AR manager in search of automated reporting

James Governor quotes some IBM bloggers in this post: On IBM AR, "I dream of a world of standard reporting", and death of the analyst business.  One of the IBMer blogging mentions automated reporting.

We suspect James and that AR bloggette may not be speaking the same language: one of the chores of AR managers and agencies is reporting. In PR agencies, they call it clippings because they usually employ slave-labour to clip all the press articles that the PR agencies will claim as results of their activities.

In this post (Measuring Analyst Relations) we argue that most AR teams are measured based on clippings, hence the reporting issue mentioned above.

Solving this issue is tricky, as most services do no offer tonality analysis, other than through human readers.  As the Kensington Group (anyone seen Norma lately?) experience shows (they went bust), the costs involved are such that it does not make a sustainable economic model.  That’s why AR managers spend their time collating reports and marking them positive, neutral or negative.  This is a bad method of reporting for at least two reasons: it automatically leads to self-selecting samples and self-evaluation bias.