Dynamic Share of Voice: Why Legacy SOV is Misleading — and How Modern Brands Finally Measure What Matters

Introduction

I’ve spent the last decade inside the measurement engines of the world’s biggest brands and agencies — Google, BlackRock, AB InBev, Meta, 3M, PepsiCo, FleishmanHillard, Edelman, Weber Shandwick, and hundreds more.

At TrendKite, I worked shoulder-to-shoulder with the comms and measurement leads at these organizations, helping them build measurement programs from scratch, restructure entire reporting infrastructures, and navigate the reality of headline pressure, competitive benchmarking, and complex media ecosystems.

At Cision, I advised global teams on how to scale measurement across dozens of regions, business units, executive profiles, corporate pillars, and reputational risk categories.

I’ve seen every version of Share of Voice.

And here’s the truth:

Traditional SOV is one of the most misleading, resource-intensive, and strategically dangerous metrics in corporate communications.

It’s not that the idea is wrong—brands do need competitive context.
It’s that the mechanics have always been broken.

Dynamic Share of Voice is our answer to that.

And once you understand why it works differently, you’ll never look at legacy SOV the same way again.

The Problem with Legacy Share of Voice

Brands don’t struggle with SOV because they’re doing it wrong.
They struggle because SOV itself was designed for a world that no longer exists.

Let’s walk through the real problems — the ones every enterprise comms team deals with but no legacy tool has been able to solve.

1. Boolean-Based SOV Is Resource-Prohibitive and Fundamentally Fragile

Every org I’ve ever worked with has the same story:

Endless competitor boolean strings
Constant maintenance
Coverage bleeding across categories
Executive names mixed with unrelated topics
Product mentions swallowed by noise
Regional expansions requiring recoding everything
Teams too stretched to maintain competitor feeds
Business units impossible to isolate cleanly

The outcome?

Brands compare themselves to:

“Google”
“Meta”
“Amazon”
“Microsoft”

…when the reality is:

Your business competes with a segment, not with an entire conglomerate.

This leads to absurdly misleading SOV pie charts that reward:

bloated conglomerates
press release farms
irrelevant mentions
high-volume, low-quality coverage

This is how SOV became a checkbox metric instead of a strategic one.

2. SOV Doesn’t Understand Brand Prominence, Tone, or Quality

Legacy SOV treats coverage like it’s binary:

Mention = 1
No mention = 0

But real-world reputation is not binary.

It is shaped by:

whether you’re the focus of the story
whether you’re framed positively or negatively
whether the coverage is feature-level or passing
whether the publication is tier 1 or tier 3
whether the narrative is about risk, safety, innovation, leadership, or crisis
whether the story has readership, engagement, or influence

Legacy SOV ignores all of this.

This leads to the classic SOV mistake:

“Yes, they had more coverage — but almost all of it was negative, low-tier, or irrelevant.”

Traditional SOV cannot see this.
Dynamic SOV can.

3. SOV Breaks Completely When You Need Business Unit-Level Insight

This is the pain I see every week:

A brand wants to compare:

Consumer hardware
Cloud
Ads
Retail
Corporate sustainability
Chief science officer visibility
AI research
Supply chain initiatives
Global ESG commitments

Legacy tools cannot isolate coverage for:

specific pillars
specific units
specific reputational themes
specific executives
specific product lines

So teams get forced into comparing:

Entire Meta vs their AI product
Entire Google vs their cloud service
Entire Amazon vs their logistics initiative
Entire AB InBev vs their craft brand

This is how brands get misled by SOV charts that have nothing to do with their real competitive landscape.

4. SOV Has No Concept of Narrative

Mention volume ≠ influence.
Mention volume ≠ leadership.
Mention volume ≠ reputation.
Mention volume ≠ momentum.

Without Narrative Clusters™ driving context, SOV is just counting.

Brand perception moves through narratives, not mentions.
Legacy SOV is blind to this layer.

**Introducing Dynamic Share of Voice

A Modern, Narrative-Centric, Impact-Weighted Approach**

Dynamic Share of Voice™ is the first SOV model built for how reputation actually works today.

It solves every flaw of legacy SOV — because it’s built on a completely different architecture.

It starts with our unique “Mapping the Business to the News” methodology.

Mapping the Business to the News

Before you can measure SOV correctly, you must understand:

What, exactly, is the business unit you are comparing?

We work with brands to map:

Business units
Executives
Corporate pillars
Product lines
Feature categories
Reputational risk clusters
Narrative clusters
Campaigns and initiatives
Industry-specific crisis archetypes

This creates a true apples-to-apples comparison layer.

Only then can SOV actually mean something.

This step alone eliminates 80% of historical SOV inaccuracies.

How Dynamic SOV Works

Once your business is mapped, Dynamic SOV measures performance across both qualitative and quantitative dimensions:

Qualitative Dimensions

Brand prominence (lead vs feature vs passing mention)
Publication tier
Narrative type and narrative evolution
Sentiment (Brand-Centric Sentiment™, not NLP)
Executive attribution
Topic adjacency
Reputational risk alignment

Quantitative Dimensions

Mention totals
Impact Score
Average impact
Average impact strength
Social engagement
Readership / reach
Dominant narrative share
AI model retrievability (coming)

This produces an SOV model that reflects reality, not volume.

You can instantly see:

“We’re losing in sustainability narratives, winning in AI leadership narratives, flat in innovation narratives, and outperforming Competitor X in executive prominence.”

This is the first time SOV has ever told a meaningful story.

The Power of Dynamic SOV: Clarity on Where You’re Winning or Losing

Dynamic SOV shows:

Your strongest narrative
Your competitor’s strongest narrative
Your biggest reputational advantage
Your biggest exposure
Where competitors outperform you
Where you outperform them
Which business units are lagging
Which campaigns generate real momentum
Which narratives you own outright

This allows leaders to finally measure:

reputational momentum
narrative dominance
crisis differentials
campaign lift
executive profile traction
product launch share
sustainability leadership
innovation leadership

All with clean, contextual, business-aligned datasets.

The Next Frontier: LLM Share of Voice Across Narrative Clusters

Traditional SOV stops at the news.
Dynamic SOV expands into machine perception.

The future is:

LLM Share of Voice

How do AI models describe your brand vs your competitors — across each narrative cluster?

This will answer questions legacy SOV could never touch:

Which brand “wins” in AI-generated summaries?
Which brand does ChatGPT cite for sustainability leadership?
Which brand does Claude consider the innovation leader?
Which company emerges as the perceived category leader in machine-curated knowledge?
How does your crisis show up vs competitors in LLM outputs?
Who controls the narrative when LLMs distill industry storylines?

This is the next major shift in competitive benchmarking.

Dynamic SOV lays the foundation.
LLM SOV completes the picture.