If you stop and think about it for a minute, you can trace almost every aspect of human society to news and social media, in one way or another. The media is a vessel for storytelling, and storytelling, is a mechanism for how we formulate opinions, make buying decisions, educate one another and express our identities as part of greater communities and beliefs.
The news media is topical, locational and categorised, and consumers as a whole have varying levels of access to it, in accordance with their place in society. As that access grows, and the world wide web becomes a staple ingredient in the recipe for integrated communication, so it forms more of a crucial cornerstone to modern life as we know it. It is a place where brands must exist within their consumers’ lives as they do, physically.
Content
Defining Media Monitoring in a Brand Context
Media Monitoring in the UK is Crucial to Reputation Management and Business Growth
Manage a Crisis
Increase sales and improve processes
Connect and capitalise
Do Better Business in the UK by Using Media Monitoring
Companies Doing Media Monitoring right, globally
Get Started Using Media Monitoring Tools in the UK
Want help getting started?
Glossary of News and Social Media Terms
Learn More about Media Monitoring in the UK
Defining Media Monitoring in a Brand Context
So, when we talk about “media monitoring” or “social listening” we are referring to ways in which we can take our offline activities online, and begin to listen to our consumers, where they are most likely to “speak” about our brands.
At first, it might seem a little creepy. The act of listening is essentially passive and “monitoring” has a kind of big brother connotation to it that doesn’t quite apply in this context. But no, it has nothing to do with how uncle Zucc is listening to our innermost thoughts and fears and how Facebook somehow knew you wanted a new watch without you ever saying so out loud.
Media monitoring, in this instance, refers to how we gain insight into the hearts and minds of our consumers, perceptions about our brand, topics and conversations related to the work we do or the services we provide and how our brand exists and performs in relation to the competition.
It’s the complex-made-simple act of regularly consuming and sorting the information we find in the media, within specific parameters that we set – based on strategy.
So, what’s the point and why do we care?
Media Monitoring in the UK is Crucial to Reputation Management and Business Growth
“A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.” – Jeff Bezos
If we accept the idea that the media plays a crucial role in how we identify, agree, rally, communicate and evolve as a society – media monitoring becomes an absolutely key activity for brands that want a place in the digital landscape. More specifically and simply put, media monitoring helps you:
Strengthen your brand. The strength of your brand can be defined beyond current sales and long-term projections. Awareness, sentiment, perception and risk mitigation are all factors in determining brand resilience (including actions such as social media branding). By understanding and planning actions and reactions to external factors, you can build stronger foundations and increase opportunity for your brand beyond its immediate environment.
Media monitoring is a crucial factor in determining how (potential) consumers feel about your brand and how they perceive it, as it makes information available to you that isn’t necessarily obvious. Also, media monitoring tools, such as a social media tracker, are able to analyse large data sets in order to give you a broader idea of how your brand is considered beyond your understanding.
Pro tip: Use media monitoring to identify and correct misconceptions and build greater awareness. You can do this by gauging sentiment and monitoring the media to get an idea of how your customers feel, through sentiment analysis. In doing so, you can measure the true strength of your brand.
“The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said”. – Peter Drucker
Manage a Crisis
One of the most crucial elements of managing a crisis is responding to commentary immediately. The problem is that a media crisis can go viral in a short space of time. So, how do you identify and respond to vast amounts of commentary if it’s all over the place? With a media monitoring tool, you can quickly collate mentions, and address them individually.
Better yet, you can detect negative mentions early, which gives you the upper hand in containing an impending crisis.
Set alerts for brand mentions, catch a crisis early, create personalised replies, then learn from the situation and adapt accordingly.
“To be effective in crisis management in the digital age means being able to use social media strategically. There is no crisis management today without a full understanding of how to use new media to listen to conversations around your brand in real-time, and understand what you do and don’t need to respond to.” – Chris Syme
Increase sales and improve processes
- Identify and create sales leads. Bridging the gap between needs and desires and a sale is a discipline within itself. But with an effective media monitoring strategy you can identify consumers who are, or could be, interested in your products.
