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PR in the Age
of Influence
Introduction:
Just like the rest of the marketing industry, PR has
changed a lot to keep up with the technologies that
have reshaped society over the past twenty years. The
internet gave us a globally connected network, while
social media made it simple for all consumers to share
information on that network, and mobile phones put
that incredible power into our hands whenever and
wherever we need it.
We all know the rest of the story. The old certainties in
marketing evaporated, and the entire industry had to
adapt to a completely new media landscape.
Perhaps the biggest change for the PR industry has
been the pivotal shift in the nature of influence. Gone
are the days when the power to reach large audiences
was held exclusively by commercial publishers and
broadcasters, thanks to social media it’s possible for
anybody to build a following and become influential.
And that means the role of PR has evolved beyond media
relations into something much more broad-ranging.
While some have argued that the rise of social media
has diminished the need for conventional PR activity, we
believe that the opposite is true. As new technologies
and consumer behaviors have changed the face
of the marketing industry, there’s never been a
greater demand for the kind of skills offered by PR
professionals.
As a result, PR is now one of the most valuable disciplines
in the marketing mix and businesses simply cannot
afford to ignore or under-resource it. In this report, we
will outline how PR has changed and make the case for
why businesses need to prioritize investment in their PR
capabilities.
PR in the Age of Influence
2
Table of
Contents
PR’s Role in Influencing the Influential
How Influence Changed
Do We Still Need PR?
Influencer Relations
Community Management
Content Marketing
Viral Marketing & News-Jacking
Conclusion
04
06
07
09
12
16
19
22
PR in the Age of Influence
3
PR’s Role in
Influencing
the Influential
Public Relations has existed as a discipline for at least a century.
For almost as long as mass media has existed, organizations
(and high-profile individuals) have understood the value of
managing how they are represented in it. The way a business is
represented in the media has a huge impact on its reputation,
which has a direct link to the bottom line.
When people talk about Public Relations, typically they’re
referring to Media Relations. In most (but not all) cases the bulk
of PR work is focused primarily on encouraging the media to
publish positive stories about a business, or limiting the extent of
negative publicity. This means that the traditional core skills of a
PR person include:
• The ability to build and maintain relationships with key
journalists.
• The creativity to develop stories that will be of interest to the
media.
• Strong and persuasive communication abilities to pitch stories
and angles.
• A deep, ongoing understanding of the media landscape and
news agenda.
PR - Influencing the Influential
4
While PR has long been recognized as an important element of the overall marketing mix, it’s often played
second fiddle to advertising and, as a “Below the Line” activity, receives a smaller share of budgets.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, because as a relatively low-cost activity it can be seen as offering great
value for the money compared to costly advertising campaigns. But the age-old problem for PR has been
how to accurately measure the ROI of its work and thereby prove that it delivers value for the business.
A review of your newest product in a consumer magazine, or a profile of your CEO in a business newspaper,
are both obviously good things, but it’s difficult to quantify exactly how much value they provide in relation
to the cost of achieving them. The best available metric for a long time was Advertising Value Equivalent
(AVE) which calculates the value of editorial coverage to be equivalent to the cost of taking out a similar sized
advert in the same publication. This is flawed for many reasons, not least because it doesn’t account for the
fact that consumers trust editorial content more than adverts.
Because it’s always been tricky to make a clear,
measurable connection between PR activity and
revenue generation, it has traditionally been tough
for both agency and in-house practitioners to unlock
a larger share of marketing budgets. So, in many
respects, PR has long been seen as the poor cousin in
the family of marketing disciplines.
PR - Influencing the Influential
5
How Influence
Changed
Before the internet, consumer buying decisions were influenced
by advertising, media coverage, and word of mouth. It’s worth
mentioning that in this context, we mean “word of mouth” in
the conventional, literal sense; people would listen to what their
friends and relatives had to say about their own experiences
with brands.
PR’s role in this equation was to secure positive media coverage
of the brand and its products, which largely involved building
and nurturing good relationships with journalists.
But then came social media (meaning “media for the people”),
which allowed anybody to publish content online, at almost
zero cost, and build their own audience. Soon the phenomenon
of online influencers emerged. This group of people, who are
not media professionals in the conventional sense, began
creating digital content about topics they are passionate about
and amassing huge followings that rival the audience sizes of
conventional media channels.
James Bell, a Partner at specialist communications and public
affairs agency, Portland Communications, says “The addition
of social media and influencers has been a very welcome
addition to the PR comms mix. Through these channels we
are better able to amplify PR campaigns, increasing reach,
longevity and value for our clients.”
But it wasn’t just individuals who took advantage of social
media to become influential. Brands also realized that they
could use social channels to directly communicate with the
audiences that in the past could only be reached indirectly via
conventional media.
Done well, owned social media enables brands to build a large
following of people who are explicitly interested in its offerings.
And that means you can communicate with them directly, with
complete control over the timing, frequency, and messaging,
which simply cannot be done through media relations.
So, with a new generation of online influencers challenging the
dominance of commercial media companies, and social media
channels enabling brands to speak directly to consumers,
people started asking the obvious question…
How Influence Changed
6
Do We Still
Need PR?
After all, if anybody can be an influencer these days, why do we
still need to build relationships with journalists? Especially since
all journalists are on Twitter and you don’t need a PR professional
to fire off a tweet at them. In fact, why can’t brands just build
their own social media presence and go directly to the audiences
they want to reach instead of playing the traditional media
relations game?
On the surface, it’s easy to see why people might be convinced
by that logic.
Not everybody believes that this is an entirely healthy direction.
Charlotte West, Executive Director of Global Corporate
Communications at Lenovo says “The rise of social has given us
the opportunity to reach and engage with our key audiences
more directly than ever, so in principle it has been a good thing.
That said, the growth of influencers is having a negative effect
on our work given the power is too one-sided. It’s become an
industry in itself and brands are paying talent obscene budgets
for what are often very limited contractual obligations.”
Do We Still Need PR?
7
West continued, “We need to move to a more balanced
approach of looking at how we build true earned advocacy
with multiple stakeholders, not only focusing on paid
influence, and moving those paid influencer budgets
back to comms where we can have a more sustainable,
meaningful, and measurable impact.”
In the new attention economy brands have to compete
more than ever to cut through ever louder digital noise and
get their message to relevant audiences. While tactics and
channels may have changed, we argue that the traditional
skills of PR professionals are perfectly suited to this task.
