Abstract
“Measuring Media Corporate Reputations” is the primal yet most common measurement communication practitioners and researchers have focused on. Dowling and Weeks recapitulate the reasons for analysing media coverage, give hands-on suggestions for an effective presentation of the media analysis and explain which action steps should be derived from its findings.
An earlier version of this chapter was published in MIT Sloan Management Review, Vol. 49, No. 2 (2008), 28–34.
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Notes
- 1.
However, as is noted in the chapter titled “Corporate Reputation Risk”, these measures can provide useful insight if they are considered as the “wisdom of a crowd”. Also, they are good for the cross-sectional analysis of companies by academics exploring broad issues of strategy and performance.
- 2.
For example, amrinteractive who do the fieldwork for the Reputation Institute measure of corporate reputation (called RepTrak – Pluse) offers such a service.
- 3.
The old acronym WOM (word of mouth) now has an expanded definition to include word-of-mouse and word-of-media.
- 4.
This overall evaluation is based on scores about eight corporate attributes – asset use, community and environmental friendliness, ability to develop and keep key people, financial soundness, degree of innovativeness, investment value, management quality and product quality. The people who rate the companies are financial analysts, senior executives and outside directors of (other than their own) Fortune 1,000 companies.
- 5.
See the List of Lists compiled by the Reputation Institute at http://www.reputationinstitute.com.
- 6.
This assumes that each is equally important – which is a big assumption.
- 7.
While these can vary depending on the particular circumstances facing the company, the typical ones are shown in Fig. 2.
- 8.
Many commercial media analysis companies rely more on counts of media stories and whether the coverage was essentially positive or negative. A good example can be found in Eccles et al. (2007).
- 9.
Another early-warning signal of reputation trouble is when employees don’t like the companies they work for. Employee “engagement” surveys are often used to calibrate these effects.
- 10.
General Electric’s “ecomagination” communication campaign is an example of a program designed to foster these effects.
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Appendix
Appendix
Research Methodology
Over the last decade, Cubit Media Research has conducted many hundreds of print media profiling assignments for both Australian and global organisations operating in the Asia-Pacific region. These often entail comparisons with competitors. A typical assignment will involve recording various types of information such as media outlet, journalist, placement of the copy in the outlet and the tone of the message and its thematic content. Figures 2–4 are a stylised version of the major findings of the message themes from this commercial-in-confidence work. The message themes are chosen to capture both business and social aspects of a company’s activities.
The method used to profile a company’s media image and reputation is as follows:
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Each client nominates either a list of media outlets for scrutiny or a number of search terms and audiences on which the media search activity is to be conducted.
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Source material appearing in the media during the period of investigation is purchased from a commercial source such as Factiva or Lexis Nexis.
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A set of “target” message themes is identified in conjunction with the client.
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Each piece of copy is read by both advanced pattern matching software and professionally trained content analysts assigned to that company. Words and phrases are identified as belonging to sets of message themes and are meta-tagged accordingly. All of these data are then stored in a specially designed data file.
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Advanced software, overseen by skilled analysts, then carries out a message-matching activity to identify four types of message themes: “hit” – where the client desired message cuts through in the media; “positive miss” – another favourable message cuts through; “negative miss” – an unfavourable comment about the client appears and “contradiction” – a message that directly opposes the client’s desired message.
The Cubit method claims an accuracy rating of better than 99.9%.
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Dowling, G., Weeks, W. (2011). Measuring Media Corporate Reputations. In: Helm, S., Liehr-Gobbers, K., Storck, C. (eds) Reputation Management. Management for Professionals. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19266-1_12
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