The cost of focusing on the wrong things
Your social listening tool is expensive and doesn’t work. That’s why we built RepScore™.
If you’re using one of the major social listening or media monitoring tools available today (and if you’re a communications professional, you probably are), you’re almost certainly overpaying for data that isn’t accurate and, more importantly, isn’t immediately usable.
That’s a glaring problem.
Not because the technology is inherently bad. Some of it is quite good, and only getting better with the advent of generative Al turning hours of analysis into minutes.
But the value of social listening/media monitoring services hasn’t evolved nearly as much as the technology has allowed for. Compared to how human behaviour has changed, that gap is even wider. Over the last decade, these tools have largely remained the same, promoting the same access they’ve always had. Meanwhile, the actions we take and our relationships with all forms of digital media have been flipped upside down.
As professionals, we’re still paying enormous amounts of money to third parties to count mentions, estimate impressions, and assign unreliable bulk sentiment codes. The reports that come back, in many cases, tell us very little about what’s actually happening to an organization’s reputation, even less about what to do next, and virtually nothing about what is coming. We trust at face value that what we’re getting is accurate without any real way to verify it.
We’ve confused access to backwards-looking data with access to intelligence. They’re not the same thing.
The industry has been measuring the wrong things
For years, PR measurement has largely been built around outputs. How much coverage did we generate? What was the sentiment? How many people did we reach?
Those things have a place. But what did any of it accomplish?
Did it improve trust? Change behaviour? Drive a patient through the door? Influence a purchasing decision? Protect or grow an organization’s value?
Those are the questions that matter. And they're questions most conventional monitoring platforms aren’t built to answer.
There’s also a more fundamental issue: the data itself is often questionable. Sentiment models routinely miss context or slap a blanket binary code on an intricate piece of data that can be negative, neutral, and positive all at the same time. Reach figures are inflated or inconsistently calculated. And we’re left making strategic recommendations based on information we don’t always have reason to trust.
We built RepScore to do something different.
We wanted to flip that model and build the antithesis to major media data SaaS tools.
Rather than starting with the data and figuring out what to do with it, we start with the outcome an organization is trying to achieve and work backwards.
That’s RepScore.
One centralized platform that consolidates reputation data — not just from media — measures performance consistently, identifies risk, establishes competitive context and, critically, connects communications activity with business performance.
We account for as much social data as we can get, but we don’t stop there: financial data for publicly traded companies, employee data, and industry rankings all make up the score. Once we’re engaged with clients, we also build in any private or proprietary KPIs they rely on to gauge their own reputation, because we believe the RepScore isn’t reaching its full potential without them.
A client recently told us, “Sentiment and coverage is all well and good, but at the end o the day we’re trying to get our cash register to open more often.” That’s what drives us creating a metric that tracks meaningful business outcomes as closely as we can.
Behind the scenes, RepScore runs on a sophisticated back end with more than a dozen API integrations. By contrast, the metric itself is extremely simplistic by design: a single score out of 100. Not because reputation is simple — it isn’t. But because complexity shouldn’t be an excuse for failing to communicate value.
The number isn’t the end goal. It’s the foundation for better analysis, stronger recommendations and more informed decisions.
If we’re working with a hospital, I want to know whether improving reputation is associated with more patients coming through the door. If we’re working with a corporation, I want to understand what reputation might mean for its enterprise value.
What I don’t want to do is tell a CEO they received 8,000 mentions last month and expect them to be impressed.
Less monitoring. More consulting.
This is where our industry needs to go.
RepScore is, in many respects, a deliberate break from modern media monitoring. It’s built around making the data we have access to more useful rather than more visible.
Consolidate it. Centralize it. Challenge it. Put it in context. Then connect it to something the organization actually cares about.
That’s what we believe good consulting should look like, too. Technology should be used to do the heavy lifting. Not to replace strategic thinking, but to create more room for it.
We’ve spent years telling clients that reputation is one of their most valuable assets.
Now, we’re investing in proving it.
To learn more about RepScore, and request a free demo, contact: Andrew Blanchette, SVP and GM, RepScore.