The big pitch: How tech and AI is the new PR principle
By Michael Bade
The Oxford Dictionary defines Artificial Intelligence (AI) as the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence. Since the phrase was coined in 1956, technology has moved rapidly to provide us with machines capable of remarkable things.
Diving into this a little further, Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a form of AI that allows machines to read and process large amounts of human language, and further, Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is the true comprehension of the meaning of this text, and is one of the greatest challenges for AI.
When we talk about AI in regards to media intelligence, we’re talking about the tech that helps us make our day to day tasks quicker and easier across a vast number of sources. For example, here’s how Truescope’s AI helps PR and marketing teams across APAC every day:
- Identifying names, places, businesses, events, data, and brands across different media and applying logic that provides a robust sentiment analysis of the different people or brands mentioned in that article, rather than just the article as a whole.
- Text classification engines help Truescope to identify influencers relevant to a client - those who are most likely to reach, engage and motivate your audiences and stakeholders - by analysing the topics they write about. This is useful for when practitioners need to react quickly to a situation developing online or in the media.
- Identifying and alerting clients to recommended content based on their viewing and engagement behaviour and equally, identifying “junk” items based on learning from previously junked items.
These are just some examples of how we’re already using AI at Truescope, and the future application of our AI will be even more exciting, in light of the following three key areas that we believe are most important to comms professionals:
- Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the one area that will help teams deliver in-depth and actionable insights to better inform their campaigns, day-to-day work and strategy. Truescope uses NLP now to harness millions of media posts each day to ensure you can get an idea of what is said about “Your brand...when you’re not in the room,” (Jeff Bezos). In the future, NLP will be key to unlocking customer insights across the complete marketing function to help develop campaigns that address what stakeholders are looking for from you. Looking ahead, advancing NLP (and Natural Language Understanding (NLU)) will lead to faster and more accurate insights to execute the right strategy, instantly, for your organisation.
- Predicting the future is close. We touched upon this in our previous blog here but it’s worth noting that it may still be a little time away yet. Through monitoring millions of posts over several months and years, AI will have the ability to derive trends and predict how media organisations could react to a story, for example, predicting social media engagement based on similar articles from similar journalists and outlets in terms of likes, comments and shares. This gives communicators the tools needed to craft the right message in a shorter period of time and becomes particularly valuable when looking to understand reactions to a potential campaign or in crisis communications situations where timing is everything.
- Seeing is believing - as we all know image and video content will continue to rise but how is that effectively monitored? For example, if you sponsor an athlete how can you be across all the media that may feature your logo in an image, especially if it’s global? This is where AI can help. It will be able to accurately detect multimedia content to ensure you can demonstrate the true value of any campaign and inform better communications.
There’s also a lot more to AI than what we can include in a blog post, so if you’d like to know more contact us at hello@truescope.com.
