Speaker 1: Today we're talking newsroom analytics. Not your traditional newsroom like ABC or CBS, but a brand newsroom, usually part of a broader brand storytelling initiative. Now before we get into the analytics, let's talk about what a brand newsroom isn't and what it should be. A brand newsroom is not a place to store press releases. It's not a place to direct your online communities after sharing a press release in social media, which I hope none of you do that. It's not a place to talk about your products and services and how good you are and how better you are than the competition. It's not a place to be self-serving or arrogant if you're a market leader. Now what a brand newsroom is, or what it should be, is a place for you to tell your complete story. Now when you pitch the media, they're probably not going to tell the story that you want them to. There might be elements of it that they include, but having a newsroom gives you the ability to fill in the blanks. It gives you the opportunity to tell your side of the story, because if you don't own your narrative, others will. And information travels fast these days with the rise of fake news and social media conversations just spreading quickly. Are you willing to take that risk? Are you willing to allow someone else to tell your story? And that's exactly what a newsroom does. It gives you the opportunity to have a platform to not only tell your story, but share thought leadership, share technology tips, educate the market, educate your customers, and even educate the media. So last week I talked about supply and demand and how to use analytics to understand what are the topics, what's the content that is demanding the attention of your audience. And the same rule applies here. When you're thinking about launching a brand newsroom, you have to understand what topics are important to your audience. Let me give you a quick example. So what we have here are two topical conversation analyses. Now in a previous episode, I talked about how to interpret this data, but I'm going to go over it again because it's really important that we understand how this data is pulled and why it's important. Now on the right, we have the media's coverage of digital transformation. These are the words, the keywords, and the phrases that the media uses the most as it relates to that coverage. You'll see subtopics like network, cloud, collaboration, and security. Now the reason why they're color-coded is because the size of the color-coded boxes represent volume. The larger the box, the larger volume of coverage. So digging a little bit deeper, you can see, for example, by looking at network, you can see that network security, network solutions, network platforms, change management, data analytics, these are all the subtopics within the context of network within a larger narrative of digital transformation. These are taken from not just headlines, but also from the body of an article. Now on the left, we're looking at a completely different data source. It's not the media. These are conversations that 10,000 IT decision makers are having about digital transformation. What's interesting when you look at these side-by-side is that the only commonality and topics are security. Now that makes sense given the climate that we live in, but everything else is different. There's a completely different conversation that IT is having than the media, and that's why it's important to prioritize your audiences. Now last week, I talked about supply and demand and how it's important to use analytics to understand those topics, those trends that are demanding the attention of your audience. Now this is where it becomes actionable because strategically, you can now align yourself with a broader narrative that is important to your audiences. If you're talking about a topic that your audience is not talking about, then you probably shouldn't talk about it much further. On the other hand, if you see opportunities to involve yourself in a conversation that your audience is having, then that's a great opportunity to do so. And more tactically, these are the actual keywords that your audience is using in their language, in their vernacular. So the key takeaway here is that you need to use these words in your headlines, in your metadata, in your articles, in your social content, in your press releases. These are also keywords that you want to bid on in paid search because that really is the only way to be relevant to an audience. The only way to break through the clutter is to relate to your audiences and speak the same language as they do. There's a lot more to newsroom analytics than just studying audiences. Now if you know me, I'm very passionate about audience intelligence. I've talked about it quite a bit in these episodes. I've blogged about it for many years. And the reason why is very simple. It's actionable. If I understand the complexities of my customers, if I understand their passions, what makes them tick, what technologies they prefer, what hashtags they're using, all of that intelligence is extremely actionable. You can use it to inform everything you do from paid, earned, shared, and owned media. I want to just talk about one last thing before we close the episode. Now assume you take my advice and you identify your audiences, you track their conversations, you track their coverage and headlines, you understand their brand affinities and what channels they're using the most, and let's say you use that data to inform your content, your headlines, you've optimized your metadata, the content in your blog, and let's say you write a really good piece about the future of technology. Just because you publish that in your newsroom doesn't mean that anyone's going to read it. And that's why it's critical to have a content distribution plan. And it's really not rocket science. It's leveraging the channels that you have access to, to ensure that your content is being published and put forth in front of an audience in the channels where they spend their time. It could be paid media. In fact, it should be paid media. It could be leveraging that content across other branded channels. It could be distributing it through a network of influencers or employees distributing it through their personal networks. In either case, you have to ensure that that story, that content travels far across the internet. In fact, over the longterm, because of the shelf life of that content, you will reap the benefits of organic search. Because if you're using the keywords that the audience is, well, that turns into search behavior. And next thing you know, you'll be getting a lot of traffic organically from Google. So that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for tuning in. Thanks so much for your time. If you like this content, please share it or subscribe to my YouTube channel. I swear I never thought I'd say that, but thank you so much again for spending six minutes with me and I will see you next week. Until then, take care.