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Generative AI is everywhere now. You see it in content, campaigns, customer experiences, and even internal workflows. It promises speed, scale, and efficiency, but there’s a harder question sitting underneath all that progress; Do your audiences actually trust it?

Trust in the Age of AI: What Consumers Really Think About AI Generated Content

Today, PR teams aren’t just tracking media coverage and share of voice. They’re also measuring how their brand shows up in AI-generated answers, search summaries, and large language models (LLMs). This new LLM visibility layer is quickly becoming a critical part of PR performance.

15 Must-Have PR KPIs and How to Track Them

See how one platform can power every decision across PR, communications, and marketing.

The Meltwater Blog

Blog Topics: Generative Engine Optimization, Media Intelligence, Media Relations, Social Listening, Consumer Intelligence, Influencer Marketing

Find out how you can leverage Facebook to boost your brand's online presence and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

Facebook Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage Instagram to boost your brand's visual appeal and gain a competitive edge. Explore our category page today!

Instagram Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage LinkedIN to grow your professional network and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

LinkedIn Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage TikTok to elevate your brand with creative content and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

TikTok Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage X / Twitter to engage your audience effectively and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

X / Twitter Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage YouTube to create engaging video content and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

YouTube Blog | Meltwater

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is transforming how brands show up in AI-powered search. Explore insights, strategies, and best practices to help your content rank and resonate across conversational engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot.

Explore insights and strategies for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to help your brand stay visible and discoverable in AI-powered search.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Blog Collection | Meltwater

Every day billions of conversations take place on social media: tweets, posts, comments, blogs, reviews, podcasts, and much more.
Learn how to use social listening to make sense of all of that data.

On our social listening category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around social listening and social media monitoring. Read more.

Social Listening Blogs | Category

Business Reputation Management: What does it take to add reputation management to your marketing strategy? More importantly, how do you keep your reputation sparkly and shiny? Here’s your all-access guide to online reputation management for the long term.

On our reputation management category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around business reputation management. Read more.

Reputation Management Blogs | Category

From your brand's logo to your website, your social media presence to your customer support—these elements combined are what constitutes a brand in the minds of customers. But, there are thousands of other businesses that have a logo, website, social media presence, and website. So, how can you position your business on the market and make it stand out from the competition?
The key to success is branding & brand management!

On our brand management category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around brand management. Build your strategy and reach your goals!

Brand Management Blogs | Category

Competitive intelligence and the act of collecting competitive data can be seen as growth drivers for a company. Our guide will help you understand the concept of competitive intelligence (CI) by answering questions such as: What is the definition of competitive intelligence? How is competitive intelligence useful to organizations? What is the goal of competitive intelligence? And more.

On our competitive intelligence category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around competitive intelligence. Learn how to stay ahead.

Competitive Intelligence Blogs | Category

Let’s dive into the customer journey framework and how to optimize the process by creating a customer journey map and using metrics that matter when analyzing the customer journey.

On our customer journey category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around mapping and understanding the customer journey.

Customer Journey Blogs | Category

What Is Data Analytics? [Beginner’s Guide 2023]
How can I grow my business? 
How do customers interact with my newly launched product?
How do I increase the productivity of my employees?
How do I know if my marketing efforts are working?
We have just two words for you...Data analytics!

On our data analytics category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around AI and data analytics. Technical and still easy to understand.

AI & Data Analytics Blogs | Category

Public relations and media relations can add impact to any marketing strategy. It’s an opportunity for brands to grow their reach beyond traditional sales messages. PR helps to shape the image you want people to have of your brand.
So, what is PR and how do you use it? This guide shows you everything you need to know to build a strong public relations foundation.

On our public relations (PR) category page, you find all our blogs covering public relations and communications topics. Step up your PR game.

Public Relations (PR) Blogs | Category

We all know exactly what the roles of sales or accounting are in a company, right? We might even have a slight idea of what the IT guys are doing.
But there is another business discipline, that plays a crucial role in organizations, even more so during the pandemic – internal communications!
But what exactly do we mean by that, what purpose does it serve and what steps can you take to ensure you and your employees will communicate effectively?

