for Vox.

More importantly is understanding the context of that coverage.

What we are looking at here is a topic analysis of that AI coverage.  You’ll see subtopics like Open AI, Machine Learning, Facial Recognition, AI Ethics, etc.

Now the six of these color-coded boxes represent volume. The larger the box, the larger volume of coverage.

So you can begin to understand what is important to Vox and the topics that they are writing about the most. This is insightful because you can use it to inform and position how you pitch your business or company to Vox when you are on the phone with a reporter.

You also want to understand the vernacular and language they are using within that context. So the smaller outer boxes represent the actual words within the articles that is most important with the media.

So you’ll see things like Human Bias, Leading AI, Silicon Valley — they are using these terms at a high volume, and by doing so they are influencing their readership and audience to start using that same language.

So a smart marketer, a smart PR person is going to say, well ok, not only do I want to position my pitches and use the same language that the media is using to be more relevant but we also want to use these terms in the headlines of our blog posts, or our social content or even our website content.

So the second example here is more focused on consumer lifestyle.

So let’s assume that you are new to a company and you are not quite sure what media publications that you need to focus on or target. So you want to do a quick analysis to identify those top media publications.

Now all I did was look up fashion or beauty in a platform within all new media, I pulled in 3.2 million articles.

So 3.2 million articles is a lot and there’s a lot of spam as I look through he data.

So what I did to isolate some specific and relevant coverage, so I created a filter and pulled in all mentions of fashion or beauty specifically in the headline of that article.

So I went from 3.2 million down to 233 thousand. And that’s still quite a bit. There’s a lot to sift through.

From there I looked up fashion or beauty and trends so I can see which media publications are really driving that trend conversation — what was happening in 2020, what spring trends are happening, summer trends, bridal trends. And that gave me about 4.3 thousand articles and that is a manageable number to work with.

These are the 5 publications that are really driving the conversation around fashion and beauty and trends.

Now the reason why they are the top 5 is because of one data point and it’s volume. Now in a future episode I am going to talk about how to look at volume and other metrics like engagement or UVMs, to specific outlets to make better decisions.

But in this case we are looking at the highest volume of publications that are writing about fashion or beauty and trends.

Now looking at the top is great but let’s take it one step further and analyze what those top 5 media publications are writing about as it relates to these topics.

And so you can see another topic analysis and you’ll see topics like dress, and beauty products and trends and fashion week etc.

And for the same reasons I mentioned before about AI is important for this and that is – if you understand the context of that coverage, you can position your pitches, your bylines, your engagement with journalists around those same topics.

Remember you want to be as relevant as possible so when you speak the same language as the media, they are more likely to listen to you and engage with you and maybe even write about you.

It’s time to use social intelligence for news media analysis.