Most of us who work in communications understand at least basic ways to measure our work. We track media coverage, including things like tone and sentiment, and whether our key messages got picked up. With today’s technology, we can do this fast, and it is easily understood.
But that data only describes how we showed up in the media. It does not tell us what the people we are trying to reach actually think. The media is just what it sounds like – a medium we use to communicate. It is not the audience, and treating coverage as a proxy for audience opinion is one of the more common mistakes I see communicators make.
I recently sat down with Maria Talakina, an Insights Director at CARMA, to talk through that gap and what to do about it.
Maria has spent her career in market research and has watched the discipline migrate from the marketing department into the world of PR and communications. She is a useful guide here, because she does not treat audience research as a replacement for media analysis. She treats it as the logical next step.
The gap between coverage and opinion
“It’s important to measure how you land,” Maria told me. “It’s important to measure your share of voice, but it’s also equally important to take it a step farther.”
That step is understanding whether your audience was actually exposed to your message, whether it resonated, and whether it changed what they think or do.
The idea is not new. Maria pointed out that one of the earliest mentions of PR measurement appeared in Public Opinion Quarterly in 1944, and even then the argument was that effectiveness should be judged by how a message lands with its target audience, not only by how it appears in the press. The AMEC Framework has been making a version of this case for years. Yet a lot of communicators still hesitate to act on it.
The payoff for acting on it is real. When you measure both the media and the audience, you can see where they agree and where they do not.
“In these differences,” Maria said, “sometimes you can find the opportunity to pivot, opportunity to grow, opportunity to even reposition yourself.”
Everyone in a given industry tends to chase the same outlets and the same journalists. What separates you is whether your message actually resonates, and you cannot know that from coverage alone.
The crisis trap
The disconnect matters most in a crisis. A spike in negative coverage feels enormous from the inside, and stakeholders react accordingly. Sometimes the alarm is justified. Often it is not.
“A crisis in the media, as much as it could be big, with the audience, it might not be as bad sometimes,” Maria said. The reverse is also true. “There are certain pain points that [the] audience really is sensitive about that you’re not addressing well, and you would never know about these pain points unless you ask people.”
A simple survey gives you a reality check that media monitoring cannot.
Why social listening is not a substitute
A natural objection is that social listening already tells you what people think. However, Maria points out that social media is a platform for the extremes. People who are delighted post about it, and people who are furious post about it. The much larger group in the middle, the people who are mildly interested or genuinely indifferent, stay quiet.
So if you are in a crisis and you turn to social listening to gauge the damage, you are likely to find more of the negativity you were already worried about. That confirms the fear without testing it.
It can leave you, as Maria put it, “in a much worse mental state than it actually is.”
Asking a representative sample of your audience is how you hear from the quiet majority instead of only the loudest voices.
It is faster and cheaper than you think
The biggest barrier is usually a belief that research is slow and expensive. That belief is out of date. I have been in communications long enough to remember when surveys meant knocking on doors and making thousands of phone calls during the dinner hour when people might actually be home. It was as cumbersome and costly as it sounds.
That is not how it works anymore.
“Market research is actually not a scary instrument,” Maria said. “It’s not an expensive instrument.”
A straightforward survey can turn around in four or five days and start in the range of $4,000 to $5,000. Set against decisions that can move much larger amounts of revenue, such as which spokesperson to back or which message to run for the year, that is a small price for an informed choice.
How to start
Maria’s advice for organizations that have never done this is to start small and stay focused. Begin in a market you already know well, so you can judge whether the results ring true. Resist the urge to ask everything at once. “Don’t disperse yourself,” she said. “Stay laser focused on the objective that you’re looking for.”
She gave me a recent example. CARMA ran a survey tied to a Netflix show that prominently featured a country’s landscapes and fed into its national branding. It was seven questions, turned around in two days, for a few thousand dollars: had viewers seen the show, had they noticed the country, and were they now more likely to visit. Paired with the media coverage of the show, those answers told a fuller story than either source could on its own.
That is the whole point. Media analysis tells you what happened. Audience research tells you whether it mattered. You need both to communicate well, and getting the second one is no longer the heavy lift it used to be.
If there is a single takeaway, it is the one Maria closed with: keep it simple. The temptation is always to overcomplicate and ask too much, which drives the cost up and the value down.
A focused question, asked of the right people at the right time, will tell you what you need to know for smarter decisions.