On our internal communications category page, you find all our blogs about internal comms topics. Learn about the intranet, internal newsletters, and more.

Internal Communications Blogs | Category

As the internet has taken root in more areas of our lives — everything from entertainment to shopping to paying bills and more — traditional marketing is becoming less impactful. As any marketer knows, you need to focus on where your audience is if you want to reach them. Since the average person spends about seven hours a day online, it’s no surprise that content has maintained its hold on marketers.

Here's a closer look at what content marketing is and why it matters more than ever in our digital-first economy.

On our content marketing category page, you find blogs about content marketing topics. Learn about strategies, KPIs, tips, and more. Make your content king!

Content Marketing Blogs | Category

The rise of the influencer marketing space – today a $10 billion industry, growing 50% per year – is one of the clearest examples of how social media is transforming traditional marketing. These days having a business website, presence on social, PR coverage, and your own content isn’t enough to compete.
We'll dive into the intricacies of influencer marketing to help ensure that you're equipped with the insights needed to be successful in this space.

On our influencer marketing category page, you find blogs about influencer marketing topics. Build your strategy, find influencers, and measure results.

Influencer Marketing Blogs | Category

Have you just launched a new product or service that you want to get the word out about? Maybe you want to share with consumers why it is awesome and how it is so much better than the one your competitors offer.

Well, then, there is one thing you can't do without...Marketing!

On our marketing category page, you find blogs about marketing topics. Learn about all the different angles and types of marketing and improve your results.

Marketing Blogs | Category

In this guide, we want to give you a peek into the definition of social media management, the daily schedule of a social media manager, social media platforms to promote your business, and the do’s & don’ts of social media management.
Are you ready to begin the journey of becoming a social media superstar?

On our social media management category page, you find blogs about social media management topics. Build and manage your online community.

Social Media Management Blogs | Category

Building a following and using social media platforms to reach a wider audience requires a well-planned social media marketing strategy. In this guide, we’ll be looking at why social media marketing is so essential and how you can make it work for your business.

On our social media marketing category page, you find blogs about social media marketing topics. Learn how to get the highest paid social ROI!

Social Media Marketing Blogs | Category

In the fast-evolving realm of digital marketing and public relations, utilizing the right tools is crucial for success. Our interdisciplinary category showcases all the pertinent tools for digital marketing & PR. These tools help in enhancing your online presence and effectively reaching target groups, whether through reputation management, influencer marketing, or social media management.

On our digital marketing and PR tools category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around mapping and understanding the customer journey.

Digital Marketing & PR Tools Blogs | Category

More than two in three people on Earth are now online

It’s only been a few weeks since we published our flagship Digital 2024 Global Overview Report, but even in that short space of time, the world’s digital behaviours have continued to evolve.

The first three months of 2024 have seen a number of big digital milestones, and our huge new Digital 2024 April Global Statshot Report – published in partnership between We Are Social and Meltwater – reveals a wealth of impressive headlines and trends.

More than two-thirds of the world’s population now uses the internet

The overall time that the world spends consuming media has declined

There’s a lot of confusion about what “Gen Z” is really doing online

We may be starting to see a change in the world’s online priorities

Social media user growth continues, despite media misrepresentation

Connected experiences are moving to smaller screens

Video games are on the ascendant, gaining in popularity across all ages

Why marketers might want to take a fresh look at Yahoo!

That’s only a teaser of what that you’ll find in this quarter’s full report though, and this latest edition of our Global Digital Reports series is packed with loads more data, insights, and surprises.

We’ve also added a number of new charts and datasets this quarter, so it’s well worth exploring the full report to see what’s new.

Weighing in at 450 pages, this is by far our richest Global Digital Statshot Report yet, and that’s all thanks to the support and generosity of our wonderful data partners:

All of this analysis was written by a human, without the use of generative AI. We may use AI to help structure data and identify patterns, but we still rely entirely on human expertise to make sense of trends and implications.

