Artificial Intelligence and machine learning might be the technologies creating sensation across several industries in today’s world, but for the communication sector, they aren’t alone. It is’ the natural language processing (NLP) that is supporting them and has even made their essence relate to the world of Public Relations (PR) and communications.
Simply defined, NLP refers to the ability of a computer program to understand, analyze and revert to the human language as per their literal rules. At present, there are several innovations like Alexa, Siri and Google Play that has made commands like “Alexa, add milk to my shopping list” and “Siri, call Mom” possible. It took almost half a century and several technological innovations to bring the machine learning up to this stage and hopefully much more is about to come.
But, now the question is, how can we tap into the power of NLP and AI to serve better in the PR and communication world?
Natural language processing otherwise includes a broad scope of abilities for the betterment of humankind, but it’s their power of identifying audience sentiments that have worked to the benefit of communicators. It has empowered the PR professionals in planning and executing impactful earned media programs in a way that has never been done before.
Earlier for technologies, communication only involved simple logic-based algorithms that identified words as either positive or negative and left many terms as unclassified. But today, the time and technology have transformed completely changed; thus, equipping the automated systems with the power to adequately interpret the nuances of human communication and deliver the context and attribute of the words true to their meaning.
With a crowd and noise of too many in the media world, the idea to lead with PR strategies is not limited to the number of coverage but is also to identify the stories and news issues that will get the desired impact on the target audience. All-and-all this is a time-taking and tedious process but with NLP engine built in the automated systems, it becomes a quick work to easily identify sentiments from the string of texts brought in through any relevant channel.
When it comes to crafting intriguing earned media campaigns, the sentiments of the audience both with regard to the brand and around its coverage is of extreme importance. This insight will help the PR professionals better demonstrate the client with the impact of their messaging, whether positive, negative or neutral on the target audience.