The Value Of Government In A Brand's Stakeholder Matrix

Where does a brand live? To the uninitiated, it may appear that the answer is that a brand lives among its customers or consumers. However that would be only a tiny slice of the reality, as a brand really lives across the entirety of it's stakeholder matrix. The definition of a stakeholder according to business literature is "any group or individual who is affected by or can affect the achievement of an organization’s objectives".

Influence For Brand Health

A stakeholder matrix will typically combine internal groups like Unions, Suppliers and Employees with external groups like NGOs, Government, Associations, Investors and more. In the above model which can be found in older textbooks, we see how these groups come together to form a web that surrounds the organization.

Interestingly when you are thinking about brand health, you quickly realize that while each stakeholder is important, some tend to be much more influential than others in this respect. Determining if something is influential is really just a matter of meeting two criteria:

1. Is this making someone think in a different way than they otherwise wouldn't have?
2. Is this making someone do something they otherwise wouldn't have done?

For example, the media is an extremely powerful stakeholder when it comes to brand perception because it's a source of information for many other stakeholders such as investors, customers & even employees. They tend to be very influential that way and alter the behavior of others. Just like the case of an Airline Executive misbehaving led to garnering negative media attention, which in-turn affected their organization's employee turnover, monthly sales, investor relations & more.

The Big Risk Here

In the same breath however is another massively underutilized stakeholder that influences others. We're talking about the Government. I'm going to share some industry knowledge here for you - Many important Government websites, resources and publications are not being indexed by Media Monitoring SaaS companies.

So what? Well, the simple way to put it is that there are huge gaps in your data when it comes to tracking sources where influential conversations live. Take a look at industries which have been debated on the floor at the parliament like Cannabis for instance. Government is a very influential stakeholder in this highly regulated industry and although government spokespeople are quoted in the media, most of the voices are lost in editing.

As a result, Government Relations & Public Affairs Practitioners are being left out of the user experience when it comes to Media Monitoring. They're having to work with cumbersome and manual processes that cost a lot time and energy to find relevant data. For example, they physically watch parliamentary video feed to keep track of the issues that are tabled, debated and commented on by parties, committees, consortium and the like. They manually transcribe footage to report on what is being said, and manage many moving parts just for the pursuit of a simple story. It's not because they are less important, but because the big Canadian Media Monitoring technologies and processes are only optimized for Editorial Content.

What does this mean? First, its an opportunity for smaller more nimble SaaS companies to take on the challenge of distilling data from additional types of external data sources and combining it with internal data to get broader outputs for reporting. In other words combining Government & Parliamentary Monitoring via Hansard, Feeds, Video Content, Government & Industry Publications, Gazettes, Tenders and Municipal Content with Online Editorial Media Monitoring.

It means the ability to track the depth and breadth of Government Communications, whether to industry or the public. Sparked by acknowledging why Government is indeed a mighty stakeholder for many brand stakeholder matrices due to it's influential nature. This by making it easier for a Public Affairs & Communications Department, Agencies or individual Practitioners to do their jobs better, cheaper and quicker.

You're On To Something

Technologies like Machine Learning & AI are being used in virtually every industry to help with heavy lifting manual tasks. It's been used in both Traditional & Social Media Monitoring for ages. However, if this matters to you, it would be a challenge to find Media Intelligence companies that can solve these problems for you.

As the VP of Insights for Gnowit Inc. Focused on evaluating communications for brands, I'm not interested in data for data's sake. Rather the value of information to me - is measured by what you are able to do with it. Therefore outputs like clips, likes & shares are far less interesting when compared to how the the outtakes & outcomes of the campaign performed. Like a race-car depends on high performance fuel by virtue of which even incremental improvements of purity add to a exciting robustness of speed. So too is the benefit, if the picture you paint to your organization, is informed by highly influential voices.

By the way, if you liked this thought experiment here is a resource for you. It's the Report titled: "Prioritizing Stakeholders for Public Relations" by Brad L. Rawlins A member of a Commission on Public Relations Measurement & Evaluation at Brigham Young University. Utah - Published by the Institute for Public Relations in March 2006: https://bit.ly/2RllUSE