Tag Archives: glide technologies

Online newsrooms of the future – Part 2

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Following on from my last post, the evolution of the audience to your newsroom, along with fast growth of influential blogs and use of social media have made it essential for companies to ensure these channels work effectively, side by side.

From press release to blog

Newsrooms of the future will be conversational and more blog like in terms of allowing commenting on the content they hold. This type of conversational approach can give brands the perfect opportunity to engage firsthand with their audiences and can provide instant, valuable insight for product and service development.

Learn how to tell a story in new ways

I listened to Elma Peters, the Corporate Communications Director at GE speak at the European Communication Summit in 2010. She described “360 degree storytelling” and how, as a team, they had to get better at telling stories to help GE engage with the audiences which lie outside mainstream media (including employees past and present).

She also spoke of the challenge laid down to them by their VP of Global Communications “to make one major announcement which doesn’t come from a press release.”

Forward thinking companies like GE have already realised the need to diversify – how often do you watch TV whilst surfing the net or posting to your social media channel of choice?

Give your newsroom some authority in your industry

Newsrooms of the future will pull in news from around their industry to help establish them as hubs of industry knowledge. The ISC Newsroom as quoted on David Henderson’s blog is a great example of this type of authoritative brand positioning.

Make clever use of social media

The exposure brands receive on social media can be leveraged on online newsrooms to enhance user experience. Sony’s Press Centre was redesigned to make better use of the vast exposure which they receive around their products on social media sites such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

Bringing in user generated content to their online newsroom really helps Sony to bring their content to life by adding the voice of their consumers and fans to content they created.

What’s important is that you start with your business objectives in mind, then you get creative.

Sam

Online newsrooms of the future – Part 1

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Back when I first started selling the concept of online newsrooms to PR and Communications teams, the idea was simple – provide an online repository for press releases and multimedia assets which could be accessed by journalists online, 24/7.

Fast forward a number of years and the explosion of online as a communication channel has radically altered the PR landscape forever.

The role of PR has evolved to more than a need to reach out to traditional media outlets and audiences. PR has become the organisational force behind how brands communicate across different channels. Therefore, online newsrooms of the (not so distant) future have to evolve too. Step one? Time to review your audience.

Redefine your audience

The online newsroom of the future won’t have a single audience, they will have many: customers, donors, volunteers, employees and investors, each looking to have their needs fulfilled by the content you deliver.

Understanding your audience well makes it easier for you to tailor your content and messaging.

Turn your online newsroom into a brand hub

Successful newsrooms of the future will become their own content and social media hubs. They will become the first place users go to get the latest information, images, market responses, and thought leadership from your company.

It’s important that brands have control over their content and don’t rely too heavily on free ‘tools of the moment’ either, especially when the content they store on them can be campaign critical. Case in point; one of the worlds biggest electronic firms found itself banned from Flickr during one of their biggest shows of the year for apparent “self promotion”. It’s a fickle world when someone else makes the rules.

The newsrooms we build for our clients enables them to store a variety of content, such as text, images, video etc, all of which can be used much like the way most sites make use of Twitter feeds. Best of all, they can tag it, distribute it and share it any way they like.

My next post will outline the importance of blogs and social media channels, and the impact they can have on a company’s newsroom. You can read it here.

Sam

Perfect imperfection

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There are lots of things wrong with the Kindle. But I love it. How can that be? How can it be that I’ve spent a hundred quid on a piece of kit that doesn’t work 100% as I want it to, but I still think it’s brilliant?

Well it does what I mostly want it to do. It presents me with a million books at my fingertips. It lets my computer-weary eyes rest on delicious matt print which honestly looks as good as a book. I can turn pages with one finger and no lengthy tome can defeat my single hand. It’s great and I take it everywhere.

It’s a bummer that you can’t quickly jump between chapters. Its a pain that sometimes it forgets what page you’re on and you have to scroll for ages. It doesn’t deal with symbols very well and some of the free books have been formatted by volunteers so they don’t read all that well. Apparently you can listen to music while you read, but I’ve not worked out how yet and it did some funny things to me when I was browsing Amazon in Ireland. Browsing the bookstore unless you know the name of the book or author is fairly tough full stop.

But I still love it. And I never thought I would. The idea of giving up on paper and print was abhorrent – until someone mentioned the number of books I could have on it. And how many were free. And how I could have a book within 30 seconds and be reading it. At that point it was all over – I was in lust and the honeymoon period seems to be lasting.

