My last post asked two questions that were posed to a roundtable of communicators recently; 1) how can you know what people think about you (your company, your leadership, your brands) and 2) can you really “manage” what people think about you?

To think though the first question, we started with some examples of the reputation metrics that evolve24 provides. However, before we can develop metrics, we first need data. The data we use comes from media monitoring, a topic which needs to be addressed as the precursor to knowing what people think of you.

Media Monitoring tells you what is being said about you and your industry. Agencies and media aggregation companies have been providing this information since time immemorial, and recently a new slate of options have appeared to add social media monitoring to the mix. There is certainly value in knowing what is being said, but knowing what is being said is not the same as knowing what people think about you.

Knowing what people think about you means not just knowing what they saw, but also understanding how they felt when they saw it. But thinking from that perspective often requires overcoming a challenge I have observed in many communications teams; the challenge of insider’s bias.

Insider’s bias is often ingrained in communications teams in a few ways. First, there is the bias that is most concerned not with knowing what was said about us, but more specifically what was said “by us”. This is media monitoring as scorekeeping, a way to tally the eyeballs that saw what we said about ourselves. This bias is often resistant to knowing what was said “about us” because that is beyond our control. All these teams want to know is did their message get out there. If the message was disseminated, then the program was a success. Often this concern is extended to the channels that got the message out, such that a message published by a typically uninterested outlet is seen as a prize.

What is missing here of course is the context of the conversation. Yes the message got out, but it was sharing all those eyeballs with other messages about the brand, those messages not of our making. Simply knowing that the message was circulated tells us nothing about whether it had an impact – i.e. whether it influenced what people think about us. To know that, we have to consider what about the message would have an influence on people’s thoughts and behavior, and what other messages would have an equally strong or stronger influence. Of course, influencing impressions positively is the point of drafting a communication or planning a marketing campaign. But we writers are insiders, we start with a favorable impression of what we’re writing about, and we don’t always think of the broad and strange variety of messages that will be competing with ours. That’s the other arm of insider bias – the difficulty in thinking like someone we’re not – our audience. More on this next post.