Nadin Vernon kertoo Cisionin kansainvälisistä Insights-palveluista

Yrityksillä on yhä useammin tarvetta osoittaa viestinnän merkitys ja vaikutukset organisaatiolle. Analyysipalveluiden avulla pystytään tekemään tietoon pohjautuvia päätöksiä, sekä operatiivisella että strategisella tasolla. Cisionin analyytikot tulkitsevat suuria määriä dataa joka päivä ja tekevät siitä tulkintoja ja johtopäätöksiä, jotka auttavat yrityksiä näkemään, kuinka heillä menee ja kuinka he voivat mahdollisesti vielä kehittää viestintäänsä. Pyysimme Nadin Vernonia, Vice President EMEA – Head of Analysis at Cision kertomaan meille Cisionin Global Insights -palveluista. Haastattelu on englanniksi.

In short, how would you describe the Cision Global Insight services and how do clients benefit from them?
Ultimately our aim is to help clients make better business decisions. This is both on a day-to-day basis as well as in terms of more strategic decisions. We live in an age of accountability and in this outcome economy, proving return on investment (ROI) is essential. Especially this year, where we’ve seen budgets tighten across the board, it’s more important than ever to ensure good ROI – and the best way to see if your efforts are working is by using a data-driven approach. Our analysts work through masses of data every day, they interpret that data to draw insights and help our clients answer key questions, like ‘How am I doing?’ and ‘How can I improve what I’m doing?’

Our offering encompasses a variety of products and services from daily news briefings to analytics and consultancy, all built on top of our platform and tailored to our clients’ needs.

Which type of businesses or industries are Cision Insights suitable for?
I truly believe that measurement provides crucial intelligence for any business, regardless of size and industry. No company is too small to benefit from some form of insights service, it doesn’t have to be a full-blown expensive solution.

Three use cases that we see on a regular basis are:

KPI programmes: These are regular, straightforward scorecard type reports to inform companies how their business is performing against KPIs. We partner with our clients during the KPI-setting stage to ensure these are relevant and meaningful as every business’ needs are unique.
Campaign / Event Tracking: A classic use case – you have an event coming up, a campaign, a launch and need to evaluate success both in real-time and retrospectively. A campaign service will provide you with everything you need to know while you’re out at the event, including shareables for the C-Suite as well as insights into tactical changes while the campaign is running to ensure optimum success.
Business Transformation: Companies often come to us when they are going through a transformation programme. The idea here is to identify where the company is headed to, set a benchmark when starting out and then review progress towards the goal on a regular basis with checkpoints to adapt strategy as necessary.

How do Cision Insights differ from regular media monitoring services?
Our biggest assets are our people. We have industry experts for every vertical who help our clients navigate the media landscape by drawing meaningful conclusions with clear calls to action. They are up to date on major players within the sector as well as any regulatory news impacting the sector. In many instances, our analysts and consultants have built long standing relationships with their clients and are seen as an extension of our clients’ teams.

Media monitoring has changed drastically over the years and gone are the days where we provide pages and pages of full text clippings books. Our news briefings focus on what matters, so that busy executives can spend less than five minutes in the morning to digest the stories of the day, any competitor activity as well as sector-related news.

In your view, what is meaningful measurement? Which metrics are important to look at?
Meaningful measurement is measurement that is relevant – while there are many metrics that help tell a story, there is little value in tracking all of them. At the start of setting up a new programme, we set up workshops with our clients where we discuss objectives and what each stakeholder is looking to get out of the programme.
This planning stage is critical to ensure success. Once we know which objectives we’re working towards, we can set up the relevant metrics and KPIs. There is no value in tracking 30 KPIs for example, it’s all about keeping things simple and holistic while leveraging metrics that resonate with senior executives.

For the most basic measurement, I would include Share of Voice (SOV) for benchmarking, sentiment for qualitative assessment of coverage and key messaging for measuring brand reputation. Beyond that, I particularly like some of the newer metrics that are now available for earned media, such as audience insights around demographics and firmographics as well as conversion rates which determine the true impact of earned media.

How would you say that the business of evaluating communications has evolved over the last five years?
There have been tremendous efforts to eradicate silos and we’re seeing a move away from duplication in different departments – PR and Marketing, for example. We’re also seeing a drive towards consistent methodologies across markets and business divisions.

Speaking of that approach, we have just won PR News’ Platinum Award for ‘Best Use of Data and Measurement’ for our work with Adobe. Over the past years, we worked very closely with Adobe to gradually move to a centralised approach to monitoring and analysis, as it’s so much more effective and efficient. I’m very proud of how the team has supported Adobe on this measurement journey.

What is your advice to someone who wants to take their media measurement to the next level?
I’d say the key is to move from outputs to outcomes. What I mean by that is to go beyond just content analysis and supplement your standard KPIs with metrics that demonstrate communications’ impact on awareness and behaviour.