How to Make Sense of Your Media Data in Today’s Hyper Speed World

PR and communications professionals know that understanding brand performance and audience sentiment is twofold. On one hand, they must cast a wide enough net to consume the millions of news articles, social posts, television and radio broadcasts, blogs, podcasts and other types of media content seemingly created by the minute. On the other hand, they need to put this wealth of data into context; they need to uncover patterns across media content and understand the impact on brand performance, press releases and marketing efforts.

Quite frankly, humans weren’t wired to track so many moving pieces of digital and print content at once—let alone make sense of it fast enough to act on it. 

So in a world of digital and print media that now moves at hyper speed, you need powerful (i.e., efficient and comprehensive) media intelligence tools to find what’s relevant to you just as quickly. And if your current media intelligence tools aren’t cutting it, you’ll be left with mountains of media content without context, blindspots in news and social feed coverage—and no idea of what audiences really think of your brand.

Here's a high-level view of the media intelligence features that can help you avoid information overload and make sense of media data in today’s hyper speed world.

A wealth of media content, purposefully channeled

Trying to capture all the world’s media content is a lot like drinking from a firehose. To keep a handle on things, some PR and communications professionals might dial back on how much media data they can see and analyze at one time. In other words, they only consume the media data they know they can put into context. But there’s a huge caveat: If you narrow the media data stream too much, you risk letting critical media data slip by undetected.

Plus, because you limited your data to a small sample size, you have no way of knowing if the data you captured is truly representative of overall audience sentiment. The answer, however, isn’t to control the amount of data coming in; it’s to channel the data before it gets to you in the first place. If you want to make fast and effective use of the world’s wealth of media content, your media intelligence needs two essential features:

1. Access to a wealth of global media content (including free and licensed content and archival data)
2. The ability to monitor, search and analyze only the most relevant content

With these features, you can open the data firehose up and channel the deluge of media information in ways relevant to your use case. That way, you keep your focus on what matters most to you without losing sight of data in the periphery that might be relevant in a way you hadn’t anticipated.

Customizable media monitoring and analytics dashboards

Customizable monitoring and analytics dashboards are vital to putting your media content into the right context and understanding it quickly. As we noted above, access to a wealth of media content is only half the equation. The other half is being able to navigate that media content in such a way that you can make sense of what’s being said about your brand quickly and act on it.

With the right media intelligence tools, you gain the ability to search, monitor, discover, benchmark and analyze relevant news topics and social media conversations via user-friendly dashboards. These dashboards ideally keep the news media “clutter” in the background and elevate only the media data most important to you in that moment.

These dashboards should also make it easy to filter media content by companies and other entities, topics, publications, social platforms and other criteria—so that you can drill down to minute details that inform your decision-making process.

News and social media alerts, plus shareable reports

With so much media content being created in the blink of an eye, it can be impossible to know when a negative news story or social post about your brand hits until it’s too late. You need to know about negative media coverage the very second it goes live. So that you can spring into action sooner to mitigate reputational damage.

The same can be said for monitoring your press releases. You need a way to monitor the responses to your PR in near real-time so that you can pivot your PR strategy as necessary. (You also need an effective way to distribute your press releases to the right journalists at the right time, which you can learn more about here. This includes being alerted to any negative responses your press release might unintentionally provoke.

A media monitoring tool that can alert you to news on specific topics and entities is key to making sense of the news and social content being generated in today’s 24/7 media world. And because responding to these alerts is paramount, the ability to generate and share reports is also critical. After all, getting buy-in from your internal stakeholders can be a painstakingly slow progress. And by the time you have the key people on board, you may already be too late.

Making sense of the hyper speed world with Nexis Media Intelligence solutions

The Nexis Media Intelligence solutions suite provide the features and capabilities necessary to make sense of the media data in today’s hyper speed world. With solutions such as Nexis Newsdesk™, you can monitor news and social data from a comprehensive range of sources—without fear that relevant news is going undetected.

Our solutions also help you search and analyze media data quickly and effectively via customizable, highly visual dashboards. And you can set alerts to stay on top of the latest news almost as soon as it hits and generate reports you need to convince others what the appropriate responses to take are.

Learn more about Nexis Media Intelligence solutions

Ready to move at hyper speed and match pace with today’s media content? Learn more about the Nexis Media Intelligence solutions and how they can help here.