With the overwhelming amount of information brought by modern media, especially social networks, the job of public relations professionals does not seem particularly easy. With numerous classic and inventive tools that allow you to find out immediately how someone mentioned you, where, and even why, it seems quite simple today to react to crises, understand how the public perceives you, and even monitor competition. Or is it? We discussed media monitoring issues in the modern environment with Lordan Kondić, a lecturer at Algebra Bernays University.
His academic specialization is in social media and user engagement with brands, as well as understanding and innovating the ways brands connect with consumers in the digital age. His expertise in brand management, market research, advertising, product and service development, customer relationship management (CRM), and the development and implementation of marketing strategies are not just theoretical knowledge but also practical skills developed through various initiatives and projects. He has led two significant rebranding projects, confirming his ability to successfully lead and implement complex marketing strategies and manage large teams. He has founded two of his own companies and currently works as a consultant, having clients from the media industry, telecommunications, tourism, and advertising.
How would you simply explain what media monitoring is and why it is important for organizations today?
– There are complicated and less complicated definitions, but I think the easiest way to say it is that it is a system for monitoring, analyzing, and interpreting content from all media channels with the aim of tracking how a brand, company, institution, industry, or topic is discussed. It may be important to highlight that it is most often used to monitor corporate brands and that the PR department within organizations uses it primarily to obtain information necessary for managing the reputation of the company or institution in the public eye. Additionally, it is used for companies to track trends in their and related industries and to gather some of the information needed for making strategic decisions. I believe it is not only important today but has always been, and all reputable companies have been using it for quite some time. Today, its role may be more prominent because information spreads much faster due to social media, making the entire process incredibly quick, which was not the case when newspapers were published once a day and news on television aired twice a day. For the monitoring process itself, agencies that conduct it are extremely important because companies rarely do it themselves. Simply reading portals and social media conducted by company employees is not systematic or analytical enough. Fortune Business estimated the global media monitoring market at $5.4 billion last year, with a growth of about six percent this year. Unfortunately, there are no such data for Croatia.
In your opinion, how much attention do domestic companies and public institutions pay to how the public perceives them?
– I believe that all good companies and institutions in Croatia systematically monitor what is being written about them in the public and that this is one of the usual ways of gathering data from the environment. So far, I have worked in several domestic and foreign corporations, and each has used the services of a media monitoring agency. The key problem is not whether data is being collected, but how that data is transformed into information, and then, with the help of that information and existing internal knowledge, how quickly correct decisions can be made. Here, our companies still lag behind some more developed markets. For example, when Marks and Spencer experienced a hacking attack during Easter that caused payment and click-and-collect service issues, management met at three in the morning and made all the necessary decisions to overcome the crisis by six, while timely informing all stakeholders. A well-known example from last year is when AT&T in the U.S. experienced a network outage. Although it took them 12 hours to fix all the issues, they immediately admitted fault and clearly communicated priorities for restoring the network and the current status of repairs. Despite this, their stock price fell by two percent.
In today’s world, where tools notify in real-time if a company is mentioned in the media space, is it more challenging for PR professionals to react to crisis situations?
– Of course, today it requires much more effort and activity to manage crises because the flow of information is much faster. The fundamental difference is the change that relationship marketing has brought to brands and companies, which is two-way communication with consumers. Today, consumers can communicate with companies, and everyone can see how companies respond to them. Moreover, today consumers communicate publicly about companies among themselves, and those companies cannot be part of that communication. However, this simultaneously represents an advantage for companies because they can also reach a larger population and thus manage crises more easily and ‘turn’ public opinion in their favor. I believe that the speed of response from companies today is much more important than before, and perhaps even more critical than the message itself, as it is important to let different publics (business, consumers, government…) know that the company hears them and is doing something about their dissatisfaction.
