4 applications of media monitoring for loyal customers and efficiency

Most organisations no longer question (social) media monitoring. Social listening allows for organisations to react in real time to situations that may occur on media channels. This can include messages on social media, articles in printed media or radio and tv fragments; tracking all these channels is made possible through technology. Due to this, monitoring has become an integral part of service, marketing and sales.

In this whitepaper we will highlight the why and how of media monitoring and show you 4 different applications that will help you achieve more efficiency. Be sure to share this whitepaper with your colleagues to inspire them to achieve a stronger implementation of online and offline media monitoring.

What can media monitoring do for you?

By structurally deploying social media, you will be able to collect data for your client services, search for buying signals and analyse which factors influence your brand’s online reputation. This will help you to gain valuable insights into messages from customers and noncustomers. For a full overview, it is useful to use the five Ws to answer questions such as “who, what, where, when and why”. Context is important here. It is important to understand your target audience’s needs and make sure you deploy these optimally. This is best achieved through good web care, 1-on-1 communication, content marketing and advertising.

Media monitoring and social service

Detecting relevant messages and conversations is important in social service and webcare. Monitoring enables you to analyse what people say about your organisation and detect trends and developments in the industry.

The five W’s aid you in finding questions and complaints and placing them in the right context. By structuring this process, you can filter out relevant information from the millions of messages posted in the media daily. By doing so, you will be left with relevant messages for your organisation, which will allow you to act upon these messages.

5W: who, what, where, when and why?

Who?

Who is talking about your brand, products and services? Know more about your target market by monitoring what they talk about and with whom.

What?

What are they saying? News coverage is an important aspect of this. Look beyond mentions; research the needs and brand preferences of your target group.

Where?

Where are these messages being shared? Through what channels and locations? Data about (geo)location is often not available; however, many organisations underestimate the possibilities provided by this.

When?

When do people talk about your organisation? Which days and times are popular? Is this before, during or after a campaign? Are you active online at the same time as your target market?

Why?

Why do we share, complain or ask questions? When receiving questions or complaints, look further than isolated situations and try to detect improvement points. This will help you to answer the why-question.

Listen with the intention to understand and improve

People often only listen in order to reply. This is also seen in organisations that do online listening.

“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.”
Stephen Covey in “The 7 habits of highly effective people”

The solutions lies in listening with the intention to understand what the (potential) client really means. Only by doing so, you will be able to learn from what went wrong, so you can improve as an organisation. This is what good customer service is! Unfortunately webcare teams are often missing an organised workflow. The service process is often only designed for reactive webcare.

Media monitoring and lead generation

Organisations often focus their social media on branding and service; however, this focus has shifted towards lead generation. The internet is filled with potential clients who are looking for the right fit for their needs. The foundation for good lead generation can be found in understanding your potential client. You will need insights into your customers: where they are, what they talk about, with whom, and at what time. Media monitoring offers solutions to get to know more about these customers and define the buyer journey further.

Several useful actions for lead generation are, for example:

• Measure when your potential clients communicate so that you can adjust your content distribution to this.
• Make use of location to target your message.
• Detect which influencers are active within your market and analyse what content they share and which possible interfaces they might have with your organisation.

Follow trends, developments and competitors

When monitoring, you should look into more than your own company name, platforms and accounts. It is advisable to follow important terms surrounding your organisation, this will help detect sales opportunities, developments and trends within the market. This will help you to find new stakeholders that are relevant for your organisation.

Monitoring your competitors will also help find your own weaknesses and strengths. Find out how you can differentiate yourself, and find new opportunities in the market. How satisfied are the clients of your competitors? And even a step further: detect contracts that are ending or unanswered questions, to see how you can follow-up on these. Invite potential clients to a meeting and use proactive behaviour to show what you can offer.

A monitoring tool aids you to filter out what messages are important for your organisation through smart searches, made easy. In addition to this, a monitoring tool has the possibility to measure and analyse the results of lead generation. This will help your organisation to optimise service, marketing and products for clients. Enrich your knowledge, analyse results and implement change to enhance your position in the market.

61% of consumers switches organisations when they experience poor service. This was shown in a research conducted by Accenture in 33 countries. Besides this, 68% of these consumers never return after switching. Therefore, lead generation is a part of optimal social services.

Event- and crisis monitoring

Besides being useful for lead generation and service, media monitoring can be used before, during and after an event or crisis for monitoring. In an ideal situation, on and offline media monitoring is strongly integrated, and your team is ready to anticipate, react and activate at all times.

Event and crisis monitoring has 3 goals:

• Crisis communication and management
• Webcare
• Marketing

Before your campaign starts, set up real-time alerts and keywords. These alerts can differ in their goals. It is possible to set an alert if the volume of messages increases greatly compared to your average volume. This could result from famous people talking about your brand or if a situation is looking to get out of hand. In the last case, you will need to spend time formulating keywords with your brand name and hashtags in combination with words such as brand, theft, injured, storm, danger, etc.

