Author: Brad Johnson

https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/620022252/0/convinceandconvertconsulting/

Media monitoring solutions are not one size fits all. There are dozens of providers and even more use cases, so start by figuring out what you want your media monitoring platform to do.  Are you looking to track traditional and social or are you looking for strategic insights? When it comes to monitoring, measurement and evaluation, listening for business intelligence is very different to monitoring for mentions, so know your priorities.

Before you start, ask the CEO or the CMO what success looks like. “The only way to start a measurement program is by being very clear on your objectives,” says Katie Paine, CEO of Paine Publishing. “Nine times out of 10 they’ll say your objective is protecting their reputation.”

To do that, at the very least you need to be able to capture and analyze what’s being said about your company, your competitors and the categories in which you compete so you can determine what the widespread beliefs are. It’s tough to interject your point of view into a conversation if you don’t know what people are talking about.

Manually reading traditional and social coverage is generally pretty easy for start-ups, cause there’s not as much being said. But for more established brands, the challenge is digesting and summarizing a large number of articles and online conversations in real time, and then analyzing them with algorithms that don’t understand the meaning of the keywords they’re tracking.

When defining your objectives, understand that if accuracy is mission critical, you’ll need to allocate sufficient resources to review your clips manually to determine widespread beliefs.

AI in Media Monitoring

Many media monitoring services claim they already have artificial intelligence capable of accurately analyzing news articles and social media posts for sentiment. They say their algorithms can automatically evaluate your reputation in real time.

But here’s the thing you need to know. It’s easy to count and score keywords in sentences for sentiment. When you consider the multiple ideas, concepts, topics and sub-topics that can be included in a single news article, accurately interpreting sentiment requires more than just natural language processing. What’s required is natural language understanding.

While AI can help process language in circumstances where the domain is narrow and the goal is concrete, when it comes to multi domain thinking, common-sense reasoning and natural language understanding, AI still falls short and according to most data scientists, it’ll probably be another 40–50 years until machines can process information at that level.

There’s also a very real chance we will never be able to build machines that can reason as well as humans can. According to Kai-Fu Lee, author of AI Superpowers, the risk of replacement for public relations specialists is among the lowest of all professions.

PR won’t be replaced by machines anytime soon. “It also cannot engage in cross domain thinking on creative tasks or ones requiring complex strategy, jobs whose inputs and outcomes aren’t easily quantified,” says Lee.

Get the Steak, Not the Sizzle 

Most services have access to the same traditional and social media news feeds, which is square one. Next, you apply Boolean keyword filters to hone in on the right information. At that, there is value to leveraging narrow AI to evaluate sentiment at the entity level, tag articles by concepts and detect geographical origin. And you can try out relevance and sentiment filters as well. But be prepared in step three to check the last two for accuracy.

Strategic insights are at the intersection of media intelligence and external data, which is why the ability to import stuff like call center transcripts and sales figures is so important, so you can spot patterns and figure out how media activity correlates to revenue.

When considering the different media monitoring platforms, rather than focus solely on breadth and depth of content or fancy AI filters, figure out if the platform has the features and capabilities you need to achieve your objectives.

“Do you really need broadcast? Because in my experience, everything winds up online anyway. Do you really need to spend an extra $24k a year, cause that’s how much it could cost. Who’s going to be doing set-up? Do you have a team of data scientists who can write Boolean or are you going to be relying on them to do it? What about reporting? Do you want automated reports or are you going to be doing that yourself? A lot of the automated reports are very pretty, but do they show value?,” asks Jonny Bentwood, Global Head of Data & Analytics at Golin.

Media Monitoring Interview Questions

To help you assess media monitoring platform providers, here’s a list of open ended questions you can use to stimulate exploratory discussions about services:

• Does it get everything or just a snippet?
• Does it get photos and graphics?
• What outlets do we need and does it capture them?
• If it doesn’t, can those outlets be added?
• Does it do social, traditional and broadcast? What about podcasts?
• How many KPIs are available to choose from on your platform?
• How much historical data is accessible?
• Can I bring in third-party data and run comparisons?
• Can I bring in usage data from my social networking profiles?
• Does it have language translation?
• Does it have image recognition so you can search images and video for logos?
• Does it measure KPIs around engagement?
• Does it understand virality, can I set my own virality parameters and how is viral amplification presented/displayed?
• Can I group the media outlets that matter most to me?
• Are there advanced, rules-based alerts you can set up via email and text?
• Instagram is notoriously difficult to monitor. To what extent can they get such data? If they say they can get all of Instagram’s data they’re either scraping it illegally or lying.
• Have you looked at the artificial intelligence layer and evaluated specific articles for relevancy or sentiment scores?
• Do they comply with copyright laws?
• Do they indemnify clients against copyright violations on their part?

The other two things to ask about are onboarding and user support. The biggest cost of changing media monitoring platforms is the time required to train staff so ease of use matters a lot because it saves you money if people can figure out how to use the service themselves.