But more than this, I love the way they deal with their imperfections.

In the manual they have a whole section on things that are included on your Kindle which are still in development. It asks for my comments, suggestions and feedback. It actually makes me feel part of something that’s growing and improving. I feel that as a reader, I have ownership of the direction that this wonderful little device is taking. I feel part of a community and will take the time to show other commuters (who always ask me how the screen looks and how I’m finding it) and tell them honestly how much I love it. I’m a zealot of an imperfectly wonderful bit of kit.

And I guess that’s the point of this ramble. If you want your service or product to be what your users want it to be, just be honest about what you have, and get down on your knees and beg for their feedback and ideas. Make it their product not yours. Keep it moving and improving and keep your ears open and mouth shut.

That’s my new role in a nutshell. I’m here to ensure that Glide develops the platform in the direction that our community of users wants and needs, making it the best PR tool available on the market. Simple? You tell me!

Samantha

What’s the question again?

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Over recent months I’ve been at conferences and seminars all looking at how meaning is extracted from the increasing mountain of available media and social outlets. At the core of much of the discussion is a persistent question: how do you get a clean set of data to start with?

Data cleansing it seems remains (as it has for some years) the biggest hurdle to making an initial start on the problem of media analysis and evaluation – at its heart this leads us to the inevitable subject of queries and how to use them.

I’ve lost count of the conference speakers I’ve seen this year who all agree that to get queries right is a complex and involved process which can eat up hours of time in a search for the perfect expression of what you are trying to identify. One frequent validation of this is to choose an ambiguous term, say, Orange, and show the audience how difficult it is to create Boolean searches with enough exclusion s and conditional keywords to remove any ambiguity from the search and return a data sample with the right subject, be it a colour, a fruit or a telecommunications network company.

If time is no object, then this is a workable possibility, but there is an alternative which offers both a faster and a more accurate result – furthermore you don’t need any training because it’s called Natural Language Processing (NLP) for a reason – it’s the way you normally speak or write.

The argument for speed is obvious: if you don’t have to construct complicated queries out of keywords and exclusions but instead simply type in the question or subject you have in mind in plain text it stands to reason it’s a lot faster.

As for more accurate, it’s a simple fact that keywords (however many of them you choose) do form a system of constraints which confine you ‘literal’ matches. If, you are looking for a product named 1506/11 then that’s a fair compromise – but what about all the times when there are equivalents or ‘near’ matches – take the phrase “Brand X is the market leader” – if a sample says instead “Brand X is Number One in its field” does that not count too? – It could easily get missed with keywords.

NLP on the other hand is not concerned with words (key or otherwise) it’s about how languages work, what patterns and associations are present and above all it deals with probabilities.

Why should this matter? Well for a start many analysis tools are based on words and dictionaries – which in any living language will be subject to continuous revision. It also makes common expressions including slang and irony nearly impossible to detect with any accuracy. The flaw in the system is the assumption that with enough words and dictionary definitions a result can be produced like (for want of a better term) ‘smart accountancy’. By contrast NLP treats the subject of language more as a system with known rules for behaviour – ‘linguistic weather forecasting’ if you will.

Not only can NLP break the dependence on complex queries and keywords it has some other interesting features of benefit to media analysts – the main one being (ironically) that it doesn’t only work on word based content. :-) , w00t, etc are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the graphical way in which new media outlets (especially the burgeoning social media groups) choose to express themselves – whilst slang is an ever moving target. Stick with keywords and not only will the initial query take a while to construct but it will need regular updates and amendments to maintain its accuracy.

NLP’s rules-based approach not only can, but does allow for shifts and pattern evolution in language without much intervention at all (our own testing has stabilised at about 30 minutes a month).

One final advantage is the area of location (where, for example a tweet is from physically as opposed to where the server which produced it is cited). NLP can be tuned to distinguish between, say, English and American – or the Portuguese used in Portugal from that in Brazil.

This approach taken as whole is providing us with more useful insight into the underlying problem of data quality – and as a precursor to our work on contextual and perspective analysis is making it possible to pose queries which would be a complex and lengthy process by any other approach.

Keith

An introduction to GlideIntelligence

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Ever since I started Glide Technologies in 2003, clients have been telling me that the methods available for effectively measuring performance in the media are insufficient. Complaints have typically been that services are expensive, slow, highly subjective and inaccurate. My belief has always been that technology will deliver a better way and now, seven years on, the technology is finally here to realise the dream.

