As expected: Microsoft Earns Best Corporate Reputation in 2004 61

This is apparently how they do their calculating:

"How Global Media Measurement Can Drive Global PR Strategy An interview with Norm Clements, Managing Director, Delahaye" ...

"The Gauge: Okay, so I'm Microsoft, a giant multinational corporation based in the U.S. What's the most important thing I need to know about measuring my communications program abroad?"

"Clements: It may sound obvious, but you have to understand that each market is different. They have a unique media marketplace. Some have very sophisticated media. Some of them don't. Some of them have critical reach. Some of them don't. Microsoft in one market might be less prominent and in another market it might be dominant. And the brand awareness in each market is considered. The local market conditions also need to be taken into account. If there's a huge amount of IT media, then you'd expect Microsoft to dominate those sort of media. Each country has its own set of differences, which is why you have to come up with a way of making comparisons that take into consideration a whole bunch of variables like brand awareness, local market conditions, media sophistication, budgets, human resources - all those things that apply to each country."

"The question then is: how do you make a comparison? How do you compare all those variables? Plus all the variables contained within a story. Delahaye uses the proprietary Weighted Impact Score. It's a score, which neither relies on quality or quanbreasty of coverage as the overriding factor, but a combination of the two. It allows you to have a much more accurate comparison. For example, in a country like the U.S., which has very large circulation publications, one story might reach millions of people. But in Spain, a similar story might only reach 100,000. But the quality of the story in Spain may be stronger. It might have pictures with beautiful captions, whereas in the U.S. it doesn't. When you weigh those things up against each other you may find the Spanish story has a better quality edge. It's not the same reach, but the richness is better. You need a scoring system that lets you do that and The Weight Impact Score does. If you analyze the article for these attributes you get a fairly accurate comparison."