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Blog post
June 24, 2019

Using media data to gain edge

For many businesses, tracking and reporting on media data plays a key part of everyday work.

A strong media profile can have a positive impact on a company’s reputation amongst current staff, potential future employees and for attracting clients—just as a weak profile can have the opposite effect.

But the real advantage of media data is when it’s used to better understand trends, motivators and the wider market. Media profile and how issues are reported has an impact on where people want to work and how they feel about their current employer.

Combined with other business metrics, media data can help businesses understand how clients and consumers view their business and their overall business performance—beyond the volume and reach of media clippings.

Strong correlation

 In my experience, when we have compared engagement survey or internal focus group results with a wider media profile analysis, there is usually a strong correlation between how employees are feeling, and what is being said about their organisation publicly.

Employees are the strongest brand advocates, and understanding all the information they have access to about a company—internally and externally—is important if you want to know how they may be feeling.

Understanding what kind of announcements or initiatives drive engagement from both current and potential staff can also be measured through media coverage and social media response.

Recent examples of initiatives that were widely reported on, and are likely to impress staff and help attract new talent and clients include:

  1. New Zealand Media and Entertainment (NZME) announcing a new parental leave policy extending an additional one-off payment of $5000 to permanent employees who are primary carers—the equivalent of an additional nine weeks of paid leave—as well as making a change to leave accrued while the primary carer is on parental leave.
  2. The Warehouse Group’s work to implement a domestic violence policy in consultation with the Human Rights Commission to support staff who are victims of family violence.
  3. Perpetual Guardian’s four-day week, where they trialled paying staff a full salary for four days’ work instead of five days, earlier in the year. Independent researchers measured the impact of the trial on the workforce and Perpetual’s CEO recently declared the trial a success and announced the four-day week would be made permanent from November.
  4. Overseas, the lesbian, gay, bi and trans equality charity Stonewall announced its Top Global Employers for 2018. Organisations were marked on several core areas including employee policy, training, staff engagement, leadership, monitoring and community engagement. The list celebrates the efforts of leading organisations to create inclusive workplaces and advance equality for LGBT people wherever they are in the world.

While you would expect announcements like these to be positive for the brand, they are also examples of industry innovation. Audiences love innovation, it helps to differentiate brands in a competitive market, and give organisations a licence to be thought leaders.

Using media to better understand trends can provide valuable insights on the challenges and potential avenues for success. Business cases for policy changes can be better supported and fleshed out with examples of the impact that similar announcements have had for other companies around the world.

It is easier to see industry trends and what is working (or not) for other organisations, and understand what might be driving the decisions of future employees.

For example, how important is a successful corporate social responsibility (CSR) or diversity and inclusion policy in recruiting Generation X or Millennials as employees? Or are companies getting an edge in attracting certain demographics from having a female CEO?

Has a paid parental leave or flexi-hours policy changed how a company is discussed? Has an announcement about diversity programmes created more impact than a new sponsorship?

Part of a planned strategy

Data doesn’t live in isolation. It is only useful if it forms part of a planned strategy or research project. It’s crucial to know what you want to achieve from the outset so you ask the right questions and can best utilise the constant stream of information that the data will provide.

Using media data to flesh out and give context to your other metrics can give a more rounded view on how your business is viewed and what is driving that sentiment.

More companies are asking these questions of media data to give them an edge, solve problems, make business cases, and to better understand what factors are most important in influencing their employer brand. It’s an often under-utilised, but incredibly powerful lens to view the world and make sense of where to go next.

As originally published in Employment Today Magazine NZ.

Ngaire Crawford, Head of Insights NZ

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There’s something appealing about one score having so much meaning behind it.
A Net Promoter Score (NPS) program is the leading indicator of growth for a business and can be based on a single question: How likely are you to recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?

In this post we are taking a step further by exploring how a combined NPS and media data analysis can give your business a holistic view of the overall sentiment towards your organisation.

Aside from its ease to implement, its appeal is two fold -  it’s attractive for the user to answer one question and it's easy for the business to calculate and measure the results. 

As Frederick F. Reichheld wrote in his Harvard Business Review, titled ‘The one number you need to grow’ having a useful metric to measure customer loyalty is a good indicator of business growth. The path to sustainable, profitable growth begins with creating more promoters and fewer detractors and making your net-promoter number transparent throughout your business. Obtaining feedback is key to success for a customer centric business.
Interestingly, statistics show every hour spent calling detractors generates more than $1000 in revenue. Businesses have leveraged NPS in boosting sales: with sales increasing by 20% when converting a detractor to a passive, and by 26% when converting a passive to a promoter.

Understanding the Net Promoter Score

An NPS score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. This score can then be compared to that of similar businesses as a reliable benchmark.

“Promoter” customers are enthusiastic and loyal, who will continue to buy from the business and ‘promote’ your business to others. With your promoters, tailor your marketing efforts and send them specialised promotions to continue their loyalty.

“Passive” customers are happy but can easily be tempted to leave by an attractive competitor deal. Passive customers have the ability to become promoters if your products, service their customer experience are improved.