Over the following sections of this guide, we’ll look at the
vital role that PR skills can play in the modern marketing
mix and make the case for greater investment in the
discipline. We also hope to provide inspiration for PR
agencies to broaden their scope of services, helping them
to unlock client budgets in areas that they have previously
thought of as out of scope. For in-house professionals, we
want this guide to give you the confidence to think bigger
about your role and the possibilities of what an internal PR
function can do for the business.
Do We Still Need PR?
The creative opportunities
are endless - the way you can
reach niche audiences is not
only impactful but really rather
fun. Imagine hitting a Dungeons
& Dragons fanatic with 5000
followers and it being worth more
than any Kardashian because of
the audience relevance. It makes
clients’ budgets go further - but
also imaginations go further.
“
”
Kev O’Sullivan, a Senior Partner at FleishmanHillard
8
Influencer
Relations
An influencer, in the most commonly used current context, is
somebody who has a large, engaged social media following of
people who trust their opinions and advice. Some influencers
don’t focus on a specific niche but simply share content on
a wide range of lifestyle topics. Others may be more tightly
focused on a particular subject, such as gaming, cooking,
personal finance, craft and DIY, or literally anything that might
attract an audience of interested consumers.
Just as people have always looked for magazines or websites
that are relevant to their interests, they now seek out influencers
on social media. And brands that operate within those areas of
interest can benefit greatly if they are recommended by popular
influencers.
So, Influencer Relations is simply the practice of building and
managing ongoing relationships with the public personalities
that matter most to your brand’s customers. Claire Lawson, a
Director with Impact Porter Novelli based in Dubai UAE, says
“While influencers can be a great asset, it is important that
PR professionals ensure best practices are being implemented
for successful campaigns. Influencer selection is key to ensure
they align with the brand’s values, and we avoid transactional
relationships and inauthentic content.”
What is Influencer Relations?
Influencer Relations
9
Influencer Relations
The biggest lifestyle influencers can have audiences that extend
into the tens of millions, so when they endorse a particular
product or brand it can have a huge impact on sales, as well as
giving an overall reputational lift.
But it’s not always about the sheer size of their social media
following. An influencer who is laser-focused on a particular
niche (say, vegan confectionery for example) might have a small
audience that is highly engaged with that topic. A brand that
operates in that space could have a high degree of confidence
that an endorsement would reach exactly the right audience.
Lawson adds, “Influencer selection is key to ensure they
align with the brand’s values, and we avoid transactional
relationships and inauthentic content. Co-creation is preferred,
to craft engaging, exciting material that delivers on the brand’s
objectives while remaining true to the audience of the influencer.
Finally, proper measurement is crucial to ensure KPIs are hit and
success can be demonstrated. Used properly, influencers can be
a great channel to achieve further awareness and mass reach
Business Benefit
This is almost a no-brainer. The parallels between Influencer
Relations and conventional Media Relations are huge, and it
makes perfect sense that PR people should be handling it.
There are some differences that PR people need to understand,
however. While journalists undoubtedly have influence, they are
not the same as social media influencers. Journalism is a specific
profession that is bound by legal and ethical obligations, and
in most cases journalists undergo formal (or at least on the job)
training. That’s not the case for social media influencers.
The rules of engagement for the two groups are different. In
most cases, a journalist would not expect payment or any other
kind of incentive to write a story about a brand, and in fact it
would be considered highly unprofessional. But in the influencer
marketing world, it’s much more common for positive coverage
to be incentivized either informally (e.g. by offering free product
samples) or through a formal commercial agreement.
How PR Skills Align with Influencer Relations
10
Key Stat
The Meltwater Advantage
Example
Influencer Relations
Sodastream’s Influencer Relations
of marketers surveyed said they planned
to increase their spend on Influencer
Marketing over the next 12-18 months.
(Source: Inmar Intelligence/Social Media Today survey of 300 marketers in 2022)
Meltwater’s Influencer Relations platform is designed
to streamline every stage of influencer campaign
management. We make it easy to identify the most
relevant influencers for your brand, and to authenticate
their audiences so that you don’t fall prey to influencer
fraud.
We have a custom built CRM system, specifically
created for managing influencer marketing
campaigns at scale. This not only simplifies the day-
to-day operations of influencer marketing, but has
measurement and ROI tracking baked in, which makes
it easy to constantly optimize and improve your
campaigns.
Learn more.
The popular brand, best known for its home drink
carbonation systems sold around the world, gets a lot of
attention on social media. With so many people talking
about Sodastream it’s hard to reply to everybody, so the
brand wanted to engage the most influential fans in its
community.
Sodastream uses Meltwater to track which of its content
and messages are resonating with audiences, and to
easily identify the strongest voices amongst all those
conversations using the influence ranking system. The
team then engages those influencers with “surprise
and delight” tactics, such as sending gifts, to show
appreciation for their support. This in turn drives more
conversations and strengthens relationships with the
brand’s most vocal and influential fans.
Read the full Sodastream case study here.
61%
Influencer Relations
11
Community
Management
Most brands these days use social media to communicate
with their audiences to some degree. The job of keeping those
channels updated, growing the follower base, as well as
moderating and responding to comments is called Community
Management.
At its most basic level this can simply involve making occasional
posts on Twitter or LinkedIn, while some big consumer brands
run highly sophisticated social media programs across the full
spectrum of channels, including:
What is Community Management?
Instagram
Facebook
Twitter
TikTok
YouTube
LinkedIn
Review sites
Forums
Community Management
Doing this at scale, for a large national
or global brand, demands a lot of resources.
A constant stream of fresh, engaging content must be created
and optimized for all channels, including copy, images, and
video, as well as interactive formats such as polls.
Comments from the community need to be constantly
monitored and assessed to decide whether they need to be
responded to, or removed if they are inappropriate, and with
large communities this in itself is a full time job. The world’s
biggest brands can have tens, even hundreds of millions of
followers just on one social media channel, with entire global
teams dedicated to managing them.
Conversely, if the community is small, or even non-existent, the
challenge is to grow it somehow. Building an online community
from scratch is extremely difficult and can take a long time
to deliver results, so it requires a long term commitment of
resources.
12
Business Benefit
Why would businesses invest the significant resources required to do community management
well?
The simplest way to look at it is that every single person who follows a brand on social media
has opted-in to receive regular marketing communications from that company. According to the
latest research, the average user spends almost two and a half hours on social media every day,
so those brand followers have opted-in on a channel where they are highly active.