In the last two years, the media landscape has changed dramatically and it’s changed forever. Companies are fast realising that what worked yesterday, simply doesn’t work today. Leading brands are changing the way they measure and for good reason. Gone are the days where a company’s reputation could be managed via a controllable set of key media channels. In today’s socially-networked world, reputations are exposed across hundreds or thousands of media outlets, including blogs, social media websites, broadcast and traditional media. Furthermore, the simultaneous fragmentation and democratisation of media means that media is frequently global. There is, therefore, an urgent need to watch and listen across very large volumes of information. Quickly getting a view on what’s happening is essential. The days of rear-view-mirror-reporting are gone because, no matter how good the report is, it’s of very limited decision-making value if it’s received after the event in the typical month-end or quarter-end format.

We began developing GlideIntelligence two years ago (after a year in planning and consultation) and were fortunate enough to attract Keith Woods-Holder to lead the project. Ex Research Director at Saatchis, Keith spent over ten years developing automated sentiment analysis models for the likes of Dell (working directly with Michael Dell himself), Sony, IBM, Kodak and Barclays. The plan was simple – take Keith’s twenty years experience in the sector, give him a highly-talented development team and all the latest technologies, and create a software-as-a-service  semantic measurement platform, GlideIntelligence. The results have surpassed even our greatest expectations and we now have a powerful, fourth generation model which overcomes many of the criticisms that have been levelled at past attempts at automated sentiment analysis while creating real competitive advantage.

GlideIntelligence is a contextual measurement solution. Unlike previous generations of analyser, it does not use dictionaries but, instead, uses grammar and context. This means that it can learn new language quickly (including slang and non-English phraseology common in social media) and will not be constantly out-of-date with language nuance. This also allows us to overcome many of the legacy criticisms of automated sentiment, for example allowing it to handle sarcasm and irony.

GlideIntelligence was developed in conjunction with a select number of Glide’s large global brands. This ensured we did not develop in a vacuum, while keeping us close to the issues and priorities of business. A nine month beta programme has helped iron out any creases, while readying the product for commercial launch.

We felt it was essential to deliver complete transparency within our product. There are a lot of automated measurement tools on the market and a common complaint is not just that they don’t do what it says on the tin, but that there is a great deal of opacity about the methodologies used. We call this the ‘black box’ factor. Namely, data is fed in one end and charts out the other, but it is difficult or impossible to know how the sentiment was deduced nor the charts constructed. GlideIntelligence overcomes this restriction with in-built transparency. The way sentiment has been deduced is completely visible. We’re confident enough in our accuracy rates to let customers see this for themselves.

In today’s highly-competitive, connected world, it’s never been more important to be able to see the whole landscape, including competitor and industry movements. This is why we built in multi-perspective analysis. This gives the corporation the ability to benchmark effectively and quickly spot competitor strengths and weaknesses. GlideIntelligence creates the ability to see what an article means not just for you or your product, but for any number of companies, brands or products.

Another common complaint from the industry is the amount of time and expertise required to work with modern measurement platforms. Common to our founding value of making software easy to use, with GlideIntelligence we made sure that insightful charts and reports could be built with a few clicks of the button. Furthermore, a MyReports feature allows favourite charts to be saved for one-click access. A powerful alerting feature makes it easy to push important news stories to users based upon their needs. For example, it is possible to receive an instant alert about all negative coverage concerning the CEO.

Real-time analysis will fast become the norm and organisations without it will not be able to manage and respond in time to important market developments. Media will continue to diversify, fragment and overlap and organisations will increasingly need to think of media as global and not local because the internet does not discriminate based upon location. These changes create new challenges, in turn forcing us all to look for new, more effective ways to measure the corporate reputation. GlideIntelligence is part of that exploration.

Sam Phillips, Glide’s Founder and CEO

Monitoring Social Media event in Boston

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The number of organic and fluid conversations all over the internet is having a profound impact on brand reputations around the world. Knowing how communication teams should be monitoring them all is a complex task.

Monitoring Social Media, a series of upcoming conferences and boot camps across the UK and USA, will explore the latest ideas, trends and techniques in social media monitoring and measurement. The first event in Boston on 5th October will bring together leading brands, PR and marketing experts, and our VP of Research, Keith Woods-Holder will be presenting the latest insights into automated sentiment analysis.

Keith is a pioneer in Brand Sentiment Analysis – building one of the first commercial sentiment analysis models at IBM – and he will be bringing his in-depth knowledge and experience to Boston to help PR and communications teams make more informed business decisions.

