Public Relations Gets a CRM Lift

MediaMap Inc. earlier this week formally partnered with a natural language processing engine provider, Cymfony Inc., to help corporate communications departments tackle brand awareness and company image issues. Organizations often have several different public relations (PR) agencies working independently of each other, according to Ruth Habbe, executive vice president at MediaMap. Without tools that can measure effectiveness, an organization with several PR agencies cannot get an accurate view of their performance, return on investment, or their ability to generate impressions in the marketplace. So Cymfony's technology will be bundled into MediaMap's recently launched Web-based solution called Performa, which enables PR and corporate communications professionals to manage branding efforts and their effectiveness in the media. Performa combines collaboration and campaign management tools with MediaMap's up-to-date media contact information for North American journalists, analysts, and news outlets, spanning the technology, business and finance, consumer, and health and science markets. Cymfony's advanced natural language-processing engine allows Performa Analytics to scan and analyze volumes of unstructured data to identify important entities, concepts, relationships, and events. It determines who and what is being talked about, and how the various entities relate to one another. The engine allows companies to add new competitors and brands for monitoring as the market shifts. "Today's CEO requires hard evidence that their communications strategies are working and adding value to the corporation," Andrew Bernstein, CEO, Cymfony, said in a statement. "Our technology puts that evidence into the hands of communications professionals." With the natural language-querying capabilities and the click of a mouse, PR and corporate communications professionals can track specific media and campaign messages across more than 8,000 print, Internet, and broadcast-media sources; monitor which key journalists are writing about a company and its competitors; instantly analyze media coverage and trends across media types; gain immediate feedback on the effectiveness and momentum of campaigns in progress; quantify the impact of communications strategies; monitor corporate reputation and brand awareness; and analyze new brands and messages. "With Cymfony our customers are not only able to manage their media relationships, they can also instantly assess the impact of their campaigns, the state of the competition, and the strength of their corporate reputation--all in real time," Habbe says. MediaMap's Performa is available in a hosted environment to keep costs down, MediaMap executives say.