Studies have shown that people trust brands’ social media channels more than advertising. This
might not make immediate sense, since in both cases the brand controls the message so there’s
no reason why one channel would be more trustworthy than the other, but people seem to judge
social media communications as being more authentic than ads.
Hopefully, it should be obvious that this channel is incredibly powerful. No matter what kind
of size of business, having a group of people who have proactively consented to hearing from
you is very useful. The brand can directly communicate with these customers easily and cost-
effectively, whenever it wants to.
It’s better than email because it’s more immediate and
engaging, and it’s better than advertising because
you can be sure the people you reach have already
expressed an interest in the brand.
Over time some of those people could be converted
to customers, and even those who never buy from you
can be helpful in spreading your message to a wider
audience.
Community Management
13
In a sense, community management is Public Relations in its purest form, because it involves communicating directly with the
public at scale, on a highly visible platform.
There’s a lot involved in community management, but at its heart is the ability to represent a brand in a professional, consistent
manner, under a wide range of circumstances, including any potential comms crisis. Nobody does this as well as PR.
The key elements of community management align closely with PR skills:
How PR Skills Align With Community Management
Storytelling & Content Creation
Successful social media communities require a lot of fresh
content. It needs to be on-brand, but the real challenge is
that it also needs to be engaging, not overtly salesy. Where
many brands fail is by posting a lot of material that is
indistinguishable from advertising, but what PR can bring to
the table is expertise in creating content that is specifically
designed to meet the needs of the target audience.
Strategic Communications
The whole point of a brand social media channel is to speak
directly to the public. Typically in a business, only authorized
executives are allowed to speak publicly on behalf of the brand
after they’ve been extensively media-trained and coached on
the appropriate messaging. So why should social media be any
different? The people responsible for a brand’s social channels
should be strategic communications experts.
Community Management
14
Key Stat
The Meltwater Advantage
Example
Community Management
360i Streamlines Community Management
US adults spend an average of 95
minutes on social media daily. This figure
consistently increases year on year, and
brands need to have a presence in social
channels.
(Source: Emarketer Social Usage Survey 2021)
Meltwater’s enterprise- ready Community Management
platform helps keep your social channels under control.
It was designed to work at scale for organizations that
need to manage multiple brand accounts across all
the leading social media platforms, in many different
markets.
With role-based dashboards, configurable workflows,
and built-in measurement and reporting facilities,
our Community Management platform is built for
collaboration, even across multiple in-house and
external teams.
Meltwater is trusted by some of the world’s biggest
brands to manage their global social media footprints.
Learn more.
Integrated creative and media agency, 360i, delivers
value for clients by creating high-impact digital content
that engages and grows their online communities. But
the agency realized that it kept running into a similar set
of challenges when doing this.
Firstly, conventional approvals processes are simply
too slow for the digital age. Content often needs to be
created and published quickly to react to fast moving
events, and waiting for stakeholder sign-off means that it
often loses impact by the time it can be published.
Secondly, reporting was taking up too much time. While
the value of understanding social media performance
was clear, the amount of time it took to gather and
analyze the data was disproportionate.
360i solved both of these problems with Meltwater
Engage, our social media community management
platform. Engage streamlines approvals and publishing
processes across different teams and organizations, and
fully automates measurement and reporting. This means
360i can focus on creating great content and building
communities for its clients.
Read the full - 360i community management
case study here.
Community Management
15
Content
Marketing
Content Marketing is not a particularly new idea, brands have
been creating content to attract the attention of customers
for a long time. In 1900, the Michelin Guide to restaurants was
originally published for free by the French tire manufacturer of
the same name, to encourage consumers to drive motor-cars
more in search of a good meal.
These days, however, Content Marketing is even more important,
as a huge number of businesses vie for limited consumer
attention. There are many different types of content, designed
to work at different stages of the marketing funnel, from broad
attention grabbing material to create awareness of the brand,
right down to very focused informational pieces that help
consumers make their final purchasing decision.
Depending on the type of brand, content can be entertaining,
educational, or useful.
What is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing
16
Content Marketing helps businesses succeed at all stages of the customer
journey. It can increase visibility at the awareness stage, improve conversions
throughout the marketing funnel, and then strengthen ongoing customer loyalty,
upsell opportunities, word-of-mouth recommendations. Great content makes it
much easier for brands to move from having a purely transactional relationship
with their customers, to a more involved relationship where the customer engages
with the brand more often.
Business Benefit
Content is not advertising. Its purpose is not to directly make a sale, but to keep the
audience interested and engaged, and to increase long- term trust in the brand.
To create this kind of content you need to know how to craft stories that will capture
and hold the attention of any target audience. You need great communication abilities,
and media production expertise, which could include anything from plain copy to
PDF eBooks, photography, videos, infographics, podcasts, and even interactive digital
media.
This magic mix of message and medium know-how is the bread and
butter of the PR department, they’ve been doing it for decades. It’s
hard to make the case for any other discipline taking charge of
content marketing in an organization.
How PR Skills Align with Influencer Relations
Content Marketing
17
Key Stat
The Meltwater Advantage
Content Marketing
The Economist
of marketers who use content
marketing are expected to maintain
content budget levels throughout 2022
compared to the previous year.
(Source: Hubspot survey of 1,067 marketers, 2021)
Meltwater Explore is a social listening and research tool
that lets you dig into all of the topics that are relevant to
your audience. This makes it easy to uncover the issues
and questions that matter to them, and build a content
marketing strategy that is based on real data about
what your audience needs, rather than hunches.
Our Consumer Intelligence tool, Linkfluence, offers
smart audience segmentation capabilities, which
identifies online “tribes” based on shared values,
interests, influences, and behaviors, instead of simple
demographics. It helps you tailor your content strategy
for each of your segments, so you never miss the mark.
Learn more.
High profile current affairs newspaper, The Economist,
which uses content marketing to grow its readership
through new subscriptions. The brand can call upon an
unrivaled library of high-quality editorial content, but
the challenge is to match the right content to the right
audience, at the right time.
The Economist uses Meltwater to create audience
insights, and build a deep understanding of its
online communities and their interests. Armed with
this actionable data the team is able to target those
audiences with relevant, engaging content.
Read the full Economist case study here.
