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Key Message Reports

Create a Key Message Report in Muck Rack

Nick Lemen avatar
Written by Nick Lemen
Updated over a month ago

Key Message Reports

Key Message Reports enable you to visualize which phrases resonate with reporters and appear in your news coverage.

Learn More in Muck Rack Academy

You can learn all about Key Message Reporting in Muck Rack by taking the Key Message Reports course in Muck Rack Academy.


Create A Key Message Report

  1. From the main navigation bar, select Reporting > Key Messages.


  2. Enter a base term, such as your company or client’s name, along with your key messages, then select the Generate button.


  3. View your report and adjust as needed.


Example of A Key Message Report

If you want to track key message pull-through for an organization or brand, such as Cigna, you can include the organization name as your base term and enter your key messages as phrases or keywords and generating a Key Message report.

From your report, you can quickly determine which key messages are mentioned most often within media coverage and how coverage of your key messages has gone up or down over time.

💡 TIP: We recommend selecting your base term in the Key Messages Over Time widget to get a better view of your data.

Select any Key Message from the Key Messages Summary widget to open a list of all articles that mention both your base term and that key message within the search results page.

💡 TIP: If you'd like to track Key Messages in any Dashboard widgets, you can select Save Search from the search results page, which will then save this as a search that can be leveraged as a data source.


Other Ways to Measure Key Message Pull Through

Key Message reports are ideal for quickly seeing how key messages are showing up across all coverage within Muck Rack's database. However, you may wish to see key message data for a specific set of coverage. For this, we recommend the following workflow:

  1. Set up Saved Searches for each key message; these Saved Searches will essentially act as tags which you can leverage in reports, alerts, and more.


    NOTE: To ensure you are only including the coverage you want most, be sure to improve your search as much as possible before saving it.

  2. Optional: Select Automate Coverage Report to collect articles matching your Key Message search into one place. This is especially important if you'd like to be able to track and control sentiment for your key messages.


  3. From any Dashboard widget, select the Saved Searches you previously set up as your data sources and label them however you like.


  4. Experiment with various widgets to see which work best for your data visualization needs.

Recommended Dashboard Widgets

While you can use almost any Dashboard widget you like, we recommend the following as top options for tracking and visualizing key message pull-through:

Widget

Description

Share of Voice

The number of articles from each selected data source is displayed in a pie chart as a percentage.

Share of Voice Over Time

The percentage of articles from each selected data source over a given time period displayed in a bar graph.

This is a great way to track trends for how your key messages are resonating in media coverage.

Sentiment Comparison

To see which of your key messages is getting the most positive coverage, you can leverage the Sentiment Comparison widget.

TIP: You may wish to leverage Coverage Reports rather than Saved Searches for this widget to allow greater control over the sentiment score assigned to the articles included in the data.

Article Comparison

The total number of articles from your selected data sources displayed in a table for comparison.

Articles Over Time

OR

The number of articles from your selected data sources by the date that the articles were published.

TIP: If you'd like to see how your pull-through may have changed for a specific key message over time, you can add a single data source to this widget, then select the Compare one data source over time checkbox under Visualization:

Word Cloud

The Word Cloud widget is a quick way to see which keywords are showing up most frequently within coverage.

For example, you can use this widget to track which words are most often mentioned along with the name of your brand or organization.

Trends in Topics

This widget shows 10 topics in a table view and the number of articles for each topic.

This differs from the Top Topics widget in two notable ways:

  1. It can be compared over previous time periods, which will add a column that shows the percentage increase or decrease

  2. It allows users to edit the widget to select specific topics that are most relevant to them.

Recommended Use:
Use this widget when you want to select specific topics that are important to you, see the specific number of articles, and see how that compares historically.

Topics Treemap

This widget provides a final visualization of the most prevalent topics that make up a user’s coverage.

The treemap shows the most prevalent topics by relative size, and allows users to rollover the topics to see the total article count. Rolling over topics also showcases how many ‘levels’ deep for a given subtopic.

Recommended Use:
Use this widget when you want to show the top topics (beyond the top 10) for a set of coverage to surface to stakeholders so they can understand how they're being covered and potentially use it to guide strategic decisions.

Topics Over Time

This widget surfaces 5 topics for a set of coverage (based on those with the highest topic score), and provides a graph that shows how each one increases or decreases over a given time period.

NOTE: The widget defaults to the top 5 topics, but allows users to edit the widget to specifically analyze the topics most relevant to them.

Recommended Use:
Use this widget when you want to report on whether your coverage within specific topics is increasing or decreasing and view this in a chart visual.

Topics Breakdown

This widget is a pie chart that defaults to showing the breakdown of all topics for the coverage based on the number of articles where that topic is mentioned.

The chart defaults to the most general topics. Clicking into each general topic (e.g. one pie slice represents Health) will automatically reload the pie chart and show the breakdown of subtopics within that topic (e.g. one pie slice for Healthcare and one for Medical Profession).

Recommended Use:
Use this widget when you want to report on all the topics that make up your coverage in an interactive way that enables you to click through larger topics to view subtopics.


Get Help

For additional help, contact support by choosing the chat icon in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen and selecting Messages > Send us a message.


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