Please note the following before you dive into this latest round of data:

GWI has revised the “Types of Websites and Apps Used” in its Core survey, which has had an impact on various values throughout our reports, including behaviours such as the use of search engines and banking apps. As part of the same update, GWI has also revised figures for this question for previous periods. As a result, change data contained in this quarter’s report will reflect “like-for-like” change, but note that values in associated timeline charts may not match those we published in previous reports.

Looking for a guided tour of this quarter’s top stories? This video unpacks 10 essential takeaways from this quarter’s report in just 10 minutes:

The complete Digital 2024 April Global Statshot Report

You’ll find this quarter’s complete report in the embed below (click here if that’s not working for you), but read on past that to explore my in-depth analysis of what all these numbers actually mean for you and your work.

The global state of digital in April 2024

Let’s begin with the latest headlines for digital adoption and use around the world [tip: feel free to copy-paste this section to create an easy social media post – just remember to tag us!]:

Data from the United Nations World Population Prospects shows that there are now 8.10 billion people living on Earth. The global population has increased by 74 million over the past year, resulting in annual population growth of 0.9 percent.

The number of unique mobile phone users sits at 5.65 billion, which means that 69.7 percent of the world’s total population now uses some kind of mobile handset. Unique mobile users grew by 2.4 percent over the past 12 months, thanks to an additional 133 million new users.

Internet users have climbed to 5.44 billion, with 178 million new users over the past year taking the global internet penetration rate to 67.1 percent. As we’ll explore in more detail below, this means that more than 2 in 3 people on Earth are now online. Internet user numbers continue to grow too, with the latest figures pointing to a year-on-year increase of 3.4 percent.

Kepios analysis shows that active social media use continues to grow as well, with platforms adding more than a quarter of a billion new unique user identities since this time last year. The global user total reached 5.07 billion by the start of April 2024, with this figure 5.4 percent higher than the total we saw in April 2023.

But beyond impressive headlines and tasty trivia, what do this quarter’s numbers tell us about how people’s digital behaviours are changing and evolving?

Let’s get nerdy, and go deeper into the numbers…

Kepios’s analysis of the latest data shows that internet users have reached “supermajority” status, with more than two in three people on Earth now online.

Data from a variety of reputable sources including the ITU, GSMA Intelligence, and Eurostat indicate that the number of people using connected technologies reached 5.44 billion at the start of April 2024, which equates to 67.1 percent of the world’s total population.

That global user total has increased by 178 million since this time last year, delivering annual growth of 3.4 percent.

If we take the advent of the web as the start of the internet as we know it today, it’s taken just under 33 years for internet users to reach this important milestone.

For perspective, barely 1 in every 1,000 people on Earth used connected tech when Tim Berners-Lee published the first website on 06 August 1991, when the erstwhile internet user base sat somewhere between 5 and 6 million.

User figures have mushroomed by a factor of almost 1,000 since then though, and at current growth rates, it would only take about 12 days for the world to add the equivalent of every one of those pre-web internet users.

India accounted for more than a third of the global increase in internet users over the past 12 months, with research published by Kantar and IAMAI pointing to an increase of more than 60 million new users since early 2023.

India’s internet population has grown by more than 7 percent over the past year, accelerating a trend that we explored in some detail in a recent deep-dive article.

Meanwhile, China added 27 million new internet users over the past year, Pakistan 24 million, and Indonesia a further 16 million.

In relative terms, Pakistan saw the fastest growth in internet users over the past 12 months, with the country’s connected population increasing by 27 percent year on year.

However, the country’s internet penetration rate still lags the global average, and despite these recent gains, less than half of Pakistan’s population is online today.

At the other end of the spectrum, 11 countries now report internet adoption rates in excess of 99 percent, while a total of 63 countries report internet adoption levels beyond 90 percent.