Glide is sponsoring the event and is offering discounted tickets, which include full one-day delegate pass to the conference, lunch, a handbook and networking drinks.

For more information and to receive your discounted ticket please go to: http://www.monitoringsocialmedia.co.uk/boston/index.html#ticket and enter ‘GLIDE’ into the discount code area to access a 20% discount.

The Boston event is followed by New York on the 4th November and London on the 22nd November. For those unable to attend the event in Boston, Glide is also offering a 10% discount for the New York event and the London event.

Best Practice Online Newsroom – Part 2: Measuring the success

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As outlined in part 1, online newsrooms are an essential tool in helping you to engage better with your key audiences, increase your exposure, and protect your brand’s reputation.

As Sam Phillips explained in his post, it is now essential for corporate communication teams to be able to demonstrate their value. Setting up and measuring key performance indicators (KPI’s) has become fundamental to evaluating the performance of an online newsroom and proving its success and presenting its value at director level.

1. Focus on what matters

First of all, it is important to start with your objectives in mind when establishing your KPI’s. You may be looking to increase the number of repeat visits or sign-ups to your corporate communications via the newsroom.

2. Use analytics to monitor your traffic

Treat your newsroom like a corporate website and implement an analytics solution to allow you to analyse traffic and user behaviour.  This is a great way of providing you with insight so that you can understand how people get to your site and what content they like. Some basic KPI’s are listed below:

• Number of visits
• Number of unique visits
• Average time spent
• Sources of traffic i.e. search engines, blog, social media

Google Analytics is a good free solution that can be used.

3. Evaluate your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Understanding how your newsroom is performing in the major search engines allows you to ensure your optimisation work is paying off.  If you’re not showing within the top 20 results, the chances are you could be missing out on lots of relevant traffic.

Some basic SEO KPI’s:

1. Number of pages indexed – this allows you to understand how easy it has been for the search engines to read and index your content
2. Number of external links – this allows you to assess how popular your content has been as people are linking to it. It’s also a really important factor when it comes to gaining a high ranking in Google
3. The range of keywords driving traffic to your site – if you’re only being found for brand related terms then you could be missing out on a ton of traffic for keywords which relate to your products or services

If you’re providing multimedia content on your newsroom you should also look at the ranking of your assets on the search engines.

Use “link:www.yourdomain.com” within Google or Yahoo to assess link popularity, or site: www.yourdomain.com to analyse the number of pages indexed.  Tip: Yahoo is a bit more transparent when it comes to disclosing the actual volumes. 

4. Measure through Social Media

If you have prominent links/feeds from your social media channels within your newsroom, on a basic level you should be monitoring the number of people who ‘like’ you on Facebook and the number of followers you have on Twitter.

Another simple way to use social media is to incorporate Facebook “Like” and Twitter “Re-Tweet” buttons. They automatically count the number of interactions and will allow you to easily identify your most popular stories.

5. Access full engagement reports

Taking it a step further, an online newsroom combined with a communication management platform will provide you with much richer reporting. This powerful combination will track engagements, such as:

- Number of visits per release
- Number of interactions with each of your assets (e.g. watched video, downloaded a document)
- Number of media requests

In effect, it will allow you to understand the success of each of your releases and assets.

Adding login access to your newsroom will make you aware of each individual visitor, allowing you to track the success of your communications based on your key contacts.

6. Evaluate the impact in the media

Good monitoring and evaluation tools allow you to analyse your offline and online coverage and link it to each of your releases. As stated in the Barcelona Principles, “measuring the effect on outcomes is preferred to measuring outputs.”

Those tools can provide you with an in depth breakdown of those effects:

• Your coverage by release
• The tonality of your coverage per release (positive, neutral or negative)
• Evaluation of the coverage that is linked to your newsroom
• Share of voice amongst your competitors

Such a solution will let you understand the success of each of your stories and the impact that your newsroom has on your coverage.

These best practices should allow you to evaluate what has been popular and why so you can refine your future communications. You will also be able to demonstrate the newsroom’s overall success and Return on Investment.

Best Practice Online Newsroom Part I: Getting the Basics Right

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With an ever-changing media landscape and the rise of social media, the need to be able to react quickly is greater than ever before. Online newsrooms have become an essential tool to allow brands to better manage relationships with the media, key stakeholders, the general public and therefore the company’s reputation. Having developed newsrooms for a large number of leading brands, I would like to share some best practices I have identified over the last few years. These guidelines will help you to increase your visibility online and make sure that your newsroom becomes a valued source of information for your target audience.