90%
Content Marketing
Example
18
Viral Marketing
& News-Jacking
An unexpected side-effect of media becoming social was that
when people found a piece of content they liked, they shared
it with their network of connections. And those people shared it
with their own networks, and so on, and so on, until suddenly
millions of people around the world are watching that funny
video of your grandmother’s cat.
Brands soon caught on to the magical power of virality and
began deliberately producing content designed to be shared as
far and wide as possible on social networks. But this is a tough
nut to crack.
There’s little rhyme or reason to what makes a particular video
or meme spread across the web, but the table stakes are that
it has to be funny, shocking, or cute. Even then, there are no
guarantees, and for every hit viral campaign you see, there are
thousands of others that simply never took off.
One of the most powerful ingredients in Viral Marketing is News-
Jacking which, as most PR people know, is the practice of
piggybacking a story or piece of content onto a trending news
topic. Often this is done with a sense of humor, making fun of a
big story that everybody is talking about.
What is Viral Marketing & News-Jacking
Viral Marketing & News-Jacking
19
The most successful viral campaigns can reach audiences of hundreds of millions
of people globally, for very little investment. You have to pay for the production of
the content, and maybe a little advertising spend to get it seen by an audience so
they can start sharing it, but that’s small beans compared to what it would cost if
you tried to achieve the same reach through conventional advertising channels.
When it works, viral marketing offers spectacular value for money. So much so
that many brands believe it’s more than worth the cost of churning out a stream of
flops, so long as the occasional hit gets them trending on social media.
Business Benefit
Much of PR is about coming up with ideas for stories that will catch the attention of
journalists and, by extension, their audiences. Everybody in PR has sat in a creative
brainstorming session, trying to come up with imaginative ideas for stories that will get
their brand seen by the public.
News-Jacking is also a longstanding PR tactic, and execs are well versed in the practice of
monitoring the news agenda for trending topics that could be relevant to their own brand or
client, and crafting stories that can ride the wave.
That kind of creative thinking is exactly what drives viral marketing. Advertising execs might argue
that they also have a strong case for taking on viral marketing, and maybe that’s partly true. But advertising
creatives know that their work will always have a media budget behind it to make sure it gets seen by an
audience regardless of how strong it is.
PR people are more experienced at coming up with ideas that have to stand on their own merits and persuade
people to pay attention, rather than simply buying their way onto the page, and that’s much closer to what
viral marketing needs to achieve.
How PR Skills Align with Influencer Relations
Viral Marketing & News-Jacking
20
Key Stat
The Meltwater Advantage
Example
Viral Marketing
Beans and Weetabix
of social media marketers say
that funny content works best
on social media.
(Source: Hubspot survey of 300 social
media marketers. November 2021)
Our social listening platform, Meltwater Explore, makes
it easy to identify trending topics and new memes
quickly enough for you to respond while they are still
relevant. After all, there’s no point trying to jump onto
a rising trend once everybody else has already done
it. By spotting these trends early, your brand can be
the first to get out a response, ensuring yours is the
one that everybody shares and remembers, instead of
being just another copycat.
Learn more.
In early 2021, the popular British breakfast cereal brand,
Weetabix, posted a tongue-in-cheek serving-suggestion
for its product on Twitter, a picture showing the product
smothered with Heinz baked beans.
The stunt, orchestrated by the agency Frank PR,
achieved its goal perfectly. Almost immediately Twitter
users began sharing the image with a mixture of horror
and hilarity. Soon it seemed like every heavyweight
blue-tick account on Twitter was sharing the image and
weighing into the debate. Hollywood celebrities, global
brands, politicians, even nation states like Israel and
intelligence agencies like Britain’s GCHQ joined in the
fun.
The original Tweet was shared over 105,000 times, by
many of the biggest accounts on Twitter. The campaign
spilled over from Twitter and received international online
and broadcast news coverage, as well as becoming
the social media marketing case study that the whole
industry wanted to talk about for the rest of the year.
With a campaign budget of under £5,000 this example
demonstrates the incredible power and value for money
of viral marketing, when fuelled by some PR ingenuity.
Watch our webinar on this campaign with Frank PR
Chairman, Graham Goodkind.
80%
Viral Marketing & News-Jacking
21
Conclusion
As we’ve seen, the rise of social media wrought changes across
the world of media and marketing, with PR experiencing the
sharp end of that upheaval. But that change shouldn’t be seen
as a negative thing for the PR industry.
Yes, the landscape is more complex now, and the days when
media relations made up the bulk of PR’s responsibilities are
over. But new opportunities have arisen. So many of the new
marketing tactics that have become the norm, because of social,
are perfectly aligned with the core skills of PR professionals.
And don’t forget that there is still a great need for traditional PR
activity. Even with the boom in influencers and the changing
nature of online media, traditional print, online, and broadcast
media is still going strong. Businesses still need to build and
manage relationships with those journalists, and a great piece of
coverage in the New York Times or on the BBC still carries a lot of
weight. Old school PR is far from dead.
Darryl Sparey, founder of London based PR agency, Hard
Numbers, and a Fellow of the UK’s PRCA (Public Relations and
Communications Association) summarizes “Over the course of
the last two years, as a result of the pandemic and lockdowns,
marketing investment in things like events and outdoor
advertising declined, and investment in PR, digital marketing
and influencer marketing all increased, as brands needed to
still reach their target audience. It will be interesting to see what
happens next, and if more marketing spend returns to areas that
businesses haven’t been able to invest in over the last two years.”
Whether you’re an in-house PR exec looking to expand your remit
and build your career, or you work at a PR agency that wants to
offer wider services to win more business, there are more options
than ever available to you.
PR in the Age of Influence
22
23
Meltwater Overview
Meltwater empowers your social media
reporting with purpose-built management
and social analytics capabilities.
We help brands run their social media
programs from end to end.
Start with Meltwater’s social media management to help you
take back your time. Simplify content publishing and planning
by publishing across networks from a single source, optimizing
post times, and organizing your team. Manage your online
communities with two-way communication, and monitor for
brand mentions and other relevant topics. When you learn more
about your audience’s interests and everyday conversations,
you’ll always be prepared with a response.
With so much data coming from your social channels every
day, Meltwater’s social media analytics brings clarity to chaos.
We make it easy to create custom dashboards that give you
insights at a glance that won’t get lost in the sea of data.
Keep tabs on earned and owned data to power your customer
service, product development, brand reputation management,
sales, and marketing. Learn how others are talking about your
brand and where you’re being mentioned so you can join the
conversations and put your best foot forward.