If you’d like to know more about internet connectivity at a local country level, our Digital 2024 reports are an excellent place to start – click here to learn more.

But despite today’s impressive figures, we’re still a long way from reaching the United Nations’ stated goal of “universal connectivity”, and Kepios’s analysis indicates that more than 2.66 billion people remain offline in April 2024.

In better news, we’ve seen promising gains in internet adoption across some of the least connected countries over recent months, with both Mozambique and Uganda registering double-digital annual gains.

However, internet adoption still languishes below 25 percent in a total of 12 countries, and the internet – at least as the rest of the world knows it – remains entirely blocked for everyday citizens in North Korea.

As part of our Digital 2024 “Deep Dives” in January, we published a comprehensive study of the various barriers to improving internet access, exploring topics such as:

If you’d like to learn more about these issues, I’d strongly urge you to read my complete analysis, together with some recommendations for further reading that you’ll find at the bottom of that linked article.

However, it’s worth highlighting here that low levels of internet use often coincide with more fundamental challenges, such as limited access to electricity and everyday life essentials such as drinking water and basic sanitation.

For related reasons, levels of internet use are still considerably lower in rural areas than they are in urban centres.

Indeed, Kepios analysis suggests that roughly 4 in 5 people living in towns and cities now use the internet, but – at a worldwide level – less than half of the people living in rural areas are online today.

Meanwhile, a stubborn digital gender divide also persists in many parts of the world, and – at a worldwide level – internet adoption amongst men is still 5.4 percentage points higher than it is for women (69.8 percent vs. 64.4 percent, respectively).

However, local divides are often considerably wider than these global figures suggest, especially across the Global South.

For example, our analysis of the latest social media data indicates that nearly twice as many men as women may use the internet across Southern Asia today.

With more than two-thirds of the world now online, it’s worth comparing the use of connected tech with that other great medium of our age: television.

Data from Statista indicates that “conventional” television – i.e. TV content that isn’t delivered via the internet – currently enjoys a global penetration rate of 68.1 percent, which equates to roughly 5.52 billion global TV viewers.

Comparing this penetration rate with the latest figures from GSMA Intelligence reveals that there are already more mobile users than there are TV viewers around the world, which suggests that mobile phones are now the most used devices on the planet.

However, data from Ericsson suggests that 1.1 billion of the 8.3 billion mobile handsets in use today are still “feature” phones (12.8 percent), which helps to explain why internet use still lags the global TV penetration rate by one percentage point.

However, the reach of “conventional” TV is only increasing by fractions of a percentage point each year, while internet penetration has grown by 3.4 percent over the past 12 months.

And as a result, if internet users continue to grow at their current rate, we should see internet penetration surpass that of broadcast TV sometime in the first half of next year.

The latest wave of research from GWI suggests that the world spent less time consuming media in the final three months of 2023 than it did during the same period the year before.

Particularly worthy of note is the fact that the amount of time people spend watching TV has fallen by a further 4 minutes per day over the past year, extending the declines that I detailed in my January analysis.

However, GWI’s research identified a decline across almost all mass media over the past 12 months, with internet use the only media activity to escape an annual drop.

Digital 2024 April Global Statshot Report Analysis

You’re not imagining it — technology is evolving faster than ever. To keep up with rapidly changing advancements in tech, listening to tech podcasts can help you stay in the know.

Technology podcasts give you bite-sized glimpses into the latest tech news and innovation. Whether you’re a tech enthusiast or thinking of pursuing your own startup, listening to podcasts is a great way to gain thought-provoking insight into the state of the industry.

We’ve rounded up the 19 best technology podcasts you should be listening to in 2025. Add them to your playlist and start learning:

The Internet of Things Podcast (IoT Podcast)

This roundtable discussion podcast covers the week’s biggest technology stories. Hear directly from industry experts as they discuss all things tech, including AI, social media, industry forecasts, global trends, politics, and new policies that could affect the future of tech.

TWiT is arguably one of the most successful podcasts of its kind, with more than 928 podcast episodes and counting. New episodes are released every Sunday.

