In this episode, Shyna, who has expertise in media relations and communications, talks about her work experiences and how she came to work with Getaround. According to her, having a good understanding of overall visibility can be achieved by looking at impressions as a baseline.

1. What made you choose communications as your career?

I got my degree in art. I did a fine arts degree, but I knew that that wasn’t something long term for me. So, I did end up having an accident. I began doing internships in social media in the mid two-thousands, I think that’s when it was kind of still fresh and new and I have the millennial perspective which a lot of a lot of businesses wanted at the time. So from that I kind of built my way up in social media.

I started my first job working in Silicon Valley at a startup running their social media and then after that just decided to try something different and applied for a pr agency and have been in that world ever since.

What was your first experience with data?

My first experience with data. Yeah, so I think it was a bit more on the social side, I was helping get users through Facebook ads and this was, you know, a bit right when Instagram ads were kind of beginning to be more popular but you know, we’d have to like pull us information, find out, you know what’s driving users to click on certain ads, look at like our cost per click, things like that and try to figure out how to like essentially get the most bang for your buck.

So just lots and lots of spread sheets and combining spreadsheets doing all this map that I did not know I would be doing when I studied art. So definitely that was, that was my first experience now. I’d say from a big picture a lot more from like a brand visibility perspective from, from a legal perspective, things like that got it.

How did you start integrating data into your campaigns and your stories?

Yeah, that’s a, that’s a good question. I think There was like the shift in the media landscape, I don’t know, maybe like 3-4 years ago where I was kind of hearing from journalists like we want, we only want a few things if you’re going to pitch us one is like a customer story or like a user story that’s like relevant to the times. The other one was survey data and the last thing I think they said, we’re just yeah, reports, statistics or industry statistics that like spoke to the broader story and all of those are a bit challenging. I think you need to really invest in your data and a lot of companies are kind of just now learning that. So since then, I’ve been really driving for, with any company I’ve worked with and with any story I’m trying to tell to pull out any facts and figures we can and sometimes, you know, it requires like leveraging industry data from Gartner Forrester. Sometimes it’s like, okay, what kind of surveys can we do on a micro level with our users? Other times it’s looking at like census data of certain states and matching it against your own data. So, I think data is one of the most important things about telling a story because otherwise, I think it’s a lot of meaningless facts.

What are your favourite metrics when you do a campaign? What is the engagement metrics that fascinates you or is it the coverage, the number of articles?

It depends from a campaign perspective, like there’s a lot of different factors. So, I guess if you’re looking a little bit more at marketing and social, I think engagement is a good number, but it may not always be the best number. So I think, you know, if you’re being real with yourself of like, you know, if you’re not putting money behind like an ad, like engagement will naturally be low when it’s organic when a lot of other folks are putting money behind every post, right? You have to look at engagement with a grain of salt?

I think impressions are a good baseline number just to just to help you understand overall visibility. So that’s speaking more to social comes to PR, in the last couple of years, again, since the landscape changed, I’m taking a bit more of a holistic approach. I look at a lot of distribution numbers for press releases. I look at, you know, how many media outlets are picking it up, what the quality of those media outlets are. I’m looking at the journalists themselves, like what their reach, their reach is. So if we get like a feature story written about the company, you know, what’s their network, like on social media, on their span through the publication, what’s their personal network look like?

Another metric I think is kind of important is like shares journalist shares, especially because of their network. So, those are the things I’ve been looking at lately. And then like, I guess the one grand metric I always look at and I think this again, to take this with a grain of salt as well, because it depends on who’s reporting it. But is the readership or the unique monthly visitors of and circulation of publications, that’s something that I think brings the most value because that’s kind of how you determine like the worth of the publication and what kind of value it will bring for your company.

Was there any challenges in communications and PR where you had a major challenge and where data kind of played a really important role in solving the challenge or overcoming that problem?

 I have but maybe not exactly the way you think. So, there have been times where I’ve worked with different managers, different companies, different things where you know, they want to tell a specific story, the better story. The bigger number story. And then I present the data and they’re like, no, we can, you know, here’s the actual story and the numbers, you know, get fluffed and you know, it really something I ethically have a problem with because you know, maybe you put a number out there, no one ever fact checks you, but like I feel like me being the more data-oriented person in pr in past roles. That’s always been a challenge for me being asked to kind of round up quite a bit and so you know, and I have all this spreadsheet and hard data in front of me and so I think that has been a challenge in itself is just like convincing, convincing like colleagues and managers and clients that we have to be true to the company and true to ourselves and the kind of information we’re putting out there and you know, the truth is in the data.

So that’s something I still try to push forward and today I feel like is a really core part of the company I work at and they stand behind quite well.

Are there any data metrics on your wishlist?

I think it’s a little bit more, it would be great to be able to like compare national data and state level data to our own data just to get like a sense of like where our data lands on the national scale. I think that would be something great and requires a lot of manual calculation right now.

How do you see this entire landscape of pr and comms and data evolve in the coming days?

Yeah, I definitely am seeing with our current like News teams and news organizations, they’re all kind of combining. And I’m seeing like a world where we just have like 4-5 major organizations and it’s shifting this way that own all of the smaller publications as well as the large ones and so you’re working with the same reporters across several news networks, and how data would play a role. I think data will be the story moving forward. I think that’s the only thing people want to hear about is the, you know, the real facts, not the alternative facts. So I think data lead our news cycle moving forward.

What are your two cents for the young professionals who wants to venture into this PR & Comms world?

I think my biggest piece of advice is to, you know, be true to yourself and your own ethics and morals. PR is a very public-facing role. So you’ll meet, you know, you’ll be in face a lot of situations where you might encounter something you may not be comfortable doing and I say to, you know, speak up and give your perspective and set boundaries and oftentimes like you may or may be not oftentimes, but you may end up with the result, that’s truer to yourself and who you are, even if it doesn’t align with, like who you work with.