Communicate with a focus on topics - the first step towards qualified data analysis

The times are gone when large and small companies could mainly differentiate themselves from the competition with a sophisticated marketing mix. The increasingly economically critical public demands information from companies about their social and ecological behavior, as well as contributions to the common good. In short, it is expected that companies take on a general responsibility - Corporate Social Responsibility.

Companies are therefore forced to shift resources that have hitherto been allocated to marketing into public relations activities. However, even the view that PR is largely media work - no matter how targeted, multimedia and well-dosed it may be - now falls short.

After all, any company that understands itself as a news producer beyond its actual corporate purpose and has already organized itself as a Corporate Newsroom is already one step ahead of the competition. They have recognized the purpose of this organizational form and have already mastered the various hurdles associated with this transition. They do this in order to bundle their limited communication resources organizationally in the face of an increasingly dynamic, complex, and volatile information world, to conceive, organize, and implement their activities from one place, to communicate in a more agile and multimedia manner and to stand out in the flood of news with clearly assignable, striking topics and content.

"How can we measure the effectiveness of a topic when our software is channel-focused?"

This centralization is not only an organizational challenge, but also a technical one. The intention of the Corporate Newsroom is ultimately not to degenerate into software-supported news cannon. On the contrary, we seek an instrument that ideally not only supports, but also enables strategically oriented communication management. With the growing importance of digital and automated news, entrepreneurial communication processes must also be digitized and automated. And if we understand communication as a process sequence of analysis, strategy, implementation, and evaluation, then the ideal newsroom software would cover all of these process steps.

Furthermore, if we want to differentiate ourselves with topics and content, it would be nice if this were also reflected in the structure of our communication management software. Because how can we measure the effectiveness of a topic if our software is channel-focused? Or - even worse - if we struggle with a hodgepodge of stand-alone tools, which in turn makes data aggregation impossible and is neither efficient nor effective.

It is only through holistic, cross-organizational control and measurement of topics that we can succeed in planning, implementing, and - in a first step - retrospectively measuring strategically, integrated, and iteratively. An evaluation becomes really interesting when it is not only retrospective, but rather predictive and ultimately iterative.