How brands cut through social media noise – and you could too
Global media intelligence solutions firm Meltwater launches new solution in 13 languages, including Arabic
Ask any brands owner, and she’ll tell you social media is as much a threat as it is an opportunity. If you manage to spin off your positive narratives online and generate enough fans of the brand, get ready to reap the rewards of ‘viral’ marketing.
On the other hand, a nightmarish scenario wouldn’t take much time to unfold if online denizens catch a fancy to a negative tweet or two about your brand and that goes viral.
Reputations that have been painstakingly built over decades can be demolished with one silly tweet left unexplained for too long, or a celebrity request left ignored overnight.
In such a high-tension livewire environment with hundreds of ongoing social media interactions, including tweets, Facebook comments and replies, LinkedIn requests and what not, how does the social media manager and her team – however big it might be – keep track of what’s positive and what isn’t in real time, and then respond to it accordingly?
PR analytics tools come in handy for an owner/manager of a brand, with several free and paid-for services available in the market that can sift through the noise and generate the stats in clear, concise and actionable formats. (File)
For, and this is a fact that we all are too aware of as consumers, that not responding to a customer request or query in time will mean that the customer takes her – and her friends’ and followers’ – business away before the brand owner can wake up the next morning.
So not responding is not an option anymore for any brand, leave alone one with any ambition of going cross-border.
Add to this the noise that traditional media – news wires, websites, magazines, newspapers, news blogs, etc. – can make regarding a brand, and the equation can really swing against the hapless marketing manager or brand owner/s.
And that isn’t all – no marketing manager can afford to not keep a track of what tricks the competition is up to, and what consumers are saying about rivals. It’s always best to learn from rivals’ mistakes, and replicate whatever success they may be achieving online.
But this means additional tracking burden on the brand owner, who too has just 24 hours in a day t do all this and more.
This is where PR analytics tools come in handy for the owner/manager of a brand, with several free and paid-for services available in the market that can sift through the noise and generate the stats in clear, concise and actionable formats.
The problem with such tools, however, is that the playing field is changing fast, and it is not always possible to ‘upgrade’ the tools to match the constantly evolving turf. In addition, for tracking the buzz around a trans-border brand, language is a major obstacle.
What works perfect in a particular geography in a particular language may not necessarily work in another geography or in another language.
Keeping these issues in mind, Meltwater, a global media intelligence solutions firm, says it has launched a new corporate communications product for business decision-makers to keep on top of billions of real-time editorial, blog and social media conversations.
The solution, said the firm which has its regional bases in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, extracts the insights required to manage your brand, understand competition, and keep on top of industry trends.
This technologically innovative product, the firm insists in a media statement, promises to deliver insights from data on the outside in order to help organisations make better, more informed decisions.
“Most companies spend a lot of effort mining internal data, but underestimate the wealth of business insights that can be extracted by mining the large amount of information openly available on the internet,” said Meltwater Founder and CEO, Jorn Lyseggen.
“Advances in data science have paved the way for a new class of business intelligence. We have leveraged this to rebuild the Meltwater platform from the ground up to present real-time insights from the outside that can be used to drive business strategy,” he added.
But with several social media tools already available in the market, including free ones, why might UAE or regional companies choose the new Meltwater tool, we ask.
For one, the new Meltwater solution is available immediately in 13 languages, including Arabic.
“Arabic is a key language for the GCC. Given the global nature of our business, it is essential to provide a local touch point,” Valerie Fawzi, chief marketing officer, Meltwater, told Emirates 24|7.
“The adoption rate of technology and social media within Arab speaking countries continues to grow, therefore, it was a natural move for us to provide a local solution for the Arab market,” she added.
“Meltwater has taken a giant leap beyond traditional monitoring into a media intelligence solution that delivers answers to the marketing and business questions that have traditionally been difficult and time consuming to answer,” said Fawzi. So who are among some of Meltwater’s clients in the UAE? “Given that we are the only global player with a local presence in Dubai, we work with a variety of sectors: finance, legal, hospitality, engineering and aviation,” she says without revealing names.
“However, the product is not restricted to those mentioned, with Dubai positioned as a centre of entrepreneurship, we envisage any company with a need for online insights to have a use case for the product that will enable them to make more informed decisions that impact their business bottom line,” the CMO says.
Indeed, using the tool to gain insights is one thing, but it’s only the first step. How would she advise clients to follow up on the insights gained through the tool? “Modern marketing is about getting the right message to the right person at the right time. Marketers should fundamentally qualify their interactions, which is a shift from the blast mentality of the past. Meltwater helps people make sure that their story counts. This is also a tool that informs other parts of business strategy, not just marketing, by delivering industry and competitive analysis,” she says.
“The new Meltwater solution is unified to provide coverage of all the conversational data outside of company firewalls. The solution offers marketers a redesigned web interface, a mobile application built for iOS and Android devices, wizards to guide users through various tasks and immediate search results. The new offering has new search capabilities, dashboards that are fully customisable and the flexibility to add in subscribed content,” she adds.
Meltwater says its 23,000 customers are already looking outside, beyond their internal reporting systems to a world where information is constantly changing. “Decision-making is a key component of business success,” said Zubair Timol, Meltwater area director Middle East, India and Africa. “Decisions that are based on knowledge and sound reasoning can lead an organisation to long-term success. But if you’re not looking beyond your own data you can miss an opportunity in the market or a gap within your own organisation’s strategy.”
