Metrics and Research

Media Audits

• How do the media and bloggers report on your company?
• Are there some reporters who are always negative?
• How do your competitors get covered? Your industry?
• Who regularly gets quoted as an industry expert?

Through media intelligence gathering and media audits, Birnbach Communications can help you:

• Assess the media landscape.
• Learn about your perceived strengths and weaknesses.
• Set benchmarks to determine the effectiveness of your communication programs.
• Compare your organization to your competitors.
• Identify strategies for communications plans that support your business objectives.

By closely monitoring national and key local media, identifying appropriate reporters and relevant trends among key reporters, influencers and bloggers, we can recommend strategies that achieve your short- and long-term business objectives. We develop a strategic and meaningful list of recommendations (that go beyond, "you should talk to the media a bit more" or "you should engage in social media").

We can develop monthly, quarterly or annual reports that compare you to your competitors, in terms of media coverage and perception.

We can conduct research to evaluate competitors’ business strengths and weaknesses to better prepare you to launch a new product or to respond to a competitor’s new product.

We can also assess the media's reaction to issues critical to your company, whether it's a reaction to trade with China or perception of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animal (PETA) protests. Learn more about our Issues Management practice.
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Trend Analysis
We take an analyst's approach to the media: we closely monitor major media, key local media as well as bloggers and other influencers to determine key trends being covered and interview them as much as possible about stories and trends they're following.

We evaluate not just the stories, blog posts and tweets – about a topic like videoconferencing – but also the approaches being used to cover the topic. For example, are the stories hyping the sector or a particular company within the sector (as media coverage of Twitter has been)? Are the stories showing a backlash (as media coverage of MySpace has been despite – the fact that MySpace still has substantially more members than Twitter)? Are they neutral (as with media coverage of LinkedIn)?

For heated topics, such as health care reform, the coverage can be all over the place, and we can help map out the coverage. We then use our Coverage Maps to make recommendations about messages, approaches and tactics.

And then we combine that with a look at macro traditional media issues, such as media consolidation or closings, layoffs, new programs, the amount of ad pages – because that affects what journalists refer to as a the "news hole," the amount of pages allocated for editorial coverage. (According to the Magazine Publishers Association, www.magazine.org, the industry average for the proportion of advertising to editorial copy has been 1:1. The implication: every additional advertising dollar increases the amount of editorial space; every decrease in spending decreases the amount of editorial.)

We also look at trends in social media, including traffic and trending topics on Twitter, and evaluate trends on blogs.

We compile the information in our TrendReport, which arms clients with topical trend ideas that enable us, through brainstorms, to determine ways clients might be able to generate coverage based on these trends.
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