1. Identify your key audiences

Your online newsroom must be able to cater for a varied audience.  Increasingly, newsrooms are accessed by journalists, stakeholders and consumers alike so you need to have content readily available for each audience member.

2. Branding

The look and feel of the newsroom is important and must be considered carefully. It needs to be authentic and consistent to your brand and your main company website, using the same layout, fonts and headers.

3. Make your newsroom visible

  • First of all, I highly recommend that the newsroom sits seamlessly within the main company website. Otherwise make sure that your company site has a clear link to your newsroom.
  • Publish multimedia content – adding images, videos and other documents will help SEO and transform your newsroom to a valued source of information.
  • Adding email, social media share and RSS feeds functionalities is good way to let your audience disseminate your stories and assets for you.
  • Tagging all of your newsworthy content with key words is a great way of increasing the visibility to search engines.

4. Fresh content

Update your newsroom regularly to make it sticky.  Refreshing your content frequently will generate regular visitors and help SEO.

5. Clearly laid out and easy to navigate

  • Include a simple and advanced search functionality to allow your audience to easily find the information they are looking for.
  • Classify your releases by date and by category (if relevant).
  • Provide high and low resolution images that are easily downloadable.
  • Supply embed codes for your videos.
  • Allow your audience to enter their email address to receive a newsletter about your latest news.

6. Relevance is key

It is essential to provide information that is relevant to your audience. You should then monitor the most popular stories and assets to refine your communications.

A good way to access more data while providing more relevant content is by giving your visitors the opportunity to create an online profile within your newsroom. During the registration process you can ask them to select their preferences. This will allow you to reach them with targeted emails and even tailor the information that they see within your newsroom (when logged in).

7. Keep the engagement high

  • Wherever possible, make sure your stories are visually stimulating by including images, videos and other digital assets.
  • Enable your audience to react to your stories by adding some “comment” boxes under your articles.
  • Include some social media feeds to allow your audience to access a larger source of your information.

8. Regain the control of your communications

I would strongly recommend using some sort of CMS (content management system) which lets you take control of updating the content on your media centre, without the help of any IT department.

Some more advanced tools can also allow you create, distribute and publish your stories all in one simple platform.

These tools are very valuable. They will help you to increase your reactivity, achieve higher quality reporting and significantly streamline your processes.

PR and corporate communications teams are required to be more and more accountable for their activities. A good online newsroom can allow them to measure and report on the impact of their communications in terms of online metrics and coverage.

This type of information enables them to refine and improve future communications.

The second part of this blog will outline how you can measure the success of your online newsroom.

The evolution of PR – operational complexity is here to stay

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In 2005, the UK’s largest PR firm, Bell Pottinger, published an excellent whitepaper on The Future of Public Relations, based on interviews with CEOs and Communications Directors from some of the UK’s biggest organisations.

It is worth looking back to see how – if at all – the issues and concerns of five years ago have been addressed and whether those issues will continue to dominate the PR landscape of the future.

PR needs radars rather than loud-hailers

One of the key themes of the original report was that public relations has become much more difficult at an operational level.  Five years on, those operational issues have only intensified and in the future, organisations can expect more of the same. The key drivers of this situation are unlikely to change either – smaller teams of people who will be tasked with managing more information and relationships with fewer resources.

In 2005, the view of senior communications directors was that PR practitioners were particularly alive to the notion that they must use “radars rather than loud-hailers” to communicate – the emphasis shifting from talking and transmitting to listening and receiving.

In the intervening years, new tools have been developed to overcome the challenge of listening to huge volumes of brand conversations in the public domain and to speedily and appropriately respond to them.  For example, the plethora of sentiment analysis tools currently flooding the market is indicative of the demand from organisations to better understand what people feel towards them. However, the promise of this technology has largely not met customer expectation. More specifically, there is much skepticism about whether technology can truly automate the process of analysing large volumes of content to produce an accurate picture of sentiment. Nevertheless, the demand remains – and surely a technological breakthrough in this area can’t be long off.

Who said what from where

But sentiment analysis is not the only area that will have a large part to play in the future of PR. As the original Bell Pottinger report pointed out: “New technology, the fragmentation of delivery through complex digital media channels, the problems of knowing who is saying what – and where they are getting it from – and the increased reputational risks created by speed and ease of access to public audiences, make it extremely difficult for Communications Directors to keep on top of what is “out there”.”

