White Paper - Whip big data into shape!

1. Tip Sheet
Whip
Big Data
Into Shape
PR Professionals have millions of influencers to engage and excludes three important factors in their potential impact
billions of conversations to track. Here are three keys to on your brand:
managing the social media data explosion.
• Their presence and impact across news sites, blogs,
The number of digital influencers has grown to over 30 print and broadcast media.
million people worldwide. The monthly traffic on Facebook
alone runs in the billions of page views. Social channels • Their influence upon particular topics, industries,
account for over 20 percent of brand impressions. products and geographic regions.
Big Data is, indeed, “big” – in volume, and in the impact it • Their participation in a “tribe” of other influencers
has on your brand. Managing it is a huge part of your job who frequently share and comment on each other’s
as a PR pro. content in a particular topic space identified through a
“network science” approach.
So: How do you deal every day with a growing and
constantly changing universe of digital influencers, the You need a 360-degree view of influence in your industry.
massive volume of social media conversations and the The most sophisticated measure – the Cision Influence
flood of real-time digital mentions about your brand, Rating in the Cision Media Database – reflects the level of
industry and competition? influence that journalists, bloggers, other thought-leaders
and outlets have across both social and traditional media.
Start by prioritizing to determine who matters, what they’re
saying and how it drives your reputation, and the best (and It uses over 40 data points to rate influencers on a scale
perhaps most immediate) way to engage with them. of zero to 99 using both the performance and “share-
ability” of their content and their presence on social sites.
Cision also offers Top 100 Influencer Lists in vertical
1 Find Out Who Really Matters markets, and regularly updates top ten lists on Cision
Navigator, to help you narrow your focus.
As you begin your search for the most influential voices in
2 Hear What They’re Saying
a community – the experts who shape others’ perceptions
of your brand – influence ratings help you save lots of time.
But the first attempts at scoring the influence of social There’s a lot of irrelevant chatter in social media
network users provided a one-dimensional view. Taking conversations – and even when you tap into a meaningful
into account only someone’s activity (number of followers, dialogue, you can’t always read every tweet, comment or
friends, connections, etc.) within a few social platforms blog post.
us.cision.com 866.639.5087 ca.cision.com 877.269.3367
332 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago IL 60604 1100-150 Ferrand Drive, Toronto, ON M3C 3E5

2. Tip Sheet
So you need to use the right keyword or string of New Tools Are Emerging, Too
keywords to tune into the right online conversations,
news sites and blogs. Then you need to aggregate that Advanced text analytics solutions are emerging and
content in real time. Finally, you must make split-second a variety of applications can tag your keyword search
decisions about whether to engage, and how. results to help you discover what else people talk about
when they talk about your brand.
Tools and listening platforms like Cision help you monitor
and analyze social media content, and these tools are Sentiment analysis tools have gotten more
getting more sophisticated by the month. The Cision sophisticated; they extract context, and can even
database includes links to the social media presence identify an influencer’s intent to test or buy particular
of top journalists and digital influencers. Cision tracks products or services in a moment of need.
over 150 million blogs, social sites, and online outlets.
And the content can be swiftly searched to zero in on There also are tools that can help aggregate this
important conversations. data and help identify trends, tag topics, and group
influencers by category – making you more productive.
3 Engage...the Right Way Technologies and tools will grow more sophisticated,
faster and easier to use in the months ahead. But if
you use sound research to identify and prioritize top
Influencer research also helps you understand how to influencers – and then communicate effectively with
engage appropriately. But Big Data presents another them – you can gain a big advantage in the race to both
challenge: where once there was a finite audience of manage and master Big Data.
journalists, analysts and bloggers, there are now at least
30 million mass influencers and opinionated consumers.
Databases like Cision’s are getting bigger, faster, and
easier to search by “mining” social content by topic.
These solutions integrate information about digital
influencers that help you better understand them – their
favorite topics, deadlines, preferred ways of getting
information, their pet peeves, and their most recent blog
posts, tweets and public Facebook updates.
The information comes from many sources – primary
research compiled by teams of analysts; profiles that
you can access from public social media sites (Twitter,
LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google+ as well as Facebook);
and “self-managed” profiles from content collaboration
sites.
us.cision.com 866.639.5087 ca.cision.com 877.269.3367
332 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago IL 60604 1100-150 Ferrand Drive Toronto, ON M3C 3E5