Third in my Factiva how to series today focuses on how to help your company manage risk with Factiva. Risk management is something that there is no shortage of need or tools for. From credit and financial risks, to regulatory concerns, to managing a compliance program. All of these have very powerful platforms and solutions (some from Dow Jones, such as our Risk and Compliance solutions) that companies have deployed. Like many of the focuses in my How To series, Factiva is an incredibly important companion to these other platforms and solutions. In many ways, Factiva is a solution that not only provides a direct ROI, but can actually enhance the value of your investment in these other platform as well.
As with all of the How To series, I’m going to focus on the marketing department for this post. One of the things all marketing departments are concerned with is the reputation of the company and brand. In fact many companies today are using Factiva to help them monitor their brand today. But what about the suppliers and partners that your company does business with? As we have seen, a negative perception of a key supplier can have a tremendous risk to a companies reputation. See the example of Nestle from last year.
You can use Factiva to look for this type of potential risk, in much the same way you manage your brand today. It’s simply extending the line of sight of your monitoring. This can be a daunting task without the right tools, but luckily Factiva eases the burden.
The process is fairly simple, and straightforward. Set up a company list of your suppliers, and key business partners. You can then create a query that searches for news on these companies, and relevant risk related topics. For the uninitiated, Factiva processes every piece of content, and tags it with a code that describes what companies the content is about, and the subject matter of the content. This makes it easy to get only highly relevant, targeted results. There are several subject codes that you’ll want to be aware of as a marketer. Corporate Social Responsibility, Risk News, Environmental News, Labor/Personnel issues are a few key ones. Of course depending on your industry, there will be other subjet codes and keywords that you’ll want to leverage as part of your query strategy.
The end result however, will be a highly targeted alert that will give you broader insight to the risks to your company’s reputation and brand. By the way, this is of course a great time to reach out to your colleagues in Supply Chain/Procurement and Partners/Alliances. In fact, they’d probably like to get the alerts too. Then you can be a hero for making them Factiva Smart. 
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Dow Jones offers another solution for this. If you want advance beyond the basic monitoring of reputation and brand risk, Dow Jones Insight offers a platform for in-depth analytics as well.
- K
