Report Mule SupportThe Challenge:
Many of the companies we've worked with have used our reports to share coverage findings among various executives and internal teams – including communications, market research, and business development. This typically means presenting the same information across different formats for different distribution channels. In one case, a client was looking for us to take over three existing types of reports to serve the needs of these different internal teams:
- An email briefing to quickly review a selection of company coverage highlights, competitor, and industry news
- A comprehensive appendix including summaries for each article that we could find
- A more data-focused 15-page monthly presentation with charts and analysis based on metrics collected for each article
The project also included tracking for a key competitor to provide an apples-to-apples comparison of coverage findings.
Some of the data we collected to analyze coverage trends included determining whether the article was:
- A feature article on the company or a brief mention
- A reference to corporate matters (an event, partnership, executive commentary), product (product integration, tutorial) or data (reports released by the company)
- Was the title of any product offered by the company mentioned?
Before using the Mule, this meant entering articles and any coverage data in a few different formats:
- A Google doc updated daily to build a monthly appendix
- A Daily Email featuring only the most notable articles
- A Google Sheet / Excel that would be shared with internal teams and later used to compile the monthly presentation
Keeping track of all this data required a high level of accuracy to make sure we were not missing any articles or forgetting important data points that we would later need. Using our Fix Article Issues tool, you can review important article elements that may be missing from your reports in The Mule. More on this tool here.
The Approach:
We were able to use The Mule to collect coverage for these reports, including written summaries and the specific metrics we needed to put together the appendix and monthly presentation. Rather than entering this information into these separate formats, we could organize into daily reports to save coverage that could later be exported to Word, Excel, or to a shareable URL.
Appendix
The monthly appendix we would build included the metrics mentioned above like type of article (feature or mention), corporate/product/data info, and product title (if applicable).
To help streamline the reporting process, we developed a system for organizing coverage using a set of article tags. We would save these tags to articles in The Mule as we compiled reports – and using custom layouts, these could serve as a quick reference for context in the appendix and the daily email.
The Verge – 3/19/18 Mention; Product (Integration)
By Adi Robertson
Magic Leap is trailing Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented reality platform, which shipped glasses to developers in 2016. But the company has made big promises about the quality of its augmented reality, and it’s seemingly pushing more toward consumer entertainment applications, while Microsoft is taking on the industrial sector. Magic Leap will be presenting at this week’s Game Developers Conference, so hopefully we’ll hear more about its plans soon.
These same tags could be saved as data points to plug into charts or tables in Excel to create visualizations for the monthly presentation.
Using The Mule, we could copy everything over from our daily reports into a separate report for our larger monthly appendix in seconds.
Daily Email
To compose the daily email, a condensed version of our comprehensive daily report, we would create a new report and copy over any notable coverage.
Most days, we would highlight a few stories that saw extensive coverage that day, and provide a count of related articles. We could get a quick count of related articles by referencing article tags, and save the number of related articles to whichever lead article was chosen to feature in the daily email.
DualShockers – 3/16/18 (230,000 UMVs) (5 articles)
By Giuseppe Nelva
Among game developers and publishers we have Astragon Entertainment, Bandai Namco, Bethesda Softworks, CD Projekt, Deep Silver (Koch Media), Electronic Arts, Epic Games, Kalypso Media, Konami, Microsoft, Ubisoft, Square Enix, Techland, THQ Nordic, Wargaming, and Warner Bros. Entertainment. Hardware companies include Asus Computer, Alternate, Caseking, DXRacer Marketing Europe, Medion, Razer, Roccat, Trust Gaming, Gigabyte Technologie, Omen by HP, and Zeus Hardware.
Monthly Presentation
Typically built in PowerPoint, this presentation featured a comprehensive written recap, key articles, and charts to visualize coverage based on the article metrics mentioned above.
Using the article tags created in The Mule, we could export metrics collected to Excel to use as data points for graphics featured in the presentation.
We might look at a breakdown of coverage for the company's top products that month, or the number of articles featuring the company as compared to less notable brief mentions.
The Result:
Without automation and the ability to create multiple custom layouts, we would not be able to handle the workload required of to process and present 300+ articles (on our busiest days) for a single report unless we had devoted several analysts on a daily basis.
The ability to translate information into different formats in seconds allowed us to focus on making sure our tracking was comprehensive, and that any coverage writeups we were sharing were as thoughtful and informative as possible.