Google is responsible for some of the greatest free tools available to the PR pro. Alerts from Google News inform on company or client news, and potential problems. Google Trends outlines aids PR planning by defining the popularity of keywords. Google Analytics provides the opportunity for a PR pro to accurately prove PR ROI, particularly for retailers and consumer brands. And now, Google’s Jigsaw team have launched unfiltered.news in beta, which will help add context and relevance to PR activity.
The platform provides a visualisation of the data from Google News. They run content analysis across all languages to identify individual topics, and categorise those topics by the location of the publication. The tool currently only shows the top 100 topics for each location, or country. Practically, what all of that means is that the PR pro can immediately understand what the media is focused on in any country and drill into individual stories.
Unfiltered.news adds an interesting twist. In addition to the most active topics being reported within a market, the platform will also list the topics that are not as popular compared to other markets. This helps to understand where a story might be trending. Speaking of trending, an easy line chart shows the popularity of the topic over time.
From a PR perspective, the tool is perfect for understanding context and trends. In measurement, we tend to focus on the company or the campaign within a set target group, so our viewpoint can be very tightly defined and lack broader context. In other words, we ignore what is happening in the rest of the world. Unfiltered.news allows us to take a step back and understand how the story might sit within the broader news context. Because it so succinctly defines key topics, unfiltered.news also provides the opportunity for the PR pro to add relevancy to a story based on topics of interest to the media.
How to use unfiltered.news
This is an easy tool to use. The landing screen will take you to a global map (below) visualising key topics across all markets. This being a Google product, it is possible to add search terms, but they will be limited to the top 100 topics.
For the sake of example, we’ll zoom into the United Kingdom to understand what might be of interest to the local media today. The topics that are of most interest are included in the UK bubble, while the topics less reported are listed separately. It is important to note that when we look at the markets surrounding the UK that Google has analysed content across all languages – the visualisation is providing me with English translations. (The ability to immediately understand key media topics sourced from local language outlets is amazing. This used to be a manual process that was time intensive and very expensive.)
One of the topics that has been popular this week is Apple, following it’s various product announcements. So, to get a sense of how the search works, we can look at where Apple is present. The country bubbles tell us what additional topics are being mentioned alongside Apple within each market. For this story, we can see that the Apple Watch is popular in Europe, while the replacement for the iPhone 5s is a key theme in Asia. Apple’s dispute with the FBI seems a globally consistent topic. The sidebar provides a trend line for the global story and news stories to drill into and read (again, translated).
PR pros can now have a clear idea of what might be distracting the media’s attention from a story within a matter of moments. It provides them with the opportunity to add relevance to their own topics in much the same way that social teams connect engagement plans with trending topics. While the data is very complex, the interface is simple and quick to use. In short, Unfiltered.news is another amazing free PR resource from Google.