By: Chris Hackney, Meltwater’s Chief Product Officer
For our second major product release of 2024, we’ve focused on adding enhancements that will make you feel like you’ve got superpowers! We’re doing that by giving you tools that empower you to achieve better results and save time.
PR and marketing professionals face an ever-growing ocean of social, online, and legacy media data that could hold transformative insights for their businesses if only they could find a way to make sense of it all. Forrester estimates that 73% of all data within an enterprise is not used for analytics, which means there’s potentially a huge amount of intelligence and insight simply being left on the table by most businesses.
At Meltwater, we think that by building tools that make it easier to analyze and surface insights that data holds, we can help our customers unlock greater potential for their businesses.
Saving Your Time
For many of us, there never seem to be enough hours in the day to get everything done. We believe that saving time isn’t about cutting corners or compromising on the quality of your work but how thoughtful technology can help us get to our goals faster.
In Meltwater’s Year-End Release, we’ve introduced product enhancements focused on saving you time.
A key element of this is the new Platform Assistant, an AI tool that makes it easy to get all kinds of help simply by asking questions in natural language. Whether you want some details about your account (e.g., how to contact your Meltwater rep), you need help finding content or creating a pitch, or you have a question about your own activity within Meltwater, you just have to ask.
Another example of time-saving enhancements is the AI Journalist Search we’ve added to our Media Relations solution. PR professionals can simply enter their campaign key messages, press releases, or pitch notes into the tool, and the AI will identify up to 200 media contacts best suited to your objectives. Instead of spending a lot of time searching and filtering lists of journalists manually, the whole task is completed in seconds.
We’ll soon launch a new Influencer Marketing AI Assistant to Klear, which allows you to interact with the platform in natural language, whether you’re trying to find new influencers, explore campaign performance metrics, or brainstorm ideas, the assistant is able to help whenever you need it.
Social media managers can now view all of their posts on Meltwater Engage’s calendar, even if those posts were posted natively through the platforms, so you have a complete view of your content across all social channels. We’ve also added a new multi-tier approvals feature to Engage, making it much easier to ensure content is checked and signed off ahead of posting while avoiding any bottlenecks in the process.
These are just a few examples of how we’re aiming to save you time with this release.
Take Action on Insights
Insight is at the very heart of Meltwater's mission. We strive to help our customers decipher the patterns and trends buried in the world’s data and use that insight for business advantage.
But insights mean little if they only exist in reports or dashboards, and never inspire action. So another of the big themes we focused on for this release was how we can make it easier for you to put insights into action.
One of the biggest new features is the Brand Analytics Tab, which automatically collates all of the key metrics around your brand performance alongside AI-generated summaries of relevant news and social media narratives. This provides an easy-to-digest real-time snapshot of your brand health, always up-to-date, and created automatically in moments.
We’ve also introduced a new feature that makes sharing Meltwater insights much more engaging and powerful. Instead of exporting reports and dashboards as static PDF files, you can now share interactive reports with stakeholders so that they can explore the data and drill down into details, even without their own Meltwater login.
A big part of this is our continued investment in high-quality data, which makes it easier to uncover insights and adds credibility to your reports when you share them with stakeholders. An example of this is our Renewed partnership with Reddit, securing long-term access to the platform’s full firehose of authentic, unfiltered consumer discussions for our customers.
Build Stronger Relationships
Whether it’s with customers, influencers, journalists, or internal stakeholders, the ability to forge strong relationships helps us to achieve our objectives more easily. So, the third major goal of this product release has been to give you the tools to nurture the relationships that matter to your business.
In Klear, we’ve made a simple but powerful improvement that shows you the full conversation history between your business and any influencer through the unified inbox. This means you instantly have access to the complete background context whenever you need to interact with that person, allowing for more authentic conversations based on their prior interactions with your brand instead of simply sending them a generic outreach email.
For PR, you now have the option to receive alerts when a media contact’s profile is updated with new details, such as when they change jobs, for example. This makes it easy to keep up to date with what’s happening with your target media, helping you to engage with them more effectively.
It’s also now possible to view the open rates of your outreach email campaigns, down to the granular level of individual contacts, whereas before, it was only possible to view the rates of an entire media list. So now you can easily identify which journalists are most engaged with your campaign and focus on them, as well as adjust your messaging for those who are not yet engaged.
More to Come!
In this post I’ve given you a taste of the biggest improvements in the 2024 Year-End Release, and explained our strategy behind this update. To get a more detailed view of what’s been added, visit the product update page.
There’s plenty more to come. This is an exciting period of development for Meltwater as we continue to harness the power of AI in our platform, and build on our industry-leading partnership with Microsoft Copilot.