For crypto fans everywhere, there’s the Stacks podcast.

Perfect for those who are curious about crypto or have already gone all-in, this podcast breaks down this somewhat-mysterious decentralized technology.

Learn how the most savvy investors are making money with Bitcoin, NFTs, and altcoins. Host Luke Martin invites experts from around the world to discuss blockchains, crypto trading, and other trends.

Consumer technology always has the power to inspire, surprise, and change our day-to-day lives as we know it. To learn more about the latest gadgets, there’s the Waveform tech podcast.

This niche podcast started as a YouTube channel featuring reviews of everything from smartphones to headsets to electric cars. The podcast continues with deep-dive episodes on a variety of consumer tech products, focusing on their features, costs, how they work, and whether they’re worth the money.

Explore the world of connected devices, smart homes, and the Internet of Things.

From consumer products like smart displays and thermostats to industrial-level IoT, a connected life is the future for all of us. This podcast goes into great detail about current IoT news, analysis, products, and predictions for the future.

Apple iOS has captured more than half of the mobile market share.

To see why, listen no further than the CultCast podcast that covers all things Apple. From Apple news to rumors to the latest product developments, listeners can take an audio deep-dive into one of the world’s most illustrious brands. In true podcast fashion, there’s also plenty of speculation and a little humor involved.

Pacemakers, the Slinky, Play-Doh, super glue, chocolate chip cookies — some of the best things in life were made by accident. This podcast is no different.

Join three software developers as they discuss the latest news, developments, and trends in the tech industry, with a focus on Apple-related products.

The internet is constantly expanding. It holds the world’s secrets and the largest collection of knowledge. To create a podcast around such a massive entity is quite an undertaking, but Gimlet’s Alex Goldman and Emmanuel Dzotsi were up to the task.

This uniquely original podcast explores internet culture and technology via interesting stories and interviews. Revel in everything from weird Wikipedia pages to stolen art to communities of chicken lovers. The show has announced some changes coming in June 2023, but you can still enjoy a backlog of more than 200 episodes.

There’s a life hack for everything these days. Sharing shortcuts to common tasks became a digital sensation some years ago and continues to be a core topic for content creators.

The Upgrade by Lifehacker turns this trend into an audio podcast by providing tips, tricks, and advice to improve your life. Technology is a big part of “life hacking,” and you might just stumble upon a game-changing piece of tech that you’d never think to Google yourself.

Another fan favorite focused on all things Apple, The Talk Show with John Gruber features deep-dive conversations about the brand’s technology.

This top tech podcast features no shortage of guest appearances, covering everything from apps to movies to emojis and more, all of which somehow tie back to Apple. With the rise of generative AI, Apple’s rumored AR headset, and revelations about Apple security, there’s plenty more to talk about.

So many opinions, not enough time — the Clockwise podcast format puts this struggle to bed with a rapid-fire round table in less than 30 minutes.

Its compressed yet in-depth format makes this one of the top tech podcasts. Co-hosts Dan Moran and Mikah Sargent are joined by two tech industry experts on each episode, where they each speak about four tech-related topics. The strict time limit keeps the conversation focused and full of valuable takeaways.

Social media has become a dominant force in its own category, but it remains an essential piece of the larger tech umbrella.

That’s why The Content Mines focuses exclusively on the social media side of tech. Social media (especially up-and-coming networks like TikTok) influence innovation in technology. Hear everything from the top trending Tweets, the hottest TikTok trends and dances, ever-changing influencer trends, and the go-to channels for marketing.

The 19 Best Tech Podcasts You Should Be Listening To In 2025

Wondering where to start when it comes to getting your digital transformation strategy off the ground? Well, you’re not alone. A recent study by IDC found that by 2023, digital transformation spending will grow to more than 50% of all ICT investment (from 36% today); this is the largest growth in data intelligence and analytics to date.