Specifically, your searches can show you users who ask specific questions, engage with product and service information that’s similar to what you offer and you can identify problems that your offering solves and speak directly to those who communicate with them on social or in news media.
Pro tip: Use media tools to identify existing leads while generating new ones, and track how many instances of reaching out lead to a conversion.
“Going viral is not an outcome; it’s a happening. Sometimes it happens; sometimes it doesn’t. Just remember, fans are vanity and sales are sanity.” – Lori Taylor - Improve customer services. In a connected world, consumers have changing expectations. They demand much more from the brands that they interact with. According to Smart Insights, “Over a third (37%) of consumers who use social media to complain or question brands expect to get a response in under 30 minutes”. With this kind of demand for engagement from brands, you can’t afford to miss a mention, and this extents beyond mentions you’re tagged in.
If we reference the old-but-good KANO model (1980), it’s important to delight your customers, and not simply address problems or concerns.
Pro tip: Identify mentions where your brand hasn’t been tagged and address issues or reward user behaviour, preemptively.“Today, complainers – haters are the canaries in the coal mine. They are the early warning detection system for your business” – Jay Baer - Get inspiration to inform a better content strategy. Media monitoring and content marketing go hand in hand. The humdrum day-to-day posts and articles are a good foundation but they need spice to keep readers interested and they need to be topical to maintain relevance. If you’ve been owning brand content for a long time, it’s tough to stay inspired but the UK media landscape can offer you a plethora of interesting challenges, topics and memes to play into.
Pro tip: Use your media monitoring tool to identify lasting trends and topics that are heavily featured over the course of a few days. Create content daily to play into these themes over and above your monthly content plan.
“Quality, relevant content can’t be spotted by an algorithm. You can’t subscribe to it. You need people – actual human beings – to create or curate it.” ― Kristina Halvorson
Connect and capitalise
One of the greatest challenges we face as marketers is generating inspiring content that engages our consumers. In some instances, consumer-generated content is more powerful than brand-owned media, as it offers a sense of endorsement and relevance. It also doesn’t require a company-owned resource to create.
If this media exists, there’s an opportunity to capitalise on it and directly benefit from it, without having to spend time or money on its existence. Find existing posts about your brand as a starting point, then connect with the owner to discuss how you can use their content.
“The next wave of the Web is going to be user-generated content” – John Doer
However…
“Eventually the consumer will come to appreciate the editorial point of view of every different brand. User-generated content without editorial oversight will simply be background noise”. – Michael Eisner
Align your brand with key influencers
If you’re on top of the UK media landscape, it will quickly become clear who has the most influence in your immediate network. But, this can be a particularly difficult exercise if you’re looking to enlist influence for a niche product or service. Typically, influencers with highly specific interests and followings are a valuable connection for reaching said audiences and are adored by their fans. They tend to have greater impact on buying decisions than those who appeal to a mass of only semi-interested viewers.
Part of your media monitoring strategy can include using tools to identify UK influencers from specific databases, that allow you to look within categories and learn more about who you could potentially build a relationship with.
Standard metrics like reach and engagement can give you an idea of what you’re working with but you also need to consider their audience demographics.
Pro tip: Use media monitoring services to identify key influencers in conjunction with an influencer database. This can give you quick access to summary information that will help you narrow down a pool of potential influencers you’d like to work with.
“There are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them”. ― Malcolm Goldwell
Align your brand with relevant news
Staying relevant is a challenge that even the edgiest of brands face. No matter how “cool” or current you are today, you can’t rely on that to be the case tomorrow. Cutting through the noise means standing out and captivating audiences who are constantly bombarded with information. A great way to do this is to align with current news that’s relevant to your brand, using commentary, humour or related media.
