Measuring your PR impact and benchmarking against your competition

Once again, we find ourselves in a recession. Naturally, the reaction of any business is to review all expenses and ask business owners to justify the existence of all projects. Public Relation is no exception to this exercise. With a median budget to purchase PR-related products of $45,800 which shoots up to $177,500 for companies with more than 1,000 employees (2006 State of the PR Profession Opinion Survey – PRSA and Bacon’s), the PR department could appear to be a good place to find savings. Hence, PR professionals have to be ready to justify the impact of their actions. However, only 6% of PR budgets are dedicated to measure and evaluate the impact PR strategy which automatically requires solutions to be affordable yet comprehensive and global in nature.

The PR solution offered in Information OnDemand a very good match for this rather urgent need. Priced at only $150 per widget, the solution is based on news provided by Newstin, a news media company that aggregates and codes more than 1 million articles daily that come from more than 150,000 information sources in 10 languages and 14 country editions.
Combined with visually pleasing and intuitive BI technology from SAP Business Objects, the result is a quite compelling solution for companies of all sizes that can deliver tangible results within seconds.


The Information OnDemand PR solution offers 5 widgets. This first widget proposes to track sentiment analysis for a given company over time. After entering the name of a company in a simple search box, the end user is asked to confirm the identification of the company from a simple list which includes all companies mentioned in the press along with the chosen company.
The widget opens up and offers a graph counting all media mentions broken into positive, negative and neutral tone. The default language is English but end users can choose to analyze media coverage from 10 languages including all western European languages as well as Chinese and Arabic.
At the click of a box, the count can become a % box clearly allowing the end user to see the how break down of positive and negative mention evolves over time; last 10 days, last 10 weeks and last 10 months and tie it back to annual PR events.
PR professionals can instantly justify their existence by answering simple questions as how many articles mention a given company, in which terms, and for which topics. The tool can also be used to monitor reputation and damage control in time of crises. Compiling the same information by hand would be hugely time consuming and certainly not as complete unless of course you speak 10 languages.

Another key feature includes a table next to the graph allowing identifying the news sources, the key topics as well as the occurrence of key words in the article. This is a pretty handy tool to get a high level overview of the topics addresses in the media and tie it back to positive, negative and neutral converage.


A second widget allows performing a side by side comparison of 2 companies. In a heart beat, end users can see which company obtains the most coverage in a given language as well as understand which company has the highest positive and negative mix at any given point. This is a pretty critical tools in these time of recessions when companies do not necessary have good news to announce and need to exercise damage control.

In times of recession, the whole industry has bad news to announce so it becomes essential to be able to benchmark your company’s image to the entire industry. This is exactly what a third widget allows end users to perform. After choosing from a comprehensive and granular list of industry, a graph displays the mix of positive and negative coverage side by side allowing the end user to determine if his or her company is fairing above or under par in terms of positive media coverage versus the entire industry. If the recession affects the entire industry, it is always a good idea to appear as the industry leader that will survive.

Completed by 2 additional widgets that allow navigating back to the news content, the Information OnDemand PR solution offers all the advantages of a pure SaaS offering. It literally takes 5 minutes for an end user to get a username and password and start working on the PR widgets. There is no software installation, no IT intervention; a simple credit card will work, unless of course you are already an IOD subscriber in which case the PR solution is part of your regular core subscription.

Bertrand Fougnies; Bertrand.fougnies@sap.com