While digital transformation offers a wide range of advantages, which we’ll cover, it’s not the simplest of concepts to get your head around. So to help answer some of your questions, this article will discuss the ‘what, why and how’ of a transformation strategy framework.

Why launch a digital transformation strategy?

Digital transformation refers to the reinvention of business operations by drawing maximum benefit from technology. By integrating new technologies, companies aim to solve traditional enterprise problems or create new and optimised processes to help them evolve into a more competitive organisation.

There is a strong correlation between companies who are making significant inroads with their digital transformation strategy and how successful they become. A study by Gartner found that 56% of CEOs have seen improved profits after carrying out digital improvements. Beyond profits, digital transformation advantages also include:

1. Improved customer experience
2. Cost reductions
3. Consolidated operations
4. Improved decision making through enhanced analytics and technology
5. Improved productivity
6. Minimalising risks

Digital Transformation Strategy Goals & Priorities

The term ‘digital transformation’ is extremely broad and encompasses a range of different initiatives and components. While no two digital transformation strategies are the same, one similarity they often share is their goal. Common strategic priorities that digital transformation aims to achieve include: Optimised customer experiences, reduced costs by increasing efficiencies, improved insights, connecting the dots by consolidating data vendors, increasing agility, optimising internal communication. We'll cover each of the priorities in more detail below.

Creating a Digital Transformation Roadmap

Turning digital is not a solution in itself, strategy drives digital transformation, not technology. Roadmaps help executives plan and coordinate digital-first strategies and the capabilities that make delivering innovations possible. Without a roadmap, executives are at risk of buying tech with no clear understanding of their role in driving digital transformation priorities and outcomes. Ensure your company is equipped to drive change throughout the organisation and read our digital transformation strategy roadmap tips below.

A digital transformation roadmap will help you define and manage your business model transformation efforts in a coordinated and effective way. The roadmap starts by assessing your organisation’s digital maturity today and moves on to your future vision. Only then can you identify opportunity and threat gaps that need to be optimised with the support of innovation. Finally, the road map details what you're going to do to plug those gaps and how you're going to measure if you've been successful.

When developing a digital transformation framework, it’s best practice to avoid focusing on individual technologies and instead develop your strategies through the lens of transforming the enterprise. This requires you to take a step back and asses your current situation, which brings us to the first step...

1. Conduct a digital capability assessment

To understand where you need to transform you first need to assess and benchmark where you currently are. Start your ‘state of digital’ assessment by evaluating your current processes and the pain points that go with them. When it comes to pain points, research what they look like for the rest of your industry too. Benchmarking against your competitors is vital, especially in the age of rapid innovation. Say, for example, your digital transformation efforts aim to reduce processing time from 20 minutes to 10 minutes, but your competitors are doing it in 5 minutes, it won’t take long for you to fall behind the industry standard and become irrelevant.

Keeping your pain points in mind, now ask yourself

1. How are we going to design for innovation, optimisation, agility and scale?
2. Does our current digital infrastructure (software, apps, tools etc) address our future needs?
3. What role will our solution partner/s play in helping us successfully move forward?
4. Does the organisation have the required skillset to overcome the challenges through digitalisation?
5. Is the company culture ready, and more importantly, willing to adapt to change?

Once you’ve established the pain point/s you want to tackle, you then need to decide on the tech you’re going to implement to resolve it. If you’re struggling with where to start, Digitalist Magazine found 50% of companies view data/ analytics as the prime technology enabling change. This is closely followed by the internet of things (42%) and artificial intelligence and machine learning (40%).

Using insights from your current state of digital assessment, make a clear statement around how you’re going to plug the gaps you’ve identified. Start by articulating a vision, keep it simple and aligned with your overall company vision.

Successful visions almost always include priorities (what), outcomes (why), relevant KPIs (how) and hold certain people/ teams accountable (whom).

If your organisation fails to see the importance of your vision, they won’t buy into it or act upon it. Your vision is best communicated by change evangelists. When sharing the vision, have your change evangelists concentrate on both the bigger and smaller pictures, framing discussions in terms of how change impacts the overall business goals, as well as employee’s day to days. This will increase the chances of your vision resonating.

