News Headline: A true PR metric

Mentions have been the currency of measurement in the PR world for a long time. But then what is true value for a currency in the real world is the weight it carries. Mentions are no different. Just looking at the total count of brand mentions can be very misleading. To give you an example, a food-tech company got a lot of mentions recently because one of their executives who had worked with them in the past joined a travel-tech unicorn. But are these mentions adding significantly to PR value? 

Assigning weight to a mention is a subjective task. To explain it to management could be tough. So, we decided to find an easier and elegant solution. We sat down with brand managers and PR experts to understand what kind of mention is significant for a brand. From a brand manager of global consumer goods, we learned that headline mentions add a lot of recall value for a brand. PR folks told us that if you can get your brand in the headline of a story – it indicates a proactive PR effort. That’s where we started to look for insights that we can draw from headline mentions and which led us to introduce two new metrics in our product. Here they are: 

News Headline Grab

If all brands were fighting for news headlines, this metric helps you measure how many you got vs. your competitors. And when you look at this with a pie of all the stories you received mentions for, it just becomes so much more insightful. For example, in the chart below, Deloitte gets 41% of all mentions, but IBM leads the pack when it comes to news headlines. The reason is that a lot of mention for Deloitte is in the form of “According to a Deloitte report” – which is great but then Deloitte is definitely not the Hero in a lot of them. 

Proactive PR Meter

When you got mentioned in a bunch of stories, how often did you make it to the headline? No mention is a bad mention. But if it is your brand that is telling stories to the world with its proactive PR efforts, you will most likely be the leader on this chart!

These new metrics are now available in Wizikey. If you are a customer, do check them out under the Trends section. If you are not, you know what you are missing. Schedule a personalized demo for your brand via here