“Detractor” customers are unhappy with your product, service or customer experience, they will either cancel their dealings with you or reduce the amount they purchase from you. With the information and feedback provided by this group of people, not only use it to try to win them back as a customer, but also use it to identify and empower your biggest promoters.

5 benefits of NPS

  1. It's reputation

NPS is a good measure of customer satisfaction for reasons such as simplicity, executive understanding or availability of external benchmarks.

2. Known as a good indicator of business growth

Each response on an NPS survey indicates either loyalty and expansion in the future or the risk of churn. A customer who responds with a 4 is at a much higher risk of cancelling than a customer who responds with an 8. If a risk percentage is assigned to each number, the impact on future growth and churn can be predicted.

3. Relevance

NPS is a measure of your whole business as its a KPI that is relevant to everyone, not just a particular team or department.

A strong NPS reflects that your business is performing well - from account management to your products, marketing and customer experience. Alternatively, a low score could indicate there are a few minor issues that need addressing and by introducing one or two additional questions to the survey can be valuable to capture this information.

4. Easy to benchmark against competitors

As it is a universally recognised survey, it is easy to benchmark against your competitors and track your business progress against your industry. 

5. Measure loyalty

Surveying your customers at least twice a year will allow you to get their latest sentiment toward your business and enable you to identify trends and track business performance over time. You can also track how different local and global teams are tracking against each other. Asking your customers to rate their experiences offers a deeper view of customer sentiment and enables quick learning and action.

Combining forces

NPS enables your business to get invaluable voluntary feedback on all aspects of your business from a sample of your customers multiple times a year, in real time. Combining NPS with media data can provide for a powerful outcome. It provides the ability to action insights faster with the visual aid of dashboards, word clouds, top voices in the media and automated sentiment - indicating if media mentions about your business are positive, neutral or negative. 

By seeking information from multiple sources, you can listen, learn and find tools that separate real insights from background noise, sense check benchmarks and get a firm grasp of your competitors, influencers and the current landscape. All these elements help provide endless possibilities for your business.

Combining media data and NPS also enables you to observe patterns and correlations that might exist between what is being said about your business throughout the media and the likelihood that your customers will promote your business to others. By recognising trends and correlations between broad social sentiment can help inform your social media, marketing and PR strategies. 

Want to learn more about gaining insight into your business and competitors, get in touch with us today.

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Blog
The Power Of One Number

There’s something appealing about one score having so much meaning behind it.
A Net Promoter Score (NPS) program is the leading indicator of growth for a business and can be based on a single question: How likely are you to recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?

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A World Of Information Without Noise 

Big data is more than just a buzzword. It’s one of the biggest challenges and opportunities facing almost every industry, business and brand today. With the potential value that it holds, investment in big data, machine learning and AI will be crucial for any business that wants to remain relevant through the ages.

Big Data

noun : extremely large data sets that may be analysed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behaviour and interactions.


Each day 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is generated – a number that continues to grow exponentially. While we have seen improvements in the collection of data over recent years, the ability to synthesize meaning from this data is demanding more from engineers and their technology than ever before.


The problem that we face is sorting through these huge chunks of data to separate the noise from what is important to individuals and their organisation. While automation has offered speed, simplicity and efficiency, the ‘why’ is where the untapped value and excitement lies.

“Contextualisation is key. It's not about just collecting data, it’s about how that data can provide clear information that enables and inspires action”

Richard Spencer, Chief Marketing Officer at Isentia.

Rather than reflecting on past performance, answering the ‘why’ has the potential to lead action that focuses on influencing the tomorrow.
Beyond big data, the 'why' behind AI and machine learning may raise new questions. For instance the wider interplay behind machine learnings ability to  translate to a language without any knowledge or assumptions about that language.

As teams start to ask these questions, the data starts to be reimagined. The perception of a data point transforms into breadcrumbs of a narrative that can tell a bigger story, and ultimately influence our thinking.

The question is, when big data becomes manageable and meaningful – how fast will it move into being predictive? And even beyond this, be able to simulate what is ‘likely’ to happen.

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From Complex To Context

Big data is more than just a buzzword. It’s one of the biggest challenges and opportunities facing almost every industry, business and brand today. With the potential value that it holds, investment in big data, machine learning and AI will be crucial for any business that wants to remain relevant through the ages.

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Tis’ the season to be jolly, but before we get into the holiday spirit here’s a few things that we’ve heard bring joy to our clients

A portal to your media data, made easy.

The volume of chatter and news coverage has increased and diversified with the introduction of new distribution channels almost daily. The task of capturing all relevant data is incredibly important, but often overwhelming and difficult to manage. Our Mediaportal clients love that while the technology is complex, the solution is simple.

Wherever a story appears – from Twitter to the weekend press – our technology picks it up, and delivers it directly to Mediaportal. It doesn’t matter when or where that story breaks, our clients get 24/7 access to their data via our intuitive online portal and app. They can customise how they would like to view their coverage, or zero in on a slice of data with flexible filtering tools. Most importantly, it is now even easier for our clients to sit back and take a look at the bigger picture, all from the one platform.

Have it your way.

