A better way to measure media
TSOV proves real impact — but what is it?
A perfectly precise, data-driven measurement framework for public relations and corporate communications doesn’t exist. Just ask ten comms flacks how to best assess the efficacy of a media relations program — you’ll get ten different answers.
I won’t bore you with the dozens of acronyms that measure marketing programs — you can Google those — but I will give you a good way to know whether or not an earned, external communications program for early stage startups (think Series C or earlier) is working.
It’s a proprietary method that my old colleague Samantha Smoak and I developed called Targeted Share of Voice (TSOV). Basic share of voice, which most comms flacks are familiar with, measures how often a brand is mentioned on the entire internet in a percentage. It’s about as effective as using a spoon while whitewater rafting. TSOV is the oar.
Most B2B/B2G tech startups don’t care about being mentioned in the Kansas City Star or Minnesota Tribune.1 Being included in a New York Post article is fun (yay! Massive reach!) but unless their potential customers are reading the Post, it won’t do much from a business perspective.
TSOV, on the other hand, is a percentage metric that allows startups to measure how often they are mentioned in media outlets that matter in articles in which they could feasibly appear — rather than the whole internet.
Seems confusing? Not to worry. Here’s a three step guide to create a TSOV dashboard to measure the efficacy of an earned media program.
Step 1: Build the base
First, ruthlessly prioritize the groups of people who actually matter. Though I loathe the word persona (or the term ideal customer profile), you need to be specific and intentional about the audiences you want to communicate with — people who will help your startup grow. The easiest way to do this? Talk to your sales leads and executive leadership team and aggregate the findings into (sigh) personas.
Then, instead of clout-chasing a name brand outlet for no strategic reason, get more granular. Focus on identifying the pieces of The Media Mosaic — the newsletter, the podcast, the influencer, the vertical media outlet, the traditional online news outlet, the who-or-whatever (moving forward, we’ll just call all of this “key media” for my own sanity, because I can’t type all that every time) — that can actually reach the people who support the brand awareness and growth of your startup.
Once complete, you’ll have a core list of key media outlets, represented by the image below (your “Mosaic”). Your key media outlets provide a baseline to focus external communications efforts on the media outlets, podcasters, Substackers, YouTubers, and others who will actually help your stories reach your key audiences.
Step 2: Identify key terms
Next up, you’ll want to identify key words and phrases that allow you to identify articles in your core list of key media outlets in which your startup could reasonably appear.
Here’s a hypothetical:
Peregrine builds a platform for law enforcement and emergency management personnel.
One media outlet in their key media list is GovTech, which is a media outlet which focuses exclusively on public-sector innovation for state and local government. Coverage in GovTech will reach Peregrine’s key audience.
Some search terms might be “AI”, “law enforcement”, “emergency response”, and “data-driven”.
But imagine cybersecurity is a topic they don’t care about and don’t work on. In that case, there is no reason why Peregrine could reasonably appear in an article about cybersecurity in GovTech, so it shouldn’t be included in the TSOV formula.
By overlaying key words and phrases across all key media outlets, you have a way to clearly identify pertinent articles that your startup could reasonably appear in within key media outlets. Depending on your preferences, you can backdate this framework or use it onward from the time you build the dashboard (personally, I recommend backdating a bit, to give yourself a baseline against which to measure future performance).
Remember: TSOV is the frequency (measured as a percentage) at which a startup is mentioned in key media outlets in articles in which they could reasonably appear. So the total subset of those articles — those that both do and do not mention the startup — is the denominator of the fraction.
Step 3: Measure TSOV
Now, identify the number of “subset” articles in which your startup is actually covered, backdating as appropriate depending on your preferences.
Divide the number of articles you’re included in by the total number of subset articles — that is your baseline TSOV percentage. The final step is to understand how TSOV changes over time (if it goes up, the key media program is working). I recommend measuring every quarter to ensure a statistically significant sample of articles, but you can measure changes in TSOV at any frequency that works best for you.
Practical implementation of TSOV
This may seem like a lot of legwork, but the truth is you can set up a TSOV measurement framework in Meltwater, MuckRack, or many other common media monitoring tools that most communications teams have access to.
In terms of functionally reporting on TSOV, you can include competitor mentions and “none” as an option. A crude dashboard might look like this:
Most of the time, a plurality of subset articles in key publications don’t mention your startup or competitors or any vendors of any kind. For executive leadership teams, it’s a critical piece of context for TSOV. A TSOV of 15% may feel low for your CEO, but if the None option has a 60% TSOV, suddenly 15% looks a lot better.
Et voilà! You can effectively measure media. Go forth and conquer.
Shoutout to Emily Ann Hill for providing feedback and editing this essay. Check out Junetail Creative to see how Emily can help improve your writing and, for small businesses, develop an unforgettable brand experience.
This is not shade to local media. Local media is critical to the fabric of our society, and needed now more than ever. I’m just saying that unless you have a good reason to seek local media coverage — where your startup was founded, conducting operations in a certain city — syndication or coverage in these pubs does nothing.