But even if the interface is intuitive, you’re still going to need support to leverage the full potential of the platform. Some platforms have dedicated customer success teams devoted to helping you get your service up and running properly so find out what kind of onboarding services and if structured, ongoing training is provided.

For a more comprehensive look at the state of media monitoring technology, download my new 2020 Media Monitoring Buyer’s Guide which includes a side-by-side features comparison grid of all the major providers, a user rating chart with my reviews and analysis.

The post How to Select the Best Media Monitoring Solution for Your Company appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/markgrow/~3/OZ39WS-E6mU/

The post Everything is out of date because the world is new appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

https://econsultancy.com/a-day-in-the-life-of-amy-barzdukas-executive-vice-president-and-cmo-at-poly/

Everybody reading this has probably used a conference phone, but what’s it like to market them? Luckily for you, today’s ‘day in the life’ features the CMO of Poly, Amy Barzdukas.

Let’s get into it…

Please describe your job: What do you do?

I am responsible for Poly’s global marketing strategy and execution and ensuring that Poly’s customer experiences are exceptional. That means it’s my job to get the word out about Poly and its products and services, to build the Poly brand and to lead a great team that helps make Poly’s vision to be the world’s best UC technology provider a reality.

Whereabouts do you sit within the organisation? Who do you report to?

I am the Chief Marketing Officer and an Executive Vice President. I report directly to the CEO of Poly.

What kind of skills do you need to be effective in your role?

Top skills a CMO needs are curiosity, to ask questions and to be a good listener. Being curious and listening to customers, stakeholders, data, other leaders, your team – are all critical to becoming an agile marketer. I also think it’s good to have some humility and a good sense of humor, so you can be resilient and adjust your sails if the wind is no longer blowing your way.

Tell us about a typical working day…

I start every day early, reading the news and checking my email and social feeds. I might start with a stand-up leadership meeting at 7am, and squeeze in a smoothie and coffee for breakfast. My meetings with my team in Europe are early and then I arrive at work and have multiple check-ins with my team. I typically have one writing activity a day – a blog, strategy positioning paper, or reviewing approved marketing copy, etc. I love writing and like to stay involved. I close out the day around 7pm, although I am always on email. I also try to fit in exercise daily – Peloton or a yoga class are my go-to.

What do you love about your job? What sucks?

Firstly, I love the people that I work with because they inspire me every day. I love working in technology because there’s always something new and amazing around the corner. And I love when the behind-the-scenes work of a campaign is finally revealed to the world, and then seeing the results roll in. One of our biggest announcements happened about a year ago on March 18^th 2019. We launched the re-brand of Plantronics and Polycom as Poly and the response was overwhelmingly positive.

What kind of goals do you have? What are the most useful metrics and KPIs for measuring success?

It’s important in marketing to have metrics that speak to the rest of the business, so we look closely at our marketing leads funnel as that ultimately turns into revenue, and that’s what really counts. We also measure web traffic as a barometer of brand relevance, share of voice, and a host of other leading indicators. But in B2B, you’ve got to be driving revenue.

What are your favourite tools to help you to get the job done?

I might be a little old school, but I love a good spreadsheet. Give me data and let me do the pivot tables to make sense of it. Beyond that – we rely on a rich marketing technology stack to help us through the day.

How did you end up at Poly, and where might you go from here?

I’d been with a couple of very large companies and wanted to be part of an organisation that was a bit smaller, but still large enough to have impact.

Which advertising has impressed you lately?

I think Jeep’s “Groundhog Day” commercial that aired during the Super Bowl where Bill Murray reprised his role from 1993 was iconic. The award-winning ad was launched on Groundhog Day itself, February 2^nd, and is a snappy montage of adventures in a Jeep day in and day out, with him enjoying each one more and more.

It resonated with me because in the world of marketing no day is the same and gets better all the time. It also moved me because we too revisited a nostalgic and historic moment this year when we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the moon landing and marked that the first words spoken by Neil Armstrong on the moon were transmitted through a Poly headset.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QgBRvMmWk4?feature=oembed&w=652&h=367]

What advice would you give a marketer starting out?

Read as much as you can – fiction, non-fiction, books, magazines, blogs. You never know where your next great idea might come from, and a breadth of exposure is a great reminder of just how diverse our world and our customers are. It also makes you a better writer, and that is a talent that is too often lacking. When you notice an ad or a marketing campaign, ask yourself what that marketer was trying to accomplish – “reverse engineer” what the brief looked like.  Remember not to take yourself too seriously and remember to laugh.

The post A day in the life of… Amy Barzdukas, Executive Vice President and CMO at Poly appeared first on Econsultancy.

https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/620022252/0/convinceandconvertconsulting/

Media monitoring solutions are not one size fits all. There are dozens of providers and even more use cases, so start by figuring out what you want your media monitoring platform to do.  Are you looking to track traditional and social or are you looking for strategic insights? When it comes to monitoring, measurement and evaluation, listening for business intelligence is very different to monitoring for mentions, so know your priorities.