One of the most loved features of Mediaportal is the ability to create Personal Folders. Mediaportal can automatically organise media items into folders based on criteria set by you. These folders can be organised by search terms, locations or media outlets, with the added feature of being able to manually add content to a folder if desired. This makes managing topics or key themes much easier – once created, folders can be shared with colleagues too, so they automatically appear under their Mediaportal login too.

Trust us with no fuss notifications.

Who sits at their desk from 9am-5pm nowadays? Our clients need to be kept informed and provided with timely updates no matter whether they’re in a meeting, dropping kids off to school, or presenting at a conference. Isentia’s media alerting system utilises all platforms and devices, supported by our news-hungry, market-leading account management teams who distribute information via email, RSS feeds or Isentia App notifications. The ability to receive information anywhere, anytime is a huge advantage for many of our clients who need relevant, accurate and manageable updates in a timely fashion.

Reporting that matters.

Regular reporting is nothing new for our clients – it is imperative in demonstrating sentiment and success relative to outputs. We know how important this is; in fact, we know that more than 5,000 reports are built in Mediaportal every week! Our Custom Reports tool is designed to suit a range of needs, allowing Mediaportal users to create, brand and share reports via a simple web link in under 2 minutes.

Analytics to help develop understanding.

With Mediaportal Analytics you can create visually engaging charts to measure the success of your media coverage and efforts. Many of our clients add relevant charts to their Mediaportal dashboard for repeat use – both saving time and allowing the delivery of a consistent picture of activity across every report.

Confidence in coverage.

Everyday our technology ingests millions of media items, and adds hundreds of millions of additional data points from other sources. Our team works hard to capture coverage that matters most to our clients, while also ensuring that the content captured meets the brief. It’s what gives our clients confidence in communicating this activity out to their wider teams, internal stakeholders and sometimes even with industry peers. 

There when you need us most.

We’re no strangers to a crisis. We’re there when our clients need us – whether the news is good, or not so good. One of the key reasons why many of our clients choose Isentia is because we know technology is great, but people are still critical to success. We have some fantastic, longstanding relationships and dedicated teams ready to assist at any time of day whether that is to simply help compile a report, or deal with an urgent crisis. Our clients lean on us, on the days when it really matters.

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These Are A few of Our Client’s Favourite Things

Tis’ the season to be jolly, but before we get into the holiday spirit here’s a few things that we’ve heard bring joy to our clients…

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Is content marketing an art or a science?

It’s not a new debate but an increasingly relevant one. As technology continues to improve, the C-Suite is demanding a clearer measurement into impact. Marketing and communications professionals responsible for curating content are no longer governed by ‘gut feeling’ and instead, are increasingly driven by engagement metrics to demonstrate ROI.

These professionals are well aware how their role requires a mix of art and science thinking. They both draw from the left brain and the right brain, using data and reason to guide the creativity that fuels it.

But this relationship is less rigorously applied to content marketing – an emerging discipline that straddles both marketing and communications objectives.

Marketers and communications professionals have varying levels of social media sophistication – particularly with LinkedIn, which is often a core channel for content. With LinkedIn estimating more than 130, 000 posts are made on its newsfeed every week, organisations are increasingly turning to it as a distribution channel for thought leadership.

Far fewer, however, understand how to draw insight from the platform to ensure their content connects with their target audience.

Marketers and communications practitioners will often speak to me with this challenge solely in mind. Most are able to gauge the success of content on Facebook and Instagram to some level. Plenty of tools exist which measure various social aspects of content marketing, such as ‘likes’ or ‘shares’. But real engagement isn’t buzz. Determining whether content is connecting with a target audience is a key challenge.

Content marketers are struggling to understand whether their current LinkedIn strategy is working – whether it’s reaching the right audience and whether a piece of content is being actively engaged on the platform.

Other times, they will want to target a particular demographic; millennials for example. But they don’t have the understanding of what this group is looking for when they log onto this social networking site.

In short, what content marketers want to do is debunk the myths surrounding their own activity and drill down into strategy to make their dollars work harder.

How can data help?

Data is pivotal. Armed with information, marketers and communications professionals have a window into the opinions, passions and motivations of their audience.

At Isentia we’ve seen this in our own business. The Research & Insights stream has grown by 25 per cent in the last year, as this market recognises the importance of data. I’m often told by clients that they’re just at the start of their measurement journey, but still desperately rely on data to convince the C-Suite to spend money on content marketing.

Research & Insights can be used to help inform content marketing strategy by highlighting what brand-relevant topics an organisation’s audience is engaging with. It can also help content marketers understand where their brand sits against those their competitors, by measuring their share of voice on a particular topic.

But most importantly, data can help marketing and communications practitioners build out content itself. By understanding what type of content receives the most engagement on the platform, they can tailor their content strategies and measure their success at the same time.

Data is the key to debunking the myths of what does or doesn’t work in a content marketing strategy. It gives marketers and communications professionals the opportunity to ensure they understand their audience first and foremost, in order to communicate in a way that connects.

This is where science can help inform the art in content marketing.

Asha Oberoi
Head of Insights, Australia 

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Is your content connecting?

Is content marketing an art or a science?

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