Schedule a 15-minute demo to learn more!
of Influence
Introduction:
Just like the rest of the marketing industry, PR has
changed a lot to keep up with the technologies that
have reshaped society over the past twenty years. The
internet gave us a globally connected network, while
social media made it simple for all consumers to share
information on that network, and mobile phones put
that incredible power into our hands whenever and
wherever we need it.
We all know the rest of the story. The old certainties in
marketing evaporated, and the entire industry had to
adapt to a completely new media landscape.
Perhaps the biggest change for the PR industry has
been the pivotal shift in the nature of influence. Gone
are the days when the power to reach large audiences
was held exclusively by commercial publishers and
broadcasters, thanks to social media it’s possible for
anybody to build a following and become influential.
And that means the role of PR has evolved beyond media
relations into something much more broad-ranging.
While some have argued that the rise of social media
has diminished the need for conventional PR activity, we
believe that the opposite is true. As new technologies
and consumer behaviors have changed the face
of the marketing industry, there’s never been a
greater demand for the kind of skills offered by PR
professionals.
As a result, PR is now one of the most valuable disciplines
in the marketing mix and businesses simply cannot
afford to ignore or under-resource it. In this report, we
will outline how PR has changed and make the case for
why businesses need to prioritize investment in their PR
capabilities.
PR in the Age of Influence
2
Table of
Contents
PR’s Role in Influencing the Influential
How Influence Changed
Do We Still Need PR?
Influencer Relations
Community Management
Content Marketing
Viral Marketing & News-Jacking
Conclusion
04
06
07
09
12
16
19
22
PR in the Age of Influence
3
PR’s Role in
Influencing
the Influential
Public Relations has existed as a discipline for at least a century.
For almost as long as mass media has existed, organizations
(and high-profile individuals) have understood the value of
managing how they are represented in it. The way a business is
represented in the media has a huge impact on its reputation,
which has a direct link to the bottom line.
When people talk about Public Relations, typically they’re
referring to Media Relations. In most (but not all) cases the bulk
of PR work is focused primarily on encouraging the media to
publish positive stories about a business, or limiting the extent of
negative publicity. This means that the traditional core skills of a
PR person include:
• The ability to build and maintain relationships with key
journalists.
• The creativity to develop stories that will be of interest to the
media.
• Strong and persuasive communication abilities to pitch stories
and angles.
• A deep, ongoing understanding of the media landscape and
news agenda.
PR - Influencing the Influential
4
While PR has long been recognized as an important element of the overall marketing mix, it’s often played
second fiddle to advertising and, as a “Below the Line” activity, receives a smaller share of budgets.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, because as a relatively low-cost activity it can be seen as offering great
value for the money compared to costly advertising campaigns. But the age-old problem for PR has been
how to accurately measure the ROI of its work and thereby prove that it delivers value for the business.
A review of your newest product in a consumer magazine, or a profile of your CEO in a business newspaper,
are both obviously good things, but it’s difficult to quantify exactly how much value they provide in relation
to the cost of achieving them. The best available metric for a long time was Advertising Value Equivalent
(AVE) which calculates the value of editorial coverage to be equivalent to the cost of taking out a similar sized
advert in the same publication. This is flawed for many reasons, not least because it doesn’t account for the
fact that consumers trust editorial content more than adverts.
Because it’s always been tricky to make a clear,
measurable connection between PR activity and
revenue generation, it has traditionally been tough
for both agency and in-house practitioners to unlock
a larger share of marketing budgets. So, in many
respects, PR has long been seen as the poor cousin in
the family of marketing disciplines.
PR - Influencing the Influential
5
How Influence
Changed
Before the internet, consumer buying decisions were influenced
by advertising, media coverage, and word of mouth. It’s worth
mentioning that in this context, we mean “word of mouth” in
the conventional, literal sense; people would listen to what their
friends and relatives had to say about their own experiences
with brands.
PR’s role in this equation was to secure positive media coverage
of the brand and its products, which largely involved building
and nurturing good relationships with journalists.
But then came social media (meaning “media for the people”),
which allowed anybody to publish content online, at almost
zero cost, and build their own audience. Soon the phenomenon
of online influencers emerged. This group of people, who are
not media professionals in the conventional sense, began
creating digital content about topics they are passionate about
and amassing huge followings that rival the audience sizes of
conventional media channels.
James Bell, a Partner at specialist communications and public
affairs agency, Portland Communications, says “The addition
of social media and influencers has been a very welcome
addition to the PR comms mix. Through these channels we
are better able to amplify PR campaigns, increasing reach,
longevity and value for our clients.”
But it wasn’t just individuals who took advantage of social
media to become influential. Brands also realized that they
could use social channels to directly communicate with the
audiences that in the past could only be reached indirectly via
conventional media.
Done well, owned social media enables brands to build a large
following of people who are explicitly interested in its offerings.
And that means you can communicate with them directly, with
complete control over the timing, frequency, and messaging,
which simply cannot be done through media relations.
So, with a new generation of online influencers challenging the
dominance of commercial media companies, and social media
channels enabling brands to speak directly to consumers,
people started asking the obvious question…
How Influence Changed
6
Do We Still
Need PR?
After all, if anybody can be an influencer these days, why do we
still need to build relationships with journalists? Especially since
all journalists are on Twitter and you don’t need a PR professional
to fire off a tweet at them. In fact, why can’t brands just build
their own social media presence and go directly to the audiences
they want to reach instead of playing the traditional media
relations game?
On the surface, it’s easy to see why people might be convinced
by that logic.
Not everybody believes that this is an entirely healthy direction.
Charlotte West, Executive Director of Global Corporate
Communications at Lenovo says “The rise of social has given us
the opportunity to reach and engage with our key audiences
more directly than ever, so in principle it has been a good thing.
That said, the growth of influencers is having a negative effect
on our work given the power is too one-sided. It’s become an
industry in itself and brands are paying talent obscene budgets
for what are often very limited contractual obligations.”
Do We Still Need PR?
7
West continued, “We need to move to a more balanced
approach of looking at how we build true earned advocacy
with multiple stakeholders, not only focusing on paid
influence, and moving those paid influencer budgets
back to comms where we can have a more sustainable,
meaningful, and measurable impact.”
In the new attention economy brands have to compete
more than ever to cut through ever louder digital noise and
get their message to relevant audiences. While tactics and
channels may have changed, we argue that the traditional
skills of PR professionals are perfectly suited to this task.