The biggest change from five years ago has been the incredible growth in social networks and the volume of content that organisations now need to monitor. What has clearly changed from five years ago is the increasing development of “digital listening posts” to help organisations deal with this. But even though specific tools and services have emerged to address individual aspects of the communications lifecycle (digital press release distribution, etc), the challenge today and over the next few years will be meeting the demand from organisations to smoothly integrate these currently disjointed activities.

Consistency of brand messaging

Another key challenge facing organisations then – and now – is how to achieve consistency of messaging across so many channels. As senior communications directors opined at the time “There is no longer the option of targeting one audience in isolation – the internet has put stakeholders in touch with each other and we face a much better networked set of stakeholders than ever before. Communications planning simply has to take this into account. At the same time, ‘shot-gun messaging’ is not an option; we face a growing need for ‘segmentation’ and tailoring of messaging if we want to achieve cut-through in the information age.”

And yet, if “shot-gun messaging” is not an option, why do so many organisations still employ this tactic?  This is surprising given that the technology to allow for the “narrowcasting” of information has definitely improved in the last five years.  In terms of the press specifically, the online pressroom technology of today is vastly superior to that of a decade ago. The ability to deliver quickly and cost effectively a wide variety of multimedia content in a targeted manner is available now. Whereas in the past this might have seemed a “nice to have” feature, this will surely become an essential part of any successful communications department in the future.

Technology has a key role to play

Finally, the view of senior communications directors in 2005 was that “Intelligence, intuition and research must be the key to tracking the chaotic and fragmented world of communications. This requires investment. Is this happening on any meaningful scale? Our view is that it is not.”

Anecdotally, things have improved in this area since 2005 – although whether they have reached a “meaningful scale” is a moot point.  The future of PR almost certainly involves greater investment in technology to help organisations gain greater insight into the feelings and behaviours of key stakeholder groups – as well as being able to respond to this intelligence with highly targeted and engaging content.

If anything has changed in five years, it is that a greater array of tools have become available to help PR and communications teams “read the world” and to help them more effectively communicate to all relevant stakeholders. Even if investment still hasn’t reached the “meaningful scale” referred to previously, the indications are – at least in this area – that things are moving in the right direction. Nevertheless, operational complexity is here to stay – those communications directors who will sleep easiest at night are those that are preparing to deal with those future scenarios today.

Sam

connect with me on Twitter @samphill

Engaged Listening

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While it’s vital to create good digital listening posts, there’s little point in knowing what’s going on if you don’t have the means to respond and engage effectively in the new landscape. I call this ‘Engaged Listening’.

engaged-listening-image

Market-leading companies are changing the way they communicate, putting far more effort into creating dynamic, discoverable content that is easy to digest and propagate. More about this in my up-coming ‘Newsroom of the Future’ post. In the meantime, here are some examples of companies putting out news in an engaging media-rich format:

Integrated platforms

There is a trend among leading bluechip companies towards integrated digital platforms. That is, integrating the content-creation tools into the listening tools. This allows everything to be measured and joined-up.

By consolidating content, publication, relationships and results into one Integrated Platform, it not only increases the efficiency of the team’s ability to listen and engage, it also uses measurement as an integral part of our day-to-day activity. Take this scenario;

An organisation responds to an insight by building and deploying some key content.  The content is then published and distributed through the same platform.   The organisation then uses the same platform to measure all parts of the engagement cycle, not just the end results.

An integrated digital listening platform will measure the number of emails read, images downloaded and links clicked on. In turn, this will get fed back into the CRM database so that we know what lights the fire of our key stakeholders and influencers. Coverage will similarly be linked back to the same database, giving us vital intelligence about interest areas. All of this increases the organisation’s intelligence and improves future targeting accuracy.

Centralised knowledge

Yes, it is possible to do this with separate tools. But separate tools create separate knowledge pools and most organisations now are working hard to centralise and share knowledge, ideas and creativity.

The explosion of data that we are all experiencing, while sometimes intoxicating, causes most of us organisational issues. What do we look at? What don’t we look at? We have to find ways of simplifying our data view and cutting out the chaff.

Large teams, often spread across different locations, also need central repositories where key content, relationships and intelligence can be housed in one place to ensure consistency of message, effective distribution of media assets and up-to-the-minute awareness of brand reputation.

Finally, all of this has to happen fast because the Engaged Web is constantly mutating and evolving. Joined up platforms create joined-up thinking that’s quicker than the step-by-step approach.

Sam