Public Relationsis a creative business where established thought leadership within the niche media brands you as a subject matter expert thus gives a more competitive edge in the industry.The Founder/subject matter expert needs to step out and talk about innovation,logistics and address the industry issues.PR is a field heavy on subjective data which has limitations like human errors, limited time frame,lack of tools to analyse metrics and inaccessibility to make draw insights from large subjective data.
The new age of doing business embraces making data driven decisions. For PR,trend analysis using large sets of data can be particularly useful, this data can be leveraged to produce actionable tactics and insights.Digital footprints are increasing and advanced consumer technology will help identify, segment and make sense of this large scale data to revamp operations and strategy.
What is Big Data Analysis?
Big data is defined by five V’s : velocity, value,volume,veracity and variety.It is an umbrella term which comprises disruptive technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning,IoT to sophisticatedly identify trends and patterns in huge amounts of data. This data can manifest in various formats like photos, videos, sensor data, text and sound recordings.
Organisations harbour two kinds of data : structured and unstructured. Structure data is more organised,cost friendly and easier for reference as compared to unstructured data like social media data, docs and emails which are relatively more difficult to analyse and produce insightful reports.This data when analyzed using right tools and softwares can help optimise a business exponentially based on their insights.
Wikibon estimates the worldwide Big Data Market is growing at 11.4% CAGR between 2017 and 2027, growing from $35B to $103B.Intrinsic value of data helps organisations to derive meaning by recognising patterns or trends and thus forming results.
Pros And Applications Of Big Data
According to an Accenture study, 79% of enterprise executives agree that companies that do not embrace big data will lose their competitive position and can face extinction.Data analysis provides us insight into not only the demographics but also the psychographics of the target audience from a business standpoint.
For Public Relations and corporate communications,Big Data comprises small data streams : Internal and External. Internal data streams are owned channels which include advertising, revenues etc, while external data streams include news coverage, competition analysis and social listening.
Data is collected through data mining which is an automated extraction of patterns in large databases, online and data streams etc. Data mining can be drawn from areas including artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics, high speed computing, data visualisation etc. The data collected helps businesses to anticipate needs, mitigate risks, optimise customer experience and personalize services.
Having data at their side gives businesses a competitive edge in the industry.
How PR Can Use Big Data?
PR industry involves a lot of manual effort when it comes to media list updation, finding relevant media for pitches compounded by lack of standardized metric tools to evaluate campaign performance.
Cision states how Big Data allows PR professionals to “quantify the degree to which their earned media content contributes to meaningful business outcomes such as awareness, consideration and behaviour.”
Social media listening when compounded by big data can be useful to gather information from niche communities, whereas leveraging news analytics tools to garner accurate insights and offer a comparative analysis on the shelf life of content on the earned media placements.
- Trend Forecasting : Using predictive analytics, the cause and action for a trend emerging in the past can be analysed into a comprehensive report which provides a case study with Do’s and Don’ts to maximize impact and optimise engagement in present if that trend repeats.
- Sentiment Analysis: PR campaigns are designed in tandem to the demographics and psychographics of the target audience to have a cognitive impact on them : be it the way the public feels, believes or thinks. These intangible values can be converted into tangible assets via sophisticated Big Data analytics tools.
- Content Analysis : Content is one of the most important KPI. In the PR universe,the backbone of strong media relations and influencing positive public opinion is relevant and creative content.This can be measured via engagement rates and data collected by social media listening tools which help us personalize content on the basis of our target audience.
- Tracking Conversion : With help of Big Data, professionals will be able to calculate ROI and quantify the influence of each media coverage that comes from a specific PR campaign.
Author : Falguni Chaudhary, PR Consultant.
Disclaimer- The News Strike does not take any responsibility for the article. The entire responsibility lies for the writer.