Over the following sections of this guide, we’ll look at the
vital role that PR skills can play in the modern marketing
mix and make the case for greater investment in the
discipline. We also hope to provide inspiration for PR
agencies to broaden their scope of services, helping them
to unlock client budgets in areas that they have previously
thought of as out of scope. For in-house professionals, we
want this guide to give you the confidence to think bigger
about your role and the possibilities of what an internal PR
function can do for the business.
Do We Still Need PR?
The creative opportunities
are endless - the way you can
reach niche audiences is not
only impactful but really rather
fun. Imagine hitting a Dungeons
& Dragons fanatic with 5000
followers and it being worth more
than any Kardashian because of
the audience relevance. It makes
clients’ budgets go further - but
also imaginations go further.
“
”
Kev O’Sullivan, a Senior Partner at FleishmanHillard
8
Influencer
Relations
An influencer, in the most commonly used current context, is
somebody who has a large, engaged social media following of
people who trust their opinions and advice. Some influencers
don’t focus on a specific niche but simply share content on
a wide range of lifestyle topics. Others may be more tightly
focused on a particular subject, such as gaming, cooking,
personal finance, craft and DIY, or literally anything that might
attract an audience of interested consumers.
Just as people have always looked for magazines or websites
that are relevant to their interests, they now seek out influencers
on social media. And brands that operate within those areas of
interest can benefit greatly if they are recommended by popular
influencers.
So, Influencer Relations is simply the practice of building and
managing ongoing relationships with the public personalities
that matter most to your brand’s customers. Claire Lawson, a
Director with Impact Porter Novelli based in Dubai UAE, says
“While influencers can be a great asset, it is important that
PR professionals ensure best practices are being implemented
for successful campaigns. Influencer selection is key to ensure
they align with the brand’s values, and we avoid transactional
relationships and inauthentic content.”
What is Influencer Relations?
Influencer Relations
9
Influencer Relations
The biggest lifestyle influencers can have audiences that extend
into the tens of millions, so when they endorse a particular
product or brand it can have a huge impact on sales, as well as
giving an overall reputational lift.
But it’s not always about the sheer size of their social media
following. An influencer who is laser-focused on a particular
niche (say, vegan confectionery for example) might have a small
audience that is highly engaged with that topic. A brand that
operates in that space could have a high degree of confidence
that an endorsement would reach exactly the right audience.
Lawson adds, “Influencer selection is key to ensure they
align with the brand’s values, and we avoid transactional
relationships and inauthentic content. Co-creation is preferred,
to craft engaging, exciting material that delivers on the brand’s
objectives while remaining true to the audience of the influencer.
Finally, proper measurement is crucial to ensure KPIs are hit and
success can be demonstrated. Used properly, influencers can be
a great channel to achieve further awareness and mass reach
Business Benefit
This is almost a no-brainer. The parallels between Influencer
Relations and conventional Media Relations are huge, and it
makes perfect sense that PR people should be handling it.
There are some differences that PR people need to understand,
however. While journalists undoubtedly have influence, they are
not the same as social media influencers. Journalism is a specific
profession that is bound by legal and ethical obligations, and
in most cases journalists undergo formal (or at least on the job)
training. That’s not the case for social media influencers.
The rules of engagement for the two groups are different. In
most cases, a journalist would not expect payment or any other
kind of incentive to write a story about a brand, and in fact it
would be considered highly unprofessional. But in the influencer
marketing world, it’s much more common for positive coverage
to be incentivized either informally (e.g. by offering free product
samples) or through a formal commercial agreement.
How PR Skills Align with Influencer Relations
10
Key Stat
The Meltwater Advantage
Example
Influencer Relations
Sodastream’s Influencer Relations
of marketers surveyed said they planned
to increase their spend on Influencer
Marketing over the next 12-18 months.
(Source: Inmar Intelligence/Social Media Today survey of 300 marketers in 2022)
Meltwater’s Influencer Relations platform is designed
to streamline every stage of influencer campaign
management. We make it easy to identify the most
relevant influencers for your brand, and to authenticate
their audiences so that you don’t fall prey to influencer
fraud.
We have a custom built CRM system, specifically
created for managing influencer marketing
campaigns at scale. This not only simplifies the day-
to-day operations of influencer marketing, but has
measurement and ROI tracking baked in, which makes
it easy to constantly optimize and improve your
campaigns.
Learn more.
The popular brand, best known for its home drink
carbonation systems sold around the world, gets a lot of
attention on social media. With so many people talking
about Sodastream it’s hard to reply to everybody, so the
brand wanted to engage the most influential fans in its
community.
Sodastream uses Meltwater to track which of its content
and messages are resonating with audiences, and to
easily identify the strongest voices amongst all those
conversations using the influence ranking system. The
team then engages those influencers with “surprise
and delight” tactics, such as sending gifts, to show
appreciation for their support. This in turn drives more
conversations and strengthens relationships with the
brand’s most vocal and influential fans.
Read the full Sodastream case study here.
61%
Influencer Relations
11
Community
Management
Most brands these days use social media to communicate
with their audiences to some degree. The job of keeping those
channels updated, growing the follower base, as well as
moderating and responding to comments is called Community
Management.
At its most basic level this can simply involve making occasional
posts on Twitter or LinkedIn, while some big consumer brands
run highly sophisticated social media programs across the full
spectrum of channels, including:
What is Community Management?
TikTok
YouTube
Review sites
Forums
Community Management
Doing this at scale, for a large national
or global brand, demands a lot of resources.
A constant stream of fresh, engaging content must be created
and optimized for all channels, including copy, images, and
video, as well as interactive formats such as polls.
Comments from the community need to be constantly
monitored and assessed to decide whether they need to be
responded to, or removed if they are inappropriate, and with
large communities this in itself is a full time job. The world’s
biggest brands can have tens, even hundreds of millions of
followers just on one social media channel, with entire global
teams dedicated to managing them.
Conversely, if the community is small, or even non-existent, the
challenge is to grow it somehow. Building an online community
from scratch is extremely difficult and can take a long time
to deliver results, so it requires a long term commitment of
resources.
12
Business Benefit
Why would businesses invest the significant resources required to do community management
well?
The simplest way to look at it is that every single person who follows a brand on social media
has opted-in to receive regular marketing communications from that company. According to the
latest research, the average user spends almost two and a half hours on social media every day,
so those brand followers have opted-in on a channel where they are highly active.
