What am I thinking? Participate in this exercise for me, if you don’t mind (I promise, the point will come full circle eventually). For you to accurately guess what I’m thinking (at the time I’m writing this, not as you’re perceiving it) is a difficult task. I exist only as words on a screen to you, and this distance between you and me isn’t exactly intimate.
If you were to give it a fair shot, you would probably start with the basics, like what any writer might convey to an audience. That might give you some insight and land you pretty good guess, but there’s still more that you can do. If you were really determined, you would analyze my writing style and find any parallels to other articles you’ve come across to assess what my intention is. The point still stands that it would be a difficult thing to do. In a world where more and more companies are conducting their business online, it gets difficult to properly assess what people might be thinking.
I don’t know much about how business was conducted pre-digital age, but my guess is that most of it was conducted in person or on the phone. So, if someone was dissatisfied with whatever product or service you were selling, you could discern what they disliked and what you could improve on in order to sway them. This is certainly much more work than sending a digital survey to a customer asking how they would rate your product/service, but you can get more reliable feedback that way.
The difficulties of improving public relations in the digital haven’t gone unnoticed by many people. There have been a lot of new apps, programs, and services created in order to help with this problem. These various programs analyze buying patterns and send out surveys in an effort to give companies better insight into what they can do to improve their sells. Among these various services is TrendKite.
The company specializes in a public relation analytics. It was founded in 2012 and is based in Austin, Texas. TrendKite analyzes more than 4.2 million articles every day and does so by tracking which articles mention the company’s name and which ones have the most impact. TrendKite’s revenue increases more than 100 percent every year. They’re starting to service big name companies like Nike and Mondeléz International.
The company’s success is understandable considering how much it knows about the workings of SEO (search engine optimization). It correlates different PR (public relations) tactics in order to get the best SEO. Here’s a bit of context directly from their website:
“Measure PR’s influence on your company’s search engine ranking and take credit for the free, high-quality traffic you drive using TrendKite’s exclusive metric, SEO Impact, powered by Moz. TrendKite is the only PR Analytics platform to offer PR SEO measurement . . . With TrendKite’s groundbreaking technology, PR Attribution, it’s finally possible to measure the total number of people visiting your website after reading a PR article – regardless of there being a link in the article. TrendKite is the only PR platform that can do this for over 4 million global publications.”
Companies pay millions for good advertisements, but there are other ways to get attention. Editorial content (much like the one you’re reading) now spreads a great deal of news about companies. Tracking that editorial content and analyzing how much of an impact it has will go the distance in terms of advertising and getting feedback from people. For companies struggling to start up, it’s good to know that a service like TrendKite exists. Not only does it analyze the way people think about your company it also gives you helpful advice and tips that can help you capitalize on that data. I’m not sure, but the last time I checked, PR can be a competitive and fragile thing. It can’t hurt to have a helping hand in that area.
Reading the minds of anonymous people online may not be the easiest thing, but it definitely helps to have services like TrendKite. So, if you have a business, and you love exploiting perks of the internet as much as the next person, then TrendKite might just be the service that helps you take your PR to the next level.
