Using data to put comms teams back in the driving seat

So how do marketing communications teams keep up? More importantly, how do they respond to either ride the crest of a PR wave or change the tone or volume of the debate if necessary? Seamless integration and coordination of content and activity is the obvious first step and Meltwater, a global leader in media intelligence, is making its move and attempting to take the leadership position.

The announcement of the enhanced Fjord product release, which empowers public relations, communications, and marketing teams with an intuitive all-in-one product suite, could be an important step forward. But is it evolutionary or revolutionary change? Is it too much to say that without a new level of collaboration and coordination global PR teams are going to struggle to maintain their position as the one of the best marketing disciplines when viewed through the prism of the ROI requirement?

On the face of it, the Fjord product release will aid public relations, communications and marketing departments evolve by evolving analytics into insights. Meltwater is bringing better ways to score and benchmark earned media mentions to market , along with the ability to attribute tangible business outcomes to earned media.

The newly integrated social publishing and engagement functionality includes interactive owned social analytics, while the new digital marketing insights product better informs customers content marketing initiatives with innovative, AI-driven insights surrounding competitors' paid digital media strategies.

Data, data, data

Right now, Meltwater’s media intelligence engine continues to invest in capturing more content and conversations than anyone else in the global media intelligence and social listening industry.

With over 500 million documents being added every single day, including the Twitter fire hose, Dow Jones premium content, and reddit data, our new search and analytics experience, Explore, provides customers with instant results and insights across news and social media, with years of historical data immediately accessible.

With the most comprehensive network of content partnerships globally, Meltwater allows customers to get full-text access to premium content not freely available online, including print and broadcast content, from a library of over 1.3 trillion documents.

By focusing on simplicity and efficiency, Meltwater customers will enjoy an upgraded user-experience, with an intuitive new design and enhanced self-help options. Projects become a centralized workspace within the Meltwater product, enabling end-to-end campaign execution from media outreach to post-campaign analysis, and the industry-leading Meltwater mobile app, available on iOS and Android, which now allows for instant notification and ad-hoc searching and analysis, as well as the ability to access all of the content from saved searches and tags in the desktop application.

When faced with enormous scope of the digital news and influencer industry, it would be easy just to say that the marketing communications industry of the 2020’s will have little chance of shaping debate and discussion in the way it has done in the last 20 years; there are so many variables and so much data to be pored over.

Alternatively, the marketing communications industry could — and should — say “not on our watch” and embrace collaboration and coordination through the effective use of powerful and agile media tools. This may put marketing communications teams right back in the driving seat, where they should always be.

Wesley Mathew, Head of marketing at Meltwater.