Traditionally media monitoring and media analysis have been time consuming exercises. So time consuming, it’s usually an after thought for communication professionals and organizations. Yet, analysis is one of the most important activities a communications professional should be engaged in.
In fact, professional associations, such as the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC), will deem a project incomplete without an evaluation phase.
However, because of the time consuming nature of media analysis, people either opt for other methods of evaluating their organizations communications activities, or they do very high level media analysis, which generally results in ‘benchmarking’.
Benchmarking is a very useful exercise, but it doesn’t come close to telling the whole story and the main reason for doing analysis or evaluation, is not to do it because it’s on the list, but to learn from mistakes and build upon trends and successes. That’s the only way to succeed in business.
Again, this is not to discount high level analysis or ‘benchmarking’. However, as the old saying goes, “the devil, is in the detail.”
Ultimately, you should be able to drill down into information, especially when you see trends. For example, if you do a report for a project you were working on and it finds that your communication efforts reached a large amount of people and then you report the project was a success based on that analysis alone.
However, other indicators, such as sales numbers provided by your company’s sales department, shows that there was little impact from your project. The reasons for this might have been revealed to you, if you had simply drilled down further into the information.
For example, you could have further segmented your information by publication or region. Maybe you only reached media that was outside of your company’s sales territories? Maybe you hit the wrong demographic?
The bottom-line is, analysis is an important function to your organization’s communications efforts and it should not be treated as an after thought. Furthermore, since evaluation has traditionally been left to the end of a project, there is a greater risk for failure. Ideally, media analysis should be real-time, allowing communication strategies and tactics to remain fluid.
18 September 2008 |
General Information |