By: Chris Hackney, Meltwater’s Chief Product Officer
At Meltwater, our goal is to ensure technology serves the needs of our users. We don’t just add features for the sake of novelty or to ride the latest tech trend. Our focus is on empowering our customers to achieve remarkable outcomes with solutions that truly simplify their workflows and effort levels.
By democratizing access to complex data and insights, we empower all users, regardless of their technical expertise, to uncover valuable information effortlessly.
For our 2024 Mid-Year Release, our team has been hard at work carefully considering how we can meaningfully elevate the use of news and social media data within organizations. That led us to focus on three things that we believed would help people make better use of such data:
- Move Faster
- Make Insight Accessible
- Drive Collaboration
In this blog post, I want to explain how the features we’re adding in this latest release deliver on those goals.
Move Faster
Technology shouldn’t slow you down, but help you do what you need to do faster. For us, that means reducing the time it takes to separate the signal from the noise to get to the insights you’re looking for.
A great example of how we’re achieving this is the new AI Search Assistant in Explore. Building a search query can often require complex boolean logic to focus in on just the data you need, while removing noise and false positives. The AI Search Assistant can let you do all of that using a natural language prompt, so you don’t need to spend countless time building and fine-tuning your query logic.
This isn’t just about AI - we’ve also made improvements to our tools that streamline workflows, such as integrating our social media management platform, Engage, with Klear, our influencer marketing solution. A new video editor tool has also been added to Engage to allow you to work with video clips directly in the application.
All of this saves you time by breaking down silos so you don’t have to switch between multiple apps to get your job done.
Make Insight Accessible
Insight should be available and understandable to everybody, not just analytics experts, so it needs to be easier to make sense of data.
This is why we’ve partnered with Microsoft to create the new Meltwater Copilot Plugin, which enables you to conversationally interact with our platform to easily surface and understand insights from billions of real-time data-points.
This represents a transformational leap forward in the way social listening and media intelligence tools work, which we believe will completely change the way people use these tools. Instead of being bound to conventional dashboard-focused user interfaces, you’ll now be able to interact with our tools in a much more intuitive, human way. In short, the software gets out of the way, so you can get the insight and intelligence you need more quickly.
What does this look like in practice? Imagine asking Meltwater a question like “What’s happening around my brand this week?” and instantly receiving a summary of your brand’s media coverage and social mentions, all in easy-to-follow natural language, in the places your people work such as Microsoft Teams.
This is just a simple example, but with the combined power of Microsoft’s Copilot and Meltwater’s data, it’s now easier than ever to find actionable insights that can have a real impact on your decision-making.
What’s more, our work on Copilot lays the groundwork for eventually bringing these same conversational question-and-answer prompts across the core Meltwater platform.
You can learn more about how the Meltwater Copilot Plugin works by watching this video.
I want to thank Andy Revels, David Delgado, and Angelica Gutierrez, our product and UX leads, for this fantastic milestone and our Karma, Knowledge Graph, Linear Digressions, and Core Apps engineering teams, without whom this would not have been possible.
Additionally, you’ll find AI generated summaries in our social listening, media intelligence, and consumer insights tools, which help you to more easily understand what the data is telling you.
Drive Collaboration
Insight only has value when used to make better-informed decisions. We want to help you put insights from our platform into the hands of decision-makers across the entire organization.
The Meltwater Copilot Plugin will enable customers to interact with our data from directly within Microsoft Teams and the Microsoft Office suite. So not only is it now much easier to query and make sense of our data, but it’s possible to do that from inside the tools that you and your team are using everyday.
This supercharges collaboration because you can find, share, and discuss news and social insights with your colleagues all in the same place.
You no longer need to disrupt your workflow and figure out how to use a different app. You don’t need to wait for an analyst to carry out the research and explain the findings to you. You can simply ask the question, in plain language, from the tool you’re already working in.
So this gives far wider access to insights across your organization, and ensures that everybody is basing their decision making on the same data sources, ensuring greater consistency. And if everybody in the company is now able to easily find insights, rather than them being confined to one team, that can drive a culture of smarter, faster decision making that impacts the whole business.
We’re always excited to bring you new features and product enhancements, but we really believe there’s something extra special about our Mid-Year 2024 Release, and we can’t wait to see what our customers will do with it.
You can read more details about the new updates here.