What is digital media monitoring?
Every minute, thousands of opinions fly around the internet, opinions about people, products, companies and brands. The new social media with their peer to peer conversations are an important source, but not the only one. Blogs, traditional on-line media, movies, and consumer organizations can also produce valuable information about companies, products and brands.
Digital media monitoring applications allow to capture, store and analyze these opinions and understand what is said about your key people, company or brands.
Why should I listen to what is being said about my company or brand?
As the customer is king, is always right and is the one who is paying you, we might just as well ask you why not listen? According to us there are three key reasons to start listening to what is being said about your brand.
- Comments from customers about your brand or service are an important source of information, be it good news or bad news. It can be somebody sharing with their friends the excitement about the launch of your new product, but cannot find it anywhere. Good to know, but probably also valuable information for your sales team. Or somebody very angry, posting a malicious video on YouTube damaging the image of your brand. An absolute must to be aware of and react to as soon as possible.
- On-line media, social media and on-line advertising are here to stay. In fact, advertising spending on digital media is rapidly growing at an estimated rate of 15-20% per year, reaching globally around 13% of total advertising spending (2010). To be able to define an on-line advertising strategy (including social media presence), you have to know where your brands stand. Only with this information at your fingertips can you start defining a sensible overall communication strategy.
- The third key reason is related to the first point. In “the old days”, a company first defined the brand, its values and its positioning and subsequently launched the product. Little or no structured information was available on the consumer perception of product or service. This has dramatically changed since the rise of internet blogs, forums, social media and other sources. We call it a paradigm shift. The unilateral brand communication from company -> brand -> consumer now has a bilateral component. You should use this new communication channel and ensure coherence between your company / brand communication and the perception of your customers.
Why Brandchats?
First, when it comes to selecting an application to support media monitoring, customers should make sure that they receive the information relevant for their brand. Nothing more and nothing less. Secondly, the application has to provide effective and powerful support for analyzing and concluding what is actually being said about your brands. Finally, it should allow you to react quickly if necessary. Those are the strengths of our Brandchats media monitoring solution.
Basic monitoring functions (retrieve mentions from all kind of different sources) and generation of simple standard reports, are also covered by our competitors, there be no should secrets about this.
We believe however the real value of a Brand Monitoring solution is found in the analytics part that helps you to separate sense from senseless(unfortunately the internet is awash with this type of information) and understand the underlying tone of mentions, messages, blogs and other digital information. Visualization is the most powerful and appropriate way to draw conclusions from large data sets. That is the key strength that sets us apart from the others.
A second differentiator is based on the rich functionalities around benchmarking with competitive brands and companies. Brandchats not only tells you how your brand is performing, but also provides powerful benchmarks with a selection of competitors and with the average of your sector. To know that your brand was mentioned 1000 times last week is one thing. To know that competitor x got 2000 during the same time and the average was 1200 gives a totally different perspective.
Last, but not least, it is our philosophy that defining complex queries and setting up filters to avoid sifting through mountains of irrelevant information is our task, not yours. With Brandchats there is no need for an unduly difficult search engine set-up and no need to analyze hundreds of messages, looking for the relevant ones.
