7 metrics trends that pervaded PR in 2015

Trend No. 1: We bade farewell to the bundling board.

For years, most organizations have kept a giant bundling board between social media and traditional media monitoring. Like the Puritans, they admitted that the two parties had occasional contact, yet there were strict rules designed to keep them apart.

In reality, organizations used different vendors and different methodologies, because most traditional media monitoring companies didn’t understand social media monitoring, and most social media monitoring companies didn’t care about (or were really bad at) tracking traditional media.

New platforms do both well, and unlike old social monitoring firms that eschewed human intervention, the developers of these platforms understand that humans are a vital element of their success.

The two best that I’ve seen so far are Talkwalker and CyberAlert.

Talkwalker has taken the best of social media monitoring—speed, elegance and a beautiful interface—and married it with a great PR platform that doesn’t just tell you how many mentions you got, but adds sexy details like the number of shares, data on the publications, and human coding for messaging and other parameters.