In order to understand the current UK media landscape and know what your most relevant trending topics are, you’ll need to monitor what people are talking about most passionately and often.
This is also true for brands which are not afraid to align themselves with social and political causes that are close to their proverbial hearts, but more accurately their values.
Pro tip: Choose your causes and allegiances carefully. Ensure they align with your values and that they resonate significantly with your target audiences. You can establish this through monitoring the media and identifying connections in topics, the number of mentions from a specific audience and their sentiment towards it.
“Bring relevance to the people before teaching them to be believers” ― Sunday Adelaja
Tip: Learn more about UK social media statistics to feed into your strategy.
Do Better Business in the UK by Using Media Monitoring
Improve product and service offerings
Social listening is particularly effective in helping you improve your ecommerce experiences for consumers. For example,“Facebook influenced 52 per cent of consumers’ online and offline purchases, up from 36 per cent in 2014”. (Source: The Drum, 2015). So, we know that social media plays a key role in helping consumers make buying decisions and in their overall customer experience.
This information helps us make a strong case for targeting and retargeting but it’s also directly related to how we speak to consumers. By responding to brand mentions, related queries and posts, you can start to build a relationship with potential buyers and guide them towards engaging with your products and services.
Use media monitoring to find questions about your industry, and respond with helpful answers, incentives and information.
“Conversation with customers will increase sales, even if the product or service is never mentioned.” George Farris
Futureproof
The concept of using big data for futureproofing isn’t buzzworthy for nothing. It also isn’t new but few companies use this tactic as effectively as they should. Collecting information on who your users are and what appeals to them can help you identify trends and prepare for future campaigns.
It can help you prioritise behaviours and consumer desires you want to speak to and formulate product and service strategies for the future. Conversely, it will also give you the insight you need to mitigate risks, and prepare for future hazards – giving you the competitive edge now, for later. This is particularly useful in the digital space, where being unprepared for change makes your brand vulnerable.
Use media monitoring to identify trends, learn about developments in your industry and to inform a change management plan.
“Being aware of the digital horizon – even if it’s way off in the distance – is one of the best things a business can do for its future.” Dan Monaghan
Understand your industry and competition
In today’s world, brands are often too focused on their own efforts, internally motivated and tunnel-visioned. It takes one excellent campaign to put your competition ahead, which can mean everything from a small loss of business to catastrophic irrelevance in a matter of days.
Your competition matters, and wherever you can get a competitive edge you should – even if that means aligning with other brands to create something better or playing in the same space, amicably.
You won’t be able to formulate an effective strategy without an intricate understanding of their work, where they differ from you in terms of objectives and how the public perceives them. So, how do you stay on top of what competing businesses are doing and manage your own campaigns at the same time?
Take the time to understand your competitors as well as you understand your own business. Use media monitoring to identify which audiences you share, how their content is performing, where you want to compete, and with whom – based on the data.“The healthiest competition occurs when average people win by putting in above-average effort” – Colin Powell
Measure your work
We all know that measuring your work is important but few people get specific about why, beyond the basic narratives of good or bad performance. Specifically, measuring your campaigns can give you more insight than “good job marketing team” “bad job marketing team” and the devil is truly in the details here.
At the end of the day, a brand’s purpose has some relation to ROI. And while that may not be a primary concern in the beginning, it will become increasingly important. A business can’t survive or thrive without positive changes to the bottom line, and we can’t assess those changes or encourage them without the data. Identify what’s working and what isn’t, basing your insights and decisions on the data instead of assumptions.
“That which cannot be measured cannot be proven.” ― Anthony W. Richardson“It isn’t just a pat on the back. Measurement is about marking, but evaluation is about improving.” – From PR Week, Panel Discussion.
Identify new markets
Identifying new markets is an important part of business growth and creating a safety net. Business growth can be achieved by extending your marketing efforts and reaching more relevant audiences. Media monitoring allows you to do this by helping you strategically identify emerging markets and potential new audiences through related topics, identifying growing needs and giving you the data you need to think outside the box.