Before you start, ask the CEO or the CMO what success looks like. “The only way to start a measurement program is by being very clear on your objectives,” says Katie Paine, CEO of Paine Publishing. “Nine times out of 10 they’ll say your objective is protecting their reputation.”

To do that, at the very least you need to be able to capture and analyze what’s being said about your company, your competitors and the categories in which you compete so you can determine what the widespread beliefs are. It’s tough to interject your point of view into a conversation if you don’t know what people are talking about.

Manually reading traditional and social coverage is generally pretty easy for start-ups, cause there’s not as much being said. But for more established brands, the challenge is digesting and summarizing a large number of articles and online conversations in real time, and then analyzing them with algorithms that don’t understand the meaning of the keywords they’re tracking.

When defining your objectives, understand that if accuracy is mission critical, you’ll need to allocate sufficient resources to review your clips manually to determine widespread beliefs.

AI in Media Monitoring

Many media monitoring services claim they already have artificial intelligence capable of accurately analyzing news articles and social media posts for sentiment. They say their algorithms can automatically evaluate your reputation in real time.

But here’s the thing you need to know. It’s easy to count and score keywords in sentences for sentiment. When you consider the multiple ideas, concepts, topics and sub-topics that can be included in a single news article, accurately interpreting sentiment requires more than just natural language processing. What’s required is natural language understanding.

While AI can help process language in circumstances where the domain is narrow and the goal is concrete, when it comes to multi domain thinking, common-sense reasoning and natural language understanding, AI still falls short and according to most data scientists, it’ll probably be another 40–50 years until machines can process information at that level.

There’s also a very real chance we will never be able to build machines that can reason as well as humans can. According to Kai-Fu Lee, author of AI Superpowers, the risk of replacement for public relations specialists is among the lowest of all professions.

PR won’t be replaced by machines anytime soon. “It also cannot engage in cross domain thinking on creative tasks or ones requiring complex strategy, jobs whose inputs and outcomes aren’t easily quantified,” says Lee.

Get the Steak, Not the Sizzle 

Most services have access to the same traditional and social media news feeds, which is square one. Next, you apply Boolean keyword filters to hone in on the right information. At that, there is value to leveraging narrow AI to evaluate sentiment at the entity level, tag articles by concepts and detect geographical origin. And you can try out relevance and sentiment filters as well. But be prepared in step three to check the last two for accuracy.

Strategic insights are at the intersection of media intelligence and external data, which is why the ability to import stuff like call center transcripts and sales figures is so important, so you can spot patterns and figure out how media activity correlates to revenue.

When considering the different media monitoring platforms, rather than focus solely on breadth and depth of content or fancy AI filters, figure out if the platform has the features and capabilities you need to achieve your objectives.

“Do you really need broadcast? Because in my experience, everything winds up online anyway. Do you really need to spend an extra $24k a year, cause that’s how much it could cost. Who’s going to be doing set-up? Do you have a team of data scientists who can write Boolean or are you going to be relying on them to do it? What about reporting? Do you want automated reports or are you going to be doing that yourself? A lot of the automated reports are very pretty, but do they show value?,” asks Jonny Bentwood, Global Head of Data & Analytics at Golin.

Media Monitoring Interview Questions

To help you assess media monitoring platform providers, here’s a list of open ended questions you can use to stimulate exploratory discussions about services:

• Does it get everything or just a snippet?
• Does it get photos and graphics?
• What outlets do we need and does it capture them?
• If it doesn’t, can those outlets be added?
• Does it do social, traditional and broadcast? What about podcasts?
• How many KPIs are available to choose from on your platform?
• How much historical data is accessible?
• Can I bring in third-party data and run comparisons?
• Can I bring in usage data from my social networking profiles?
• Does it have language translation?
• Does it have image recognition so you can search images and video for logos?
• Does it measure KPIs around engagement?
• Does it understand virality, can I set my own virality parameters and how is viral amplification presented/displayed?
• Can I group the media outlets that matter most to me?
• Are there advanced, rules-based alerts you can set up via email and text?
• Instagram is notoriously difficult to monitor. To what extent can they get such data? If they say they can get all of Instagram’s data they’re either scraping it illegally or lying.
• Have you looked at the artificial intelligence layer and evaluated specific articles for relevancy or sentiment scores?
• Do they comply with copyright laws?
• Do they indemnify clients against copyright violations on their part?

The other two things to ask about are onboarding and user support. The biggest cost of changing media monitoring platforms is the time required to train staff so ease of use matters a lot because it saves you money if people can figure out how to use the service themselves.

But even if the interface is intuitive, you’re still going to need support to leverage the full potential of the platform. Some platforms have dedicated customer success teams devoted to helping you get your service up and running properly so find out what kind of onboarding services and if structured, ongoing training is provided.

For a more comprehensive look at the state of media monitoring technology, download my new 2020 Media Monitoring Buyer’s Guide which includes a side-by-side features comparison grid of all the major providers, a user rating chart with my reviews and analysis.

The post How to Select the Best Media Monitoring Solution for Your Company appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/markgrow/~3/OZ39WS-E6mU/

The post Everything is out of date because the world is new appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.