By setting goals and objectives, you're less likely to digitalise aimlessly. When setting yours, make sure they’re focused on improving the overall business, instead of individual processes.

While there's no one-size-fits-all approach to transforming, the end goals of the initiatives tend to centre on the below:

In order to survive this increasingly competitive business environment, companies must create customer-centric strategies. Enterprises that focus on transforming the customer experience by modernising customer touchpoints and customer-facing strategies benefit from hyper-personalisation, increased brand relevancy, and agility. Ultimately, by shifting focus and paying attention to what customers want, they’ll improve client acquisition and retention while simultaneously reducing spend and foster a competitive advantage by doing so.

By creating a business transformation framework that focuses on optimising business technology and operations, for example shunning manual interventions in favour of tech that can automate tasks and projects for them, executives can better evaluate processes and identify problems further in advance. This often leads to cost-per-transaction savings. Moreover, efficiency speeds up process flows and leads to a much leaner organisation.

One of the greatest competitive advantages of digitalising processes and frameworks is improving your ability to track and analyse data. By leveraging advanced technologies like machine learning, data mining and statistics, a company is better able to predict what is likely to happen next. This insight is commonly applied to solve a business problem, unveil new opportunities, or to forecast the future. Members of the c-suite who leverage such insights to make data-led corporate decisions minimise risk, reduce costs and improve revenue.

Connecting the dots by consolidating data vendors

While data innovation brings about access to more business-critical insights than ever before, it has also made the landscape increasingly difficult for management to navigate. Navigating this noisy data landscape is difficult when data sources are scattered and do not integrate with each other. This has led to major strategic decisions being made based on fragmented data sources, resulting in poor alignment and reduced comparability of data. To overcome this data fatigue, enterprises are beginning to transform how data is collected, analysed and stored via consolidation strategies. By doing so, their aim is to introduce cost-effective procurement processes, streamline business workflows and increase robust decision making.

Sustainable market leadership stems from having the ability to quickly spot, adapt, and react rapidly. This can be in light of a threat or an opportunity. Either way, businesses that fail to be agile and meet the demands of their industry environment will struggle to survive. Staying ready for ‘the next big thing’ is crucial, as is being proactive. While we’re not superhuman and we can’t have our eyes on everything all of the time – technology can. It’s worth bearing in mind that it can also hinder agility if it’s outdated. With that being said, we’re seeing more and more enterprises creating digital transformation strategies to eliminate slow legacy IT systems in favour of more nimble and responsive stacks that are better able to keep up with market trends and demands.

As the saying goes, “no man is an island”, yet we still see many divisions in companies act that way. Certain types of digitalisation fuel internal collaboration, something that’s needed to ensure all employees are aligned and working towards the same end goals. Employee engagement is a hot topic right now, and rightfully so. By optimising communication, employees can learn from their peers. Reducing siloed working also helps processes flow more effectively as workforces become more productive, systematic and consistent. As a result, organisations become more efficient.

Your digital transformation roadmap should include short, medium and long-term goals since transformation must be viewed as being continuous. You’ll find the timeframe for transformation objectives are typically longer than your average functional objectives as they’re formed from long-term visions. To ensure your SMART objectives are achievable and realistic, they need to be adaptive and approached with agile execution.

In terms of metrics, Gartner suggests selecting 5-9 metrics to track, report and act on. Gartner also states the best metrics have a clearly defined and defensible causal relationship to a business outcome, focus on a defined audience, can be understood by a non-IT audience, and drive action.

When it comes to introducing new workflows that change how a business and its employees operate, stakeholder buy-in is crucial. There are many barriers to digitalisation (which we'll explore in a little while), but poor communication is one of the biggest.

Don’t underestimate the power of storytelling. This is becoming a popular means of gaining employee buy-in. Moreover, don’t overlook the importance of giving employees a voice. Their feedback is fundamental since they’re the ones most likely working with the processes you’re trying to change. Giving them a voice can help break down rigid company structural hierarchies and also open up innovative thinking.

