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Caliber recently entered a partnership with media intelligence firm Polecat. We asked our founder and CEO, Shahar Silbershatz, to put five questions to Polecat’s chief insights officer, Yasmin Crowther — and vice versa — to discover more about the changing media, stakeholder and reputation management universe in late 2024.
Yasmin: We’re all about accelerating speed to insight. We solve for companies seeking to navigate, manage and measure their reputations and reputational landscape based on high-quality online and social data.
Landscapes can be very noisy, and we work to simplify complexity with our impact metrics and lens on events so that customers can focus, assess, prioritize and plan. Users can now also chat with their data and get factual referenced answers in a fully private Gen-AI environment.
It all adds up to super-agile, actionable insight that’s board-ready to report and enable effective management of risk and opportunity.
Yasmin: It all comes down to the framing question. Media monitoring answers a question similar to: ‘How much do I weigh at the moment?’ It’s quite a narrow question, but it has an unequivocal numeric answer (X kilos), which makes us feel like it’s something we can control, but as everyone now knows, that’s not a route to health and sometimes the opposite.
Reputation monitoring is more akin to appraising overall health or trust — assessing the landscape and trajectory, one’s place in it and how to set a course. Media monitoring counts and likes only get you so far.
Next-generation tools — and I count Polecat here — offer better always-on metrics that help you see where you are on the map of global discourse at a glance, with zero search strings, and help you get much closer to predictive analytics and assessing where you’re going and your next moves.
We’ve seen the shift of companies “needing” to measure and monitor stakeholders; governments, academics, think tanks, international organizations like UN, WEF, World Bank, etc… to get ahead of the events, issues and opportunities of tomorrow.
Yasmin: Many companies are on board regarding some sort of metrics around their comms activities. But there’s a difference between companies monitoring their media footprint and the success of their PR / campaigns versus managing reputation, which requires appraising strategic events, understanding how a landscape is evolving and how peers are moving, seeing which stakeholders are important, and where risk can be managed and even leveraged into opportunity.
One of the advantages of our platform is that we help join up teams within companies — managing reputation risk isn’t only a comms activity; it touches enterprise risk teams, legal teams, sustainability and reporting teams.
Those teams benefit from a consistent window into the world, which is what we work to deliver. If business leaders have a vision of a more agile and joined-up approach and how a platform like ours can enable it, that’s great — it’s not always the case, but increasingly so.
Yasmin: The media landscape is constantly changing. Younger generations no longer absorb print media in the same way — their focus is much more on social media and learning from their own peers and influencers.
We saw the power of long-form podcast interviews in the US election. X has also obviously gone through quite some turbulence and seen people and organizations moving away from it as it’s become more contentious.
These shifts present a host of challenges. Companies need to be looking across the bandwidth of media to appraise reputational risk and opportunity and ensure their strategies are robust and meaningful across that diversity, while also being consistent.
In an era where there is low trust in many companies, and in certain media, companies need to understand the credible voices and stakeholders that can communicate facts out into the world on their behalf – not just when it comes to positive campaigns, but also in circumstances where they may be a need to counter misinformation or disinformation.
Yasmin: Caliber’s Real-Time Tracker will show what relevant stakeholders think of them. It does so by continuously tracking stakeholder perceptions and quantifying these perceptions.
Alongside a Trust & Like Score, which is an overall measure of their reputation, clients can get real-time scores for a range of brand and reputation attributes such as Authenticity, Innovation and Leadership.
Together with our media sentiment analysis, this data will show them the true impact of relevant media coverage on their reputation — and vice versa, of course.
Shahar: Caliber is a stakeholder intelligence company that helps brands build trust. We give companies real-time data about how their stakeholders perceive them, which helps them understand their audience and communicate more effectively.
Unlike media monitoring tools, which show businesses what the media are saying, or social listening tools, which show them what the most opinionated people online are saying, we show them how all relevant stakeholders perceive them.
And unlike quarterly or annual reports, whose insights are often “stale on arrival”, our real-time data delivers up-to-the-minute, actionable insights. The continuous, representative multi-stakeholder data allows for accurate impact assessment and subsequent optimization or mitigation of communication activities and external events.
Shahar: Look at the headlines. From the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East to the return of Trump as president, from anxiety about AI to concern about climate change, we’re in the age of the “polycrisis”, a series of interconnected crises that separately and together impact how stakeholders think, act and behave towards brands and businesses.
At the same time, companies are increasingly expected, whether by consumers, employees or other stakeholders, to take a stance on certain issues — or at least be clear about what does or doesn’t matter to them.
In short, the world is more complex than ever, and companies increasingly must think about their stakeholders not as a singular bloc but as disparate audiences with potentially competing interests or reactions to what businesses say or do.
This multistakeholder environment — and the pace of change — means companies and their comms teams increasingly must be “always on”: alert to reputational risks and opportunities to build trust with stakeholders and communicate their values.
Shahar: We’re increasingly seeing Chief Communications Officers and their teams use data to demonstrate the impact of their communications campaigns.
For years, CCOs had to rely on their gut instinct — “This is how we’re perceived” or “This isn’t going down the way we thought it would”. Using real-time data about stakeholder perceptions, they can effectively confirm their instinct or get evidence to the contrary.
This means several things.
First, they can look at the data, see how stakeholders respond to a communications campaign, say, or a crisis response and decide whether to hit the brakes, pump the gas or change course.
Second, they can prove the ROI on investment in communications activities — meaning their work is no longer about “vibes” or “emotions” but demonstrable impact.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, by “connecting the dots” in this way, they can earn — and cement — that fabled “seat at the table”, further elevating the status and importance of the comms function within the C-suite and broader organization.
At the same time, companies are increasingly expected, whether by consumers, employees or other stakeholders, to take a stance on certain issues — or at least be clear about what does or doesn’t matter to them.
In short, the world is more complex than ever, and companies increasingly must think about their stakeholders not as a singular bloc but as disparate audiences with potentially competing interests or reactions to what businesses say or do.
This multistakeholder environment — and the pace of change — means companies and their comms teams increasingly must be “always on”: alert to reputational risks and opportunities to build trust with stakeholders and communicate their values.
Shahar: It means they can better understand their brand’s and reputation’s true impact on media coverage — and vice versa.
By integrating Polecat’s data into Caliber’s Real-Time Tracker, our customers can stop guessing what impact relevant media coverage has and instead pinpoint the most impactful media mentions.
Seeing continuous (media) output and (reputation) impact data side-by-side is invaluable for communicators, making their decision-making on things such as channels, messaging, targeting and so on much more informed and effective.
Shahar: IBM provides an excellent case in point. Last December, it had a Trust & Like Score of 69 (out of 100) and a Net Sentiment Score of 17.
Its reputation has remained fairly constant throughout 2024, falling to 66 in April (which correlated with a seven-point drop in its Net Sentiment Score) and rising as high as 74 in early September (which correlated with a 22-point rise in its Net Sentiment Score to a year-high of 42).
The graph shows the “dance” between the two, with IBM’s Trust & Like Score mirroring its Net Sentiment Score.
The correlation of these two metrics suggests an opportunity to use one as a predictive metric for the other, spurring action that can capitalize on potential reputation gains — or minimize reputational setbacks.
In other words, having such information at their disposal, IBM could have immediately detected the impact of the negative coverage — which audiences were affected and how — and focused its engagement activities more narrowly, thus mitigating any reputational damage.
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