Taking a closer look at media monitoring, AVE and regulation - Part three

4 Oct 2017

In the final chapter of this three-part series on media monitoring, ROI Africa's Tonya Khoury shares insight into some of the biggest campaigns she's witnessed as well as some of the trends emerging in PR.

Tonya Khoury

What are some of the best and worst campaign results you’ve seen?

I think one that remains in the forefront of my mind is Ford Kuga. The lack of response from the organisation in the infancy of the crisis just served to exasperate the situation. Social media was relentless and the brand damage is something Ford will experience for years to come.

Other than that, there are many great campaigns that have drawn my attention over the years, most have been social-media based:

#BoycottWoolworths made a huge impact over an extended period of time; #FeesMustFall brought the world to its feet; and #ZumaMustFall brought a nation to the streets.

What are some of the biggest campaigns you’ve monitored, what were the results?
I think by far the biggest story we ever monitored was the Oscar Pistorius trial. Here we used the platform to measure what was being said across the world in news and social media, and we also compared the big media stories at the time so that we could speak about the sheer enormity of the trial.

Taking a closer look at media monitoring, AVE and regulation - Part one

Angie White 15 Sep 2017

What are some of the PR and monitoring trends that you are noticing?

The general flavour of the moment is to have a one-stop solution, like ours, which offers immediate access to your data, simplifying and decluttering your media publicity in one place. Media monitoring must offer the client opportunities to customise according to their needs and give them what they need as soon as they need it.

People are also becoming increasingly creative in their PR efforts – PR does not merely just reply on a press release. Creative elements like YouTube videos and Instagram memes are used to create extra publicity. An interesting trend that I have seen is that some companies are moving a lot of traditional print and online functions, like bursary applications, to social media to enable more access to the general public and encourage more interaction.

Social media is also a quicker way to reach your target audience – a tweet is published virtually as you speak and retweeted with one button, while traditional media follows a much longer timeframe, especially print.

The occurrence of fake news is naturally a phenomenon that influences public perception of a brand. One can refer to the recent MiWay racism debacle which was fuelled on social media, and which ended with a disgruntled client that published fake news in order to get back at MiWay, who apparently refused his claim due to him not complying with their requirements. I maintain though, fake news is news.

In analysis, we tend to find that the graphs and data must do the talking and there is no longer the need for 80-pager, long-winded explanations – clients want their smart information simplified, offering them total media intelligence on their brand.

What are the common misconceptions about media monitoring?

The biggest misconception about the media monitoring process is that it is simple. Despite a big part of the process being automated (gone are the days of manually cutting up the newspapers, gluing them to paper and manually measuring the piece to calculate an AVE value), there is still a huge human input needed (thank goodness for machines). Something like voice automation, as an example, does not work in the South African context, as our accents cannot be accurately picked up. Other languages, like Afrikaans, Xhosa or Zulu are also problematic, and we have found that something like automated sentiment is just above 80% accurate, which might prove problematic.