Nutanix’s communications team use Informing Decisions to produce meaningful reports for internal stakeholders and drive PR success.
Nutanix® is a global leader in cloud software and a pioneer in hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, making clouds invisible to free customers to focus on their business outcomes
The Nutanix communications team tracks editorial coverage of Nutanix and its competitors using a popular media monitoring platform.
To transform findings from the monitoring platform into meaningful reports for internal stakeholders and to ultimately further drive PR success, the company turned to Informing Decisions.
Informing Decisions helped Nutanix make sense of the myriad of data available and understand the story behind the figures.
“We’ve moved from a dashboard of numbers to analytics that help us make better decisions and help us meaningfully improve our strategy and demonstrate its effectiveness.”
Jennifer Massaro, VP Corporate Communications
Public Relations at Nutanix
Nutanix is a leader in hyperconverged infrastructure and hybrid multicloud computing. It competes with a small number of larger competitors. As a key part of Nutanix’s marketing mix, public relations helps the company amplify awareness of its solutions and differentiate itself.
As a data-driven company, PR measurement is used to set objectives, evaluate the success of PR campaigns and identify how to better compete for share of voice.
The communications team, led by Vice President of Corporate Communications, Jennifer Massaro, produces quarterly earned media coverage reports. Detailed results are presented to the CMO and key partners in the Marketing organization, and key stats are shared with the CEO.
The Challenge of Creating Accurate and Meaningful PR Reports
Nutanix operates in a complex marketplace. Competitors include multinational technology conglomerates complicated by the fact that they offer multiple product ranges that aren’t all competitive with Nutanix. Moreover, Nutanix operates in an environment where key competitors can also be partners, creating a classic “co-opetition” environment. Complex Boolean searches are required to ensure a meaningful and accurate comparison. In addition, millions of websites are tracked by the monitoring platform, but not all of them are relevant to Nutanix’s goal of reaching its target audience.
The monitoring platform provides a dashboard with a myriad of data. However, to be of real value, Nutanix realized it needed to understand what was behind the figures.
For example, did a competitor’s share of voice increase because of a major product announcement, or was it due to coverage of a data breach or vulnerability? How can Nutanix learn from what’s been said about its competitors and the publications that covered them?
“We realized there was untapped insight in the data that could be unleashed by working with Informing Decisions.“
Jennifer Massaro
Each quarter, there are thousands of stories about Nutanix and its competitors. These need to be manually reviewed in order to distil and articulate the key drivers of coverage.
Nutanix believed its PR team’s time and expertise was more valuable elsewhere. They also wanted the analysis to be overseen by a 3rd party totally independent from the work being reported on. The Nutanix team often had hypotheses about their quarterly performance and didn’t want to add affirmation bias to the final analysis.
Why Nutanix Chose Informing Decisions
Nutanix had previously worked over many years with the founder of Informing Decisions, Craig Hodges, as the head of Apollo Research’s media evaluation division. Nutanix valued Craig and his team’s high level of expertise in the area of communications evaluation. In addition to a deep understanding of the technology industry, they have decades of experience in managing earned media monitoring tools.
The monitoring platform provided assistance in configuring Boolean searches and Nutanix also paid for its service that reviews and removes irrelevant coverage. However, during the initial consultation, Informing Decisions was able to demonstrate an additional level of skill and oversight. For example, by highlighting that competitors’ share of voice was artificially high due to content being scraped from those competitors’ own websites. In addition, whilst irrelevant coverage was being tagged by the managed service team, this content was still being counted towards the share of voice results.
Another key factor was Informing Decisions’ ability to cost effectively review coverage and help Nutanix understand what was behind the figures. Whilst this is offered as a premium service by a number of media monitoring companies, the costs were prohibitive given the volume of coverage generated by Nutanix and its competitors.
The Results of Working with Informing Decisions
“The data and surrounding context influenced many decisions, including how to compose target press lists, which story types to prioritize in our pitching efforts, and even the specific writers to engage.”
Abby Evans, Nutanix
Informing Decisions gives the PR team the ability to confidently contextualize the results to senior leadership.
It has allowed them to showcase the success of its PR even when this wasn’t immediately apparent from the dashboard within the monitoring platform.
For example, share of voice gets reported to the CEO. However, this figure in isolation doesn’t tell the full story. Informing Decisions created charts which mapped not only story numbers, but also audience reach and coverage sentiment. In spite of Nutanix being mentioned in fewer articles than a key competitor, the PR team was able to demonstrate that Nutanix was not only receiving more favorable coverage but actually reaching a bigger audience.
This led the Nutanix CEO to congratulate the PR team on “punching above its weight”.
This has also allowed the PR team to shift its focus from quantity to quality and in doing so more closely align PR goals with business objectives.
Working with Informing Decisions has given Nutanix more accurate and meaningful measurement data. This in turn has enabled the PR team to tell a more meaningful story about their contribution to the company’s vision and mission. They’ve been able to more effectively demonstrate the impact of work done by the PR team whilst simultaneously saving hours of work on data analysis and report preparation.