The key to identifying potential markets lies in the specificity of your search terms. Use a combination of everything from keywords around your brand to buzzwords, related products and services, competition names and slogans.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” – R. Buckminster Fuller
Companies Doing Media Monitoring right, globally
VANS
VANS is and has always been an iconic brand, since its inception in 1996. One of the ways in which it remains relevant is by adapting to change. Media monitoring is a crucial part of VANS’ operations. Especially considering its close alignment with the youth market and it’s affinity for creative self-expression.
According to Warren Talbot, VANS Media marketing Manager, the brand needed to “define metrics… automate time-consuming activities and collate social media data across different campaigns”.
Using Meltwater media software, VANS was able to use real-time media monitoring and analyse media trends, which helped them remain competitive in a noise-heavy youth retail industry.
Vans continues to use online media monitoring as a mechanism for executing events, connecting with influencers, generating reports and measuring ROI.
PRIDE IN LONDON
The London Pride event is a key part of the LGBTQXYZ calendar but managing the marketing and media around it is a complex task. Given the social nature of the organisation, there are multi-tiered conversations at play and a lot of controversy in terms of sentiment and social media reactions.
For this organisation, research is key and can only be conducted with media monitoring software. Online visibility is an important part of the pride initiative and in order to gain this visibility, there needs to be regular and consistent community growth.
What Pride in London excels at is the ability to manage it’s communities, view and respond to mentions, build and create awareness without diluting the brand message along the way.
“Social listening helps us better understand whether key messages are resonating or becoming lost in the noise. The best way to increase engagement with our audience is to focus our communications around topics that our audience deem important. In 2013-2014 Pride grew by 135%, from 2014-2015 growth peaked to 215% and indications suggest 2016’s community growth will follow the same trend.” – Steven Ward, Deputy Chair
Get Started Using Media Monitoring Tools in the UK
Starting anything new can seem daunting at first but media monitoring, with the right interface, is sometimes easier than using default social dashboards. With media monitoring software, you have a plethora of options available to you – built into a user-friendly interface.
Media Intelligence
Media Intelligence allows you to analyse the impact of media from the largest global source base. It’s the most comprehensive solution for PR and marketing professionals as it combines editorial and social listening into one easy-to-use interface. Our media intelligence also comes with an Android or iOS app that allows you to get relevant insight and coverage wherever you are.
Reports
Meltwater Media Monitoring Analysis Reports give you customised, real-time analysis, which helps you measure impact and ROI and improve and simplify the reporting process. Customise the metrics and KPIs you’d like to measure and share instantly.
Mobile
Meltwater Mobile allows you to receive a notification every time a piece of content matches your keywords and other search parameters. It also allows you to easily collaborate by sharing content via apps like Slack or via text, email, etc. and to tag media. Mobile dashboards gives you the opportunity to digest whole conversations around a topic with thousands of articles, social media posts and broadcast coverage centralised into one dashboard for easy consumption and analysis.
Premium social
Meltwater Premium Social can give you better insight into what’s happening on Twitter and Facebook with it’s social echo functionality – as well as real-time insight for social share counts on editorial content. Plus, advanced analytics give you a more detailed view of social performance and allow you to drill down into key metrics.
Broadcast
Meltwater Broadcast Monitoring offers easy access to radio and television content, with cross-channel media analytics. It’s a powerful yet easy-to-use way to access your clips from a global capture network and and too share and edit when necessary.
In order to be fully diligent when it comes to media mentions, it's important to keep an eye on all relevant channels. The demand for print clippings is significantly decreasing for smaller brands, but if you're a global well-known brand, chances are you're still frequently mentioned in printed publications. Meltwater offers printed media clippings and analytics through our trusted global, and local print monitoring partners.
What can you do with these media intelligence tools?
