In the world of public relations, a key aspect of the craft is the ability to showcase where media opportunities come to fruition in the form of coverage. Media monitoring is important to our industry as it allows us to track what is being said about clients, their industry, their competitor, and partners while also providing relevant measurement capabilities – i.e. share of voice, sentiment, virality, etc.

One of the companies that are leading the way in this arena is TrendKite. Founded in 2012 by AJ Bruno and Matt Allison and headquartered in Austin, TX, TrendKite offers an analytics software and media monitoring platform that has revolutionized how brands and agencies measure the effectiveness of their PR and social media efforts.

According to Jordan O’Neil, customer success manager at TrendKite, Bruno and Wilson actually came from Meltwater, a competitor in this space. They started TrendKite because they noticed clients were spending a tremendous amount of time manually reporting and only getting ‘finger in the wind’ accuracy of the actual impact of PR on the business. They saw how reporting could be improved and extended with media monitoring and measurement, making them the only public relations software that actually measures Return on Investment (ROI) for public relations. TrendKite allows firms to present up to date, targeted, complete data based on news alerts and mentions that measure PR efforts and prove those efforts are achieving a significant return.

Brands like Hershey’s, Campbell’s, Nike, Pinterest and Mondelez International use TrendKite to respond to press coverage quickly, take action faster than ever before, and discover new publications and authors. To date, TrendKite has raised $20.1million. The software company uses big data and natural language processing to deliver modern PR analytics, along with legacy metrics. Which means TrendKite works to measure business impact, down to integrating with web analytics in order to understand the traffic and conversions driven by any agencies PR efforts. TrendKite also uses machine learning to help empower communications teams to monitor their coverage and easily focus on important coverage. Within TrendKite, users have the ability to create reports within minutes based on dashboards that are already set up and users can measure metrics like readership, and mentions.

Machine learning is a program that is built to search for articles on a daily basis and pull that coverage into TrendKite’s article database. From there, TrendKite sets up searches that will pull in the appropriate coverage based on brand name or client name. With that information, TrendKite pairs analytics where users can not only see their success and analytics but also their competitors and how they are doing in comparison all with one click of a button.

“Trendkite is definitely a game changer in the industry, we offer not only traditional metrics and a media monitoring system but we are constantly innovating,” said O’Neil.

Public Relations is an important and challenging avenue to navigate. However, with software companies such as TrendKite, tasks such as media monitoring is made easy. Here at Wise PR, TrendKite has been a great resource allowing us to demonstrate ROI on our campaigns while also giving us a unique insight into our client’s competitive landscape among other benefits.

MedMen Co-Founder and CEO Adam Bierman appeared on Bloomberg TV to discuss the future of legalizing marijuana in this year’s election. The legalization of marijuana has been in the works for the last 30 years, and has gained enough momentum to be featured on ballots, where recreational use by adults passed in California, Nevada, Massachusetts, and just today, Maine. California passed with about 56 percent, but the tally's not over yet. Arizona failed to pass. Florida, North Dakota and Arkansas passed medical marijuana measures.

This momentum has been spurred by companies such as MedMen, an industry leader in bringing institutional business practices to the cannabis industry. In his interview with Bloomberg TV, Bierman described California as the possible tipping point in eventually legalizing marijuana throughout the country.

To watch Bierman’s interview, click here.