The sound of people talking about your brand is what’s ringing in your ears. Although they are invisible to you, they are out there spreading rumours about your identity and activities.
The science isn’t entirely clear whether tinnitus is an underlying symptom, but most astute businesses are well aware of the discourse around their brands. How were they not able to? By 2020, everyone is online and the globe has returned home.Or at least 59% of the population is, and considering the staggering volume of data being sent between millions of devices, a 6% increase from the previous year is significant.
Businesses are using faster, more sophisticated methods to gauge the success of their online PR, communications, and marketing campaigns in order to stay up with the explosive expansion of online activity. Collectively, these instruments produce an array of insights and are referred to as media intelligence.
However, precisely what is media intelligence?
We must first identify all the components that make up media intelligence before we can define it more precisely. Media intelligence is described similarly, combining many techniques for obtaining information from the media into a coherent whole. This definition is akin to our understanding of fundamental intelligence, which is the capacity to acquire and use general knowledge and abilities.
As technology advances, so does the official terminology for the many instruments utilised to extract insights from a wide range of media sources. Here, we’ll simply dive into the three primary categories of data analysis, social listening, and media monitoring to keep things simple.
Media Surveillance
Press clippings services were the best way to search the media for mentions of your business back when newspapers were still in print. Media monitoring companies are experts at locating and gathering copies of pertinent media content for your company and customising it based on subject, region, or industry.
As time has gone on, media monitoring has changed to keep up with technological breakthroughs, adapting its approach to finding material to reflect the emergence of radio, television, and the internet. A good pair of eyes is still needed to complete some parts of this procedure because of the recent introduction of data mining and machine learning.
Listening Socially
Similar to the previously discussed media monitoring, social listening necessitates keeping a steady hand on the conversations that are pertinent to your brand. On the other hand, social listening is primarily confined to social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and so on, whereas media monitoring has a more expansive coverage.
Although social listening and media monitoring are fundamentally the same means to the same aim, it’s easy to mistake the two. However, social listening may be thought of in terms of metrics. Which metrics do you employ to gauge the level of talk about your brand? Things like mentions, hashtags, SOV, and industry trends are good places to start.
Another area where social listening varies is in the way it applies those measurements to ascertain ideas that are more difficult to measure, such as how consumers feel as indicated by a sentiment score. By using social listening, you can go beyond simple data collection and examine metrics that indicate the range of your online reputation and the sentiment that behind it—whether it be favourable, unfavourable, or neutral.
Information Analysis
With the incredible amount of data available, knowing how it links and what kind of business you can make with it requires having a platform or tool in place. Data analysis comes into play when you combine your initial meticulous examination of a rise in your brand’s SOV within a particular niche, such as FinTech, with other data to provide a more palatable answer.
Business KPIs start to matter at this point. What objectives do you have? Are you attempting to handle an issue quickly? Alternatively, would you like to compare what you observe with the competitors? To truly grasp the benefits of media monitoring and social listening tools for your organisation, you must have a structure in place for sifting the data they provide.
Let’s take an example where you wish to gauge how well a recent social media marketing effort is working. As you engage with your social media staff, you monitor the tone and quantity of mentions. Analysing data involves taking a close look at the hard figures and arranging them in a way that best fits your goals and vision. In order to distinguish the more useful metrics from the vanity ones, dashboards, graphs, and other visual aids are useful in this situation.
What Makes Media Intelligence Important, Then?
We’ve already discussed media intelligence and how it collects crucial information about your brand’s story, but why is it important?
Apparently, people enjoy being heard
Traditional marketing has long placed a premium on audience knowledge. Teams have historically gathered data on their client base in a variety of methods, but how many have been able to tune into the natural conversations taking place about your business in real time? With the advent of social media, you can now use the correct technologies to transform the media landscape into real-time focus groups that you can monitor based on trending topics or daily themes.
Media intelligence is important because it provides you with a wealth of information about how your audience behaves. A good media intelligence platform will highlight your consumers’ pain points in their chats because people are more inclined to express their opinions when they are speaking through an avatar. Who in the room is the loudest? Influencers who spread the word about your company to their thousands of followers can also be found with the correct solution.
Corporate reputation is continuously vulnerable to hourly occurrences as the world changes due to political movements and increased social responsibility. When bad news breaks, you can handle a communications crisis immediately by utilising early warning and alarm systems from the appropriate media intelligence solution. Additionally, media intelligence gives you insight into current events and, using predictive analytics based on your data collection, lets you detect future patterns.
But until you do something with the data, none of this will change ROI. individuals who are interested are interesting individuals, as are brands. Listening intently to what your audience is saying is one thing, but actively participating is quite another. Having access to vital data, media intelligence provides you with a competitive advantage when creating customised content for your audience depending on their preferences and requirements.
The demand for the complete media intelligence service has only increased due to the exponential rise in the number of people logging on in 2020. Proactive audience data collection techniques are becoming more popular than traditional reactive ones. Therefore, you need media intelligence to adjust that buzzing in your ear to the correct frequency, lest you miss the positive word about your business.