Studies have shown that people trust brands’ social media channels more than advertising. This
might not make immediate sense, since in both cases the brand controls the message so there’s
no reason why one channel would be more trustworthy than the other, but people seem to judge
social media communications as being more authentic than ads.
Hopefully, it should be obvious that this channel is incredibly powerful. No matter what kind
of size of business, having a group of people who have proactively consented to hearing from
you is very useful. The brand can directly communicate with these customers easily and cost-
effectively, whenever it wants to.
It’s better than email because it’s more immediate and
engaging, and it’s better than advertising because
you can be sure the people you reach have already
expressed an interest in the brand.
Over time some of those people could be converted
to customers, and even those who never buy from you
can be helpful in spreading your message to a wider
audience.
Community Management
13
In a sense, community management is Public Relations in its purest form, because it involves communicating directly with the
public at scale, on a highly visible platform.
There’s a lot involved in community management, but at its heart is the ability to represent a brand in a professional, consistent
manner, under a wide range of circumstances, including any potential comms crisis. Nobody does this as well as PR.
The key elements of community management align closely with PR skills:
How PR Skills Align With Community Management
Storytelling & Content Creation
Successful social media communities require a lot of fresh
content. It needs to be on-brand, but the real challenge is
that it also needs to be engaging, not overtly salesy. Where
many brands fail is by posting a lot of material that is
indistinguishable from advertising, but what PR can bring to
the table is expertise in creating content that is specifically
designed to meet the needs of the target audience.
Strategic Communications
The whole point of a brand social media channel is to speak
directly to the public. Typically in a business, only authorized
executives are allowed to speak publicly on behalf of the brand
after they’ve been extensively media-trained and coached on
the appropriate messaging. So why should social media be any
different? The people responsible for a brand’s social channels
should be strategic communications experts.
Community Management
14
Key Stat
The Meltwater Advantage
Example
Community Management
360i Streamlines Community Management
US adults spend an average of 95
minutes on social media daily. This figure
consistently increases year on year, and
brands need to have a presence in social
channels.
(Source: Emarketer Social Usage Survey 2021)
Meltwater’s enterprise- ready Community Management
platform helps keep your social channels under control.
It was designed to work at scale for organizations that
need to manage multiple brand accounts across all
the leading social media platforms, in many different
markets.
With role-based dashboards, configurable workflows,
and built-in measurement and reporting facilities,
our Community Management platform is built for
collaboration, even across multiple in-house and
external teams.
Meltwater is trusted by some of the world’s biggest
brands to manage their global social media footprints.
Learn more.
Integrated creative and media agency, 360i, delivers
value for clients by creating high-impact digital content
that engages and grows their online communities. But
the agency realized that it kept running into a similar set
of challenges when doing this.
Firstly, conventional approvals processes are simply
too slow for the digital age. Content often needs to be
created and published quickly to react to fast moving
events, and waiting for stakeholder sign-off means that it
often loses impact by the time it can be published.
Secondly, reporting was taking up too much time. While
the value of understanding social media performance
was clear, the amount of time it took to gather and
analyze the data was disproportionate.
360i solved both of these problems with Meltwater
Engage, our social media community management
platform. Engage streamlines approvals and publishing
processes across different teams and organizations, and
fully automates measurement and reporting. This means
360i can focus on creating great content and building
communities for its clients.
Read the full - 360i community management
case study here.
Community Management
15
Content
Marketing
Content Marketing is not a particularly new idea, brands have
been creating content to attract the attention of customers
for a long time. In 1900, the Michelin Guide to restaurants was
originally published for free by the French tire manufacturer of
the same name, to encourage consumers to drive motor-cars
more in search of a good meal.
These days, however, Content Marketing is even more important,
as a huge number of businesses vie for limited consumer
attention. There are many different types of content, designed
to work at different stages of the marketing funnel, from broad
attention grabbing material to create awareness of the brand,
right down to very focused informational pieces that help
consumers make their final purchasing decision.
Depending on the type of brand, content can be entertaining,
educational, or useful.
What is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing
16
Content Marketing helps businesses succeed at all stages of the customer
journey. It can increase visibility at the awareness stage, improve conversions
throughout the marketing funnel, and then strengthen ongoing customer loyalty,
upsell opportunities, word-of-mouth recommendations. Great content makes it
much easier for brands to move from having a purely transactional relationship
with their customers, to a more involved relationship where the customer engages
with the brand more often.
Business Benefit
Content is not advertising. Its purpose is not to directly make a sale, but to keep the
audience interested and engaged, and to increase long- term trust in the brand.
To create this kind of content you need to know how to craft stories that will capture
and hold the attention of any target audience. You need great communication abilities,
and media production expertise, which could include anything from plain copy to
PDF eBooks, photography, videos, infographics, podcasts, and even interactive digital
media.
This magic mix of message and medium know-how is the bread and
butter of the PR department, they’ve been doing it for decades. It’s
hard to make the case for any other discipline taking charge of
content marketing in an organization.
How PR Skills Align with Influencer Relations
Content Marketing
17
Key Stat
The Meltwater Advantage
Content Marketing
The Economist
of marketers who use content
marketing are expected to maintain
content budget levels throughout 2022
compared to the previous year.
(Source: Hubspot survey of 1,067 marketers, 2021)
Meltwater Explore is a social listening and research tool
that lets you dig into all of the topics that are relevant to
your audience. This makes it easy to uncover the issues
and questions that matter to them, and build a content
marketing strategy that is based on real data about
what your audience needs, rather than hunches.
Our Consumer Intelligence tool, Linkfluence, offers
smart audience segmentation capabilities, which
identifies online “tribes” based on shared values,
interests, influences, and behaviors, instead of simple
demographics. It helps you tailor your content strategy
for each of your segments, so you never miss the mark.
Learn more.
High profile current affairs newspaper, The Economist,
which uses content marketing to grow its readership
through new subscriptions. The brand can call upon an
unrivaled library of high-quality editorial content, but
the challenge is to match the right content to the right
audience, at the right time.
The Economist uses Meltwater to create audience
insights, and build a deep understanding of its
online communities and their interests. Armed with
this actionable data the team is able to target those
audiences with relevant, engaging content.
Read the full Economist case study here.
90%
Content Marketing
Example
18
Viral Marketing
& News-Jacking
An unexpected side-effect of media becoming social was that
when people found a piece of content they liked, they shared
it with their network of connections. And those people shared it
with their own networks, and so on, and so on, until suddenly
millions of people around the world are watching that funny
video of your grandmother’s cat.
