Measuring PR Share of Voice

A nice way for measuring PR results is to calculate your company’s share of voice as compared to your main competitors. However to get meaningful data there are some things to consider. A short guideline to measuring share of voice:

1. Work with a good analysis company
Be sure to select an analysis company that really monitors all media and websites that are relevant to your market. Beware that there are a lot of service providers who claim to monitor European media, but have a strong focus on UK. The best way to tackle this is to ask for a full list of publications being monitored per country and have your local PR in each country look at it.

2. Don’t select too many competitors
The more competitors you select, the smaller your share of voice will be and the more difficult it will be to monitor in- or decreased share of voice. If you select 100 competitors, your share of voice may only increase from 5.0 to 5.1 per cent. This is not motivating for local PR and frankly does not recognize the good local work. Limit the amount of competitors to a maximum of 4-6 and make sure there are some local market players included per country.

3. Refine overlapping competitors as much as possible
If you are a niche software vendor, and IBM is in your space as a competitor, IBM wil definitely have a great share ofvoice. But their share of voice may not totally be concerning the space you are in, because IBM is messaging on software, hardware, services and so on. Try to refine competitor monitoring to your specific space as much as possible.

4. Measure long term
So what happens if you launch a great new mobile phone and get some great coverage out of it, but at the same time Apple decided to launch their newest iPhone? Although you have done great work, your share of voice is likely to decrease. Alternatively if you get caught up in a high profile lawsuit, your share of voice may go up dramatically for the wrong reasons. These ‘incididents’ happen every now and should be leveled out over a longer period of measurement. Do look at short term results where they can be attributed to great PR (of your company or your competitor), but also look at results year by year.

Good luck! And remember: share of voice is just one of many measurement tools ;-)