You'll find implementation will fail if you purely focus on technologies without investing in the organisation's ability to ensure impact. Digitalisation isn’t just about tech, it’s about people, processes and infrastructure. Training must take place prior to executing changes, especially if there’s a skills gap. This will also help foster cultures that are receptive to change. Depending on the type of transformation, you may decide to launch the change all at once or introduce it gradually. Either way, create a detailed timeline and continuously communicate this with the organisation.

Partnering with expert consultants and service providers can help with technical aspects of the installations and can guide you on best practice. In fact, research has found that 88% of firms are using third-party providers for at least one component of their digital transformation efforts. How much support you’re getting from your technology partners should be considered prior to bringing them on board.

Business transformation is a journey, not the destination. As such, it should be seen as a continuous learning process, one that’s progress needs to be regularly measured. Digital transformation measurement should be part of the planning process, considered well before implementation. Since transformation involves a company stepping into unknown territory, you’ll most likely find holes in the framework that need to be patched up – and that’s ok! Transformation doesn’t happen overnight; the important thing is that you’re starting. Only then can you benefit from a competitive advantage.

Overcoming Common Digital Transformation Barriers

While digital transformation is a strategic focus shared by many organisations, the c-suite sometimes struggling to implement changes and evolve. In fact, Forbes reports 84% of businesses who engage in digitalisation end up failing to make their efforts a success. At Meltwater, we frequently have conversations with executives trying to get their head around the new digital economy and digital transformation barriers preventing their success. In light of this, we’ve included top transformation barriers and suggested solutions to overcome them. Be mindful of the common barriers when starting the rollout of your transformation initiatives so you can put plans in place to eliminate them.

It’s widely known that people don’t like change, we also see this is the case for some industries more so than others. Resistance stems from various roots, with reasons spanning difficulties justifying transformation, competing revenue sources, fear of job loss/ change in job role etc. Getting to the bottom of why there’s resistance is important as only then can you truly tackle it. Bear in mind that each stakeholder has their own priorities, therefore the resistance reasoning may vary depending on who you speak with.

Suggested solution – focus on culture:
Don’t underestimate the power of company culture since culture greatly impacts how employees act towards change.

Aim to build a small group of evangelists within your organisation rather than starting with mass adoption. Focus on developing a team of executives who lead by example, take a “digital first” approach, and have an open-mind and entrepreneurial spirit. Have those evangelists drive peer advocacy and set out to dispel digitalisation myths within the wider organisations. Encourage them to practice personal mastery so they're mindful of the impact their patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving have on the people and situations that surround them. For example, it’s foolish to believe investing in technology means you’re transforming your company. In order to truly transform, technology needs to be supported by a workforce who are willing and able to create change. This is up to both the company’s peer advocates, as well as their technology partners to drive.

Since personal mastery revolves around the idea that leadership starts with ‘you’, it encourages a sense of responsibility and accountability amongst your advocates. Hopefully this will trickle down into the general work force and create a company culture that’s agile, adaptable and also open to change.

It’s not uncommon for digital transformation projects to fail due to poor communication, lack of vision, and vague objectives. Keeping your communication line open is critical. Research by McKinsey shows companies are between 8 and 12 times more likely to succeed with business transformation when good communication is apparent.

If you’re not honest about progress, outcomes and impact so that stakeholders know where they stand, employees are likely to stand against you and not with you. It’s important for everybody who is involved to be addressed and just as important for them to feel heard too.

Suggested solution – keep all stakeholders updated at every stage

In order for your digital transformation strategy to be a success, there needs to be clear direction from management. Explain the current state of the digital economy, the smaller picture (how the transformation will impact them in their day to day) and the bigger picture (how this will help the company in relation to the competition). When communicating your vision, start from the business model or the customer experience instead of starting from an inward goal such as digitising legacy operating processes.

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