The Communications Command Center: Five Key Metrics Every CCO Needs

Leslie Stefanik, Vice President, Marketing, PublicRelayIn a digital day and age where crisis can strike a brand in a moment’s notice and spiral into a viral nightmare, command centers or crisis “war rooms” have increased in popularity in recent years. But these insight centers shouldn’t just be reserved for issue management. Whether a command center takes the shape of a multi-screen nerve center or a single screen view for a desktop or mobile device, a central hub of media analysis can provide communicators a 360-degree view of their brand. Consistent access to data about the brand’s traditional and social coverage, industry and competitor news, and spokespeople can help avoid crises in addition to managing them.

Successful Command Centers Help Communicators Track Their Entire Competitive Landscape and How Their Brand Measures Up Against It

So what types of data should you pull into your command center? The following types of metrics will ensure your brand has an ongoing 360-degree view of your brand health and campaign success:SOV for brand and reputational drivers: Does your company want to be known as a thought leader? A diverse employer? An innovative company? To achieve such goals, your team needs to track metrics about how your communication efforts are translating to these business objectives. Being able to quickly spot where your brand is excelling or struggling from a reputational perspective helps your PR team best evaluate where to allocate resources.Competitor and Peer coverage: This intelligence gives you a read of your market or industry in multiple ways. Messaging and media relations are two of the most actionable areas for using this analysis. Who is writing about you and/or your competitors? Which messages are pulling through for each of you? How are they writing (tone) about your brands or industry? Furthermore, insights from competitive intelligence can be shared with other business divisions like Product Development and Marketing.Influencer engagement: Whether your brand engages with authors, outlets, or third-party influencers like pundits or academics or celebrities, you want to see your relationships pay off with positive coverage. You can visualize your progress in a command center dashboard and always be in the know.Traditional Media Trending: A trending score tells you how your traditional media coverage is performing (or not) on social media channels. Consistently analyzing this data over time may reveal patterns that will help you leverage each channel for maximum impact. Do your CSR stories tend to perform better on Facebook? Do stories featuring your CEO spark sharing on LinkedIn? Do certain authors inspire retweets on Twitter? Understanding these data points will also help you spot anomalies quickly so you dive into why they are happening.Messages and Campaigns: Lastly, to understand your brand and the impact of your strategies you need to know whether or not your campaigns and their messages are pulling through in your earned media. Tracking which messages are resonating the most with your target demographics, allows you to better allocate resources to areas where your messaging needs amplification or a revamp.Incorporating these five key metrics into a live communications command center, will help your brand’s PR function consistently make better, smarter and faster decisions. Learn more about PublicRelay’s Communications Insights Center Here.

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About the Author: Having worked on both the agency and industry sides of marketing and communications, Leslie brings extensive corporate communications, branding and demand generation practice and understanding to the team at PublicRelay. Formerly the VP of Digital Marketing for Optymyze, Leslie holds a Bachelor’s of Business Administration in Marketing from Youngstown State University.