Brands soon caught on to the magical power of virality and
began deliberately producing content designed to be shared as
far and wide as possible on social networks. But this is a tough
nut to crack.
There’s little rhyme or reason to what makes a particular video
or meme spread across the web, but the table stakes are that
it has to be funny, shocking, or cute. Even then, there are no
guarantees, and for every hit viral campaign you see, there are
thousands of others that simply never took off.
One of the most powerful ingredients in Viral Marketing is News-
Jacking which, as most PR people know, is the practice of
piggybacking a story or piece of content onto a trending news
topic. Often this is done with a sense of humor, making fun of a
big story that everybody is talking about.
What is Viral Marketing & News-Jacking
Viral Marketing & News-Jacking
19
The most successful viral campaigns can reach audiences of hundreds of millions
of people globally, for very little investment. You have to pay for the production of
the content, and maybe a little advertising spend to get it seen by an audience so
they can start sharing it, but that’s small beans compared to what it would cost if
you tried to achieve the same reach through conventional advertising channels.
When it works, viral marketing offers spectacular value for money. So much so
that many brands believe it’s more than worth the cost of churning out a stream of
flops, so long as the occasional hit gets them trending on social media.
Business Benefit
Much of PR is about coming up with ideas for stories that will catch the attention of
journalists and, by extension, their audiences. Everybody in PR has sat in a creative
brainstorming session, trying to come up with imaginative ideas for stories that will get
their brand seen by the public.
News-Jacking is also a longstanding PR tactic, and execs are well versed in the practice of
monitoring the news agenda for trending topics that could be relevant to their own brand or
client, and crafting stories that can ride the wave.
That kind of creative thinking is exactly what drives viral marketing. Advertising execs might argue
that they also have a strong case for taking on viral marketing, and maybe that’s partly true. But advertising
creatives know that their work will always have a media budget behind it to make sure it gets seen by an
audience regardless of how strong it is.
PR people are more experienced at coming up with ideas that have to stand on their own merits and persuade
people to pay attention, rather than simply buying their way onto the page, and that’s much closer to what
viral marketing needs to achieve.
How PR Skills Align with Influencer Relations
Viral Marketing & News-Jacking
20
Key Stat
The Meltwater Advantage
Example
Viral Marketing
Beans and Weetabix
of social media marketers say
that funny content works best
on social media.
(Source: Hubspot survey of 300 social
media marketers. November 2021)
Our social listening platform, Meltwater Explore, makes
it easy to identify trending topics and new memes
quickly enough for you to respond while they are still
relevant. After all, there’s no point trying to jump onto
a rising trend once everybody else has already done
it. By spotting these trends early, your brand can be
the first to get out a response, ensuring yours is the
one that everybody shares and remembers, instead of
being just another copycat.
Learn more.
In early 2021, the popular British breakfast cereal brand,
Weetabix, posted a tongue-in-cheek serving-suggestion
for its product on Twitter, a picture showing the product
smothered with Heinz baked beans.
The stunt, orchestrated by the agency Frank PR,
achieved its goal perfectly. Almost immediately Twitter
users began sharing the image with a mixture of horror
and hilarity. Soon it seemed like every heavyweight
blue-tick account on Twitter was sharing the image and
weighing into the debate. Hollywood celebrities, global
brands, politicians, even nation states like Israel and
intelligence agencies like Britain’s GCHQ joined in the
fun.
The original Tweet was shared over 105,000 times, by
many of the biggest accounts on Twitter. The campaign
spilled over from Twitter and received international online
and broadcast news coverage, as well as becoming
the social media marketing case study that the whole
industry wanted to talk about for the rest of the year.
With a campaign budget of under £5,000 this example
demonstrates the incredible power and value for money
of viral marketing, when fuelled by some PR ingenuity.
Watch our webinar on this campaign with Frank PR
Chairman, Graham Goodkind.
80%
Viral Marketing & News-Jacking
21
Conclusion
As we’ve seen, the rise of social media wrought changes across
the world of media and marketing, with PR experiencing the
sharp end of that upheaval. But that change shouldn’t be seen
as a negative thing for the PR industry.
Yes, the landscape is more complex now, and the days when
media relations made up the bulk of PR’s responsibilities are
over. But new opportunities have arisen. So many of the new
marketing tactics that have become the norm, because of social,
are perfectly aligned with the core skills of PR professionals.
And don’t forget that there is still a great need for traditional PR
activity. Even with the boom in influencers and the changing
nature of online media, traditional print, online, and broadcast
media is still going strong. Businesses still need to build and
manage relationships with those journalists, and a great piece of
coverage in the New York Times or on the BBC still carries a lot of
weight. Old school PR is far from dead.
Darryl Sparey, founder of London based PR agency, Hard
Numbers, and a Fellow of the UK’s PRCA (Public Relations and
Communications Association) summarizes “Over the course of
the last two years, as a result of the pandemic and lockdowns,
marketing investment in things like events and outdoor
advertising declined, and investment in PR, digital marketing
and influencer marketing all increased, as brands needed to
still reach their target audience. It will be interesting to see what
happens next, and if more marketing spend returns to areas that
businesses haven’t been able to invest in over the last two years.”
Whether you’re an in-house PR exec looking to expand your remit
and build your career, or you work at a PR agency that wants to
offer wider services to win more business, there are more options
than ever available to you.
PR in the Age of Influence
22
23
Meltwater Overview
Meltwater empowers your social media
reporting with purpose-built management
and social analytics capabilities.
We help brands run their social media
programs from end to end.
Start with Meltwater’s social media management to help you
take back your time. Simplify content publishing and planning
by publishing across networks from a single source, optimizing
post times, and organizing your team. Manage your online
communities with two-way communication, and monitor for
brand mentions and other relevant topics. When you learn more
about your audience’s interests and everyday conversations,
you’ll always be prepared with a response.
With so much data coming from your social channels every
day, Meltwater’s social media analytics brings clarity to chaos.
We make it easy to create custom dashboards that give you
insights at a glance that won’t get lost in the sea of data.
Keep tabs on earned and owned data to power your customer
service, product development, brand reputation management,
sales, and marketing. Learn how others are talking about your
brand and where you’re being mentioned so you can join the
conversations and put your best foot forward.
Schedule a 15-minute demo to learn more!