Monitoring news coverage during an event or crisis will give your organisation more insights into what is happening. It will never provide you with a complete view, but it will give you extra knowledge of your organisation, employees, sponsors, and customers’ opinions regarding the event. You will be able to anticipate risks and crises through these findings. In addition, you can react to questions and comments in real-time, both reactive and proactive. Finally, you will be able to get in contact with involved customers, which will help you create more impact and reach.

Crisis monitoring and risk analysis

When monitoring a crisis, you should start by identifying risks. When an event is coming up, you can usually easily identify which topics need more attention. These topics might be influenced by; location, program, catering, weather or other aspects of the event. It is advisable to take the time to identify these topics through keywords before your event. This way you are sure you will not miss out on messages and you can react on them as soon as a situation occurs. To avoid an information overload you should prioritize messages and topics. Providing adequate and fast communication will allow your organisation to be a trustworthy source for updates about the situation. Strong preparations really is the best strategy for crisis monitoring.

Reactive and proactive service

Event monitoring can help you to identify questions, remarks and complaints, which will help you to provide reactive and proactive service. A good preparation will provide you with a complete overview of what is messages are surrounding your organisation. Make sure you are able to help out with questions before, during and after the event.

Engage visitors and their network

When you start promoting your event on social media you are not only improving branding, but also engaging visitors and sponsors. For example; short interviews could be used as teasers for the event, but also as a source of inspiration.

During the event you can make use of live narrowcasting to display online messages from visitors. This will help you to stimulate the use of social media and visibility of your event content.

From preparation and real time service to evaluation

Whilst preparation and strong keywords are important for crisis communication and service, evaluating is also an added value. This will help you analyse your work afterwards, helping you to identify possible patterns in messages. Besides learning and improvement points you will be provided with an over overview of what partners and sponsors were involved in the event.

After our own event, we analysed how the news coverage developed throughout the day. We also found out who was most active, and by analysing the sentiment, we could discover how the day’s content was received. Finally, we had a critical look at engagement input, in which KPIs such as service level and response speed could be improved.

The (online) reputation of an organisation is influenced by several different factors:

• Is the organisation customer-focused?
• How does the organisation communicate?
• What is the quality of the services and products offered?
• How well is the organisation involved in social responsibility?
• How can you discover which factor will influence your reputation the most? How can you respond to this as a brand?

Your brand’s reputation is also influenced by information that can be found anywhere on the internet. Any potential customer can access this online information, which could influence how they view your organisation. Therefore, it is extremely important to have a grip on this information.

Knowledge is Power!

Though organisations have become more comfortable with social media data and analysing it, the next step towards reputation management is often still seen as difficult. For most organisations, the challenge mainly lies in interpreting the data and translating it into actionable insights.

Many organisations are looking for actions to take to improve their reputation. We would all like to find the simplest solution for this. The most important aspect is to link the right subjects with each other. The following tips provide insights into (partly automated) structural reputation management analysis.

6 tips to take your reputation management to a higher level

Tip 1: look further than volumes

An increase in message volumes is often influenced by some factors. For example, one person could repeatedly share his/her message, an online contest or if your organisation is continuously mentioned in other situations.

In addition, problems that can influence your reputation don’t necessarily need a large volume. Therefore, always broaden your search into source types (newspapers, RTV) and sources (high-impact sources such as industry blogs, Reddit, etc.).

Tip 2: Measure your core values

You have decided on core values within your corporate communication strategy. Analyse what topics might arise according to these core values. Then, analyse the sentiment around your core values to see if they can be improved.

Tip 3: Monitor press releases after sending them

Creating and spreading press releases is an important task for communication professionals, and it has a large impact on an organisation’s reputation. Often, press releases are not monitored well enough. This provides strong insights into which media channels pick up what topics, which subjects score the highest, and which press releases influence your sentiment on social media.

Tip 4: Look at the number of proactive versus reactive messages

Another important guideline is proactive versus reactive messages. Structurally analysing this provides insights into what messages you have been able to influence somewhat.

“Media monitoring is crucial for any type of organisation. It constantly provides real-time insights into news coverage around your brand, industry and competitors. This allows you to have control and influence on your organisations reputation.”
Alexander de Ruiter, CEO Spotler Nederland

Tip 5: Broaden your market knowledge

What issues are there? (Social) media monitoring is not only for your organisation. When your communication professionals have good insights into which issues have an influence on your market, your organisation will be able to play into this.

Tip 6: Monitor important stakeholders

It is important to have detected your organisation’s most important stakeholders. Can you group these or find certain trends?

One of the most important lessons from reputation management is that people want to be heard. Be open to feedback to help you react to as many questions and remarks as possible. Be sure to reply quickly, especially on social media, and always stay friendly. Due to disappointment or unmet expectations, people often want to leave their remarks. Replying with understanding and a clear view often changes this and will result in a more positive reputation, loyal clients, and efficiency!

61% of consumers reads the reviews before making a decision in the buyer journey. This is shown in a study conducted by Econsultancy!