- Set a specific time period and location. You can use social listening software to set a custom date range to monitor data over the time of an incident. For example, go back into past data-sets to see a correlation between an event and negative sentiment. You can also look for keywords specific to London, United Kingdom – for example.
- Identify key words and phrases for monitoring. Start with the basics. Identify the obvious keywords around your brand and service or product offering. Add the names of known competitors. This will take some research. Similarly your audience research prior to establishing keywords will help you look for related topics, journalists and influencers (typically categorised in a pre-populated database with high-quality media monitoring software like Meltwater's). Tip: Check out this UK Media Database Comparison
You can also add misspellings to your searches, and even memes and popular joke formats. With the Meltwater Media Monitoring Software, you can use Boolean search technology to weed out negative keywords and information you don’t want to see. - Filter by sentiment, media type, language, location. By choosing specific parameters, you can narrow down your results to the information you specifically need.
- Sort your information once you’re done filtering it. You can sort by rank, views or dates depending on the priority of the information you’re trying to collect.
- Collate social and news information. The best way to get organised and monitor your social data effectively is to aggregate all your timelines into one stream. Centralise the information on your dashboard and view it all from one place, with overall scores applied to sentiment and top news.
- Analyse the nitty-gritty details. Making sense of the immediate data available to you is an ongoing process. Real-time mentions, conversations, compliments and complaints around your brand, pose opportunities for you to join the conversation. Just make sure you aren’t joining in where you aren’t wanted or it doesn’t make sense for you to be there.
- Then look at the bigger picture. From a bird’s eye view, you can begin to look at trends in user behaviour, long-trending topics and recurring fads. This will allow you to document and gain insight into future behaviours and to establish a content plan and crisis management plan, accordingly.
- Evaluating the competition.The visibility of brands online already offers a fair amount of insight into the competition, if you know where to look. But with media monitoring you can really get the upper hand. Look at metrics like share of voice, sentiment towards competitors, how often they are sharing and where, how their content performs.
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Glossary of News and Social Media Terms
If you’ve been in the marketing or PR environment for a while, you’ve likely become familiar with a number of these terms, but just in case:
- Social listening involves monitoring and analysing social conversations and behaviour in order to gain a greater understanding of user behaviour, online. This includes monitoring sentiment, discussions, trending and key hashtags around a specific topic or brand.
- Media monitoring involves the same act of “listening” by monitoring a combination of media that includes social as well as editorial content, news, forums etc.
- An algorithm is a set of formulas that’s created to allow a computer to complete a function. In a media context, algorithms often work with machine learning to predict or respond to user behaviours automatically and become “better” at this over time.
- Forums in this context specifically refer to online sites created for discussion.
- Influencers are people with a notable internet presence who have significance in terms of affecting the behaviour of your target market. In many instances, these influencers can have as great a following as traditional media celebrities but are categorised by the size of their followings.
Nano influencers typically have a following of 4000 or less on a social media platform. Micro-influencers typically have between 4000 and 10 000 followers on a specific platform and bigger influencers often go up to the millions in terms of following. Influencers are usually open to working with brands for content creation, sponsored posts or competitions. - Relationship marketing is an approach that reveres long-term relationship building and establishing customer loyalty over short-term, individual sales. In theory, relationship marketing will strengthen returns in the long term, compensating for short and medium-term losses.
- Content marketing uses media to inform or entertain without expressly selling something but it’s created by a brand with the intent of benefitting that brand.
- Analytics. Interpretations of data allow for social media managers and marketers to draw insight.
- Crisis management is the process of handling events or communications that can impair your brand’s reputation or hinder your business.
- Retargeting is the action of gearing advertising towards users who have been to your site or your social platform before. They might not have completed a sale or another conversion, and you can use that information to prompt them to do so.
Learn More about Media Monitoring in the UK
Meltwater has a range of resources to help you tuck into the intricate details of social listening and media monitoring beyond the basics. Contact us for more information.
