Choosing a Communications Analytics Tool

By Andrew Sullivan and Amber N. Ott

Have you tried choosing a communications analytics tool of late? If so, you’ve probably noticed the field is a thicket of startups selling big promises and largely similar offerings. Adding to the confusion is the near uniformity in company names, all of which seem to derive from Latin or Greek. Many offer vague company purposes: “visualize the world’s collective intelligence” or “find the truth in data.” And the tools are nearly impossible to road test. You get a salesperson to demonstrate the tool, and it seems to serve your needs. Next thing you know, you’ve signed a two-year contract for something that doesn’t do what you hoped it would.

So what can be done to cut through the confusion and find the tool you need? These four steps will save you time, angst and money.

Step One: Figure out what information you need to meet your goals

The first thing to do is to take stock of your company’s situation. Are you dealing with a crisis? Planning an IPO? Launching a campaign? This exercise may sound basic, but framing your situation in terms of business challenge and defining your goals will dictate your choice of tool — and determine if you need an analytics tool or a different research methodology. This point is critical. Too often decisions about analytics tools are divorced from business goals — focusing on activities, such as engaging digital influencers, rather than outcomes, like getting elected.

Step Two: Determine who matters

After taking stock of your situation, focus on your audience. If you’re planning an IPO, then your audience is the investment community. If you’re launching a political campaign, then it’s the group of voters you will need to win more than 50 percent of the vote. You can dig a bit deeper by breaking your audience into segments. In the political context, who is your base, and who are your persuadables? No doubt you already know your audiences deeply, but don’t skip this step. The audiences that matter will vary along with your business goals, as will the data tools you use to understand or engage them.

Your audiences will vary along with your business goals, as will the data tools you use to understand or engage them.

Step Three: Decide which questions you need to explore

Once you have figured out your goals and audiences, you should decide which questions you will want your data tools to answer. For instance, are people aware of your company’s issue? Is it impacting your brand or reputation? This step is important for the same reason as step two: different tools will answer different questions.

Step Four: Choose your methodology and tool

This is where the rubber meets the road. Sometimes what you need to do is uncover people’s attitudes. If this is the case, it’s better to use a primary research method such as polls and focus groups than an analytics tool.

Why? Because primary methods can reveal why people have an opinion and how widely that view is held. They can drill down into audience segments — do different groups of people have different opinions? — and they can capture feedback on topics people haven’t thought about before.

Of course analytics tools — which are secondary methods — have their own advantages. For instance, they can gauge the momentum and acceleration of a controversy on social media and the effectiveness of your efforts to mitigate it. Analytics tools excel at this sort of news and social media evaluation. There are also emerging data tools which can identify online influencers and use big data to evaluate speeches and web content. These are big breakthroughs in applying data science to communications.

Clarifying your goals, audiences and research questions will allow you to match your organization’s needs to the strengths of different methodologies and choose the tool (or tools) you need.

Four Steps in Practice

To show how this works in practice, let’s return to the company whose CEO has been forced out. What’s your goal? You’d like to measure the effectiveness of your company’s efforts to recover from this reputation hit. Your audience? It’s your customers and opinion elites, whose views can impact your customers and potential customers. What questions do you need to answer? You want to know if people have heard about the company, the CEO’s ouster and if what they’ve heard is having an impact on their impression of your brand. You also want to know if your company’s response to the crisis is up to snuff. In this situation, a survey — of a random sample of your target audiences — would give you the reputation measure you need.

Listening to media discussions of the matter would help you evaluate the effectiveness of your corporate communications — to see if they are gaining traction — but it won’t help you gauge public response, since the Twittersphere does not reflect your target audience.

This brings us to our closing point: when an analytics startup is selling you a product and not an approach to solving your problem, retain your skepticism. When this happens, you know you’re in the analytics thicket, experiencing the outcome of new and growing companies jostling in search of market share. So take a step back. Figure out what you need to accomplish, who you need to deal with, what questions you need to address. The answers will flow from there, and you’ll find the research tools which suit your needs.