PLDT

Philippines’ telco looks to bolster media relations and engagement

That’s exactly what Cathy Yap-Yang, FVP & Group Head, Corporate Communications at PLDT, wanted to address. As the Philippines’ largest fully integrated telecommunications company, PLDT enjoys one of the largest market capitalisations among Philippine listed companies. Cathy leads a small, tight-knit team who handles corporate news for PLDT, including information about investments and networks. The same team is also responsible for Smart, PLDT’s products and services related to smart home technologies.

One of the group’s main areas of responsibility is media relations. PLDT’s diverse range of products and services, along with the need to communicate frequent investor updates, generated the need for a lot of media releases. Cathy suspected they could be over-communicating to the market, but she had no way to know for sure.

“We had a number of media release distributions in a year in a highly competitive market,” she says.

“I wanted to make sure we were benefiting from all that effort.”

Reputational Risk

Reputation was another area where Cathy wanted deeper insight about PLDT.  She wanted to measure the effectiveness of their online stories and gauge media sentiment for the company. She also wanted to know how PLDT measured up to their competition, especially when they were mentioned in the same article.

“We’re measuring our share of voice and the social echo on regularly,” Cathy says.

“The quicker we can detect negative commentary, the more time we have to prepare a response.

“Tracking sentiment about our competitors is also vital to how we communicate in the marketplace.”

Small Corporate Comms team dealing with large volume of information

Cathy was looking for multiple efficiencies to help her team maintain their high performance. They manage large volumes of information and need to ensure their comms and content strategies remain effective. Keeping internal customers happy was also critical.

“The Management Committee reviews our reports on a regular basis,” Cathy says.

“They want clarification on what a particular issue means to our reputation. They want to know how our competitors are performing and being able to provide definitive answers and to do it quickly is vital.”

Media monitoring with Meltwater helps PLDT zero in on reputation management

PLDT used Meltwater extensively especially during start of the pandemic and quickly discovered the whole team benefited from the product suite. With Meltwater, they’ve been able to zero in on stories and filter those that only mention their company. This gives them the granular information they need to remain nimble despite the size of their team.

“Meltwater gives us the flexibility to customise our searches, which helps establish effectiveness,” Cathy says.

 “It’s extremely important for our team to keep an eye on competitors, specifically concerning media sentiment,” Cathy says.

In the past, PLDT found sentiment could be challenging to determine when more than one company was mentioned in the same article or post. Sentiment data grows over time, especially for evergreen content or if a piece goes viral. Using Meltwater’s Entity Sentiment tool, PLDT has a full picture over the lifetime of a piece. They can tell if content is favourable for them but negative for their competitors and can detect if sentiment shifts in another direction.

To add to the complexity of measuring sentiment, many of the comments about PLDT are in the local language for the Philippines. Meltwater's advanced NLP (natural language processing), combined with NER (named-entity recognition), provides context-based sentiment for each occurrence of an entity in a document. This is driven by the sentence in which that occurrence appears to provide a high level of granularity for brands.

“Meltwater’s Entity Sentiment tool also supports Tagalog, which makes our reporting more robust and accurate”, Cathy says.