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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

Digital footprints left behind on social are a hot topic of today. We’ve all heard horror stories about employers following our digital breadcrumbs to find out about the ‘real you’. While many wish for “world peace” on their job applications, photos of an applicant dancing on the bar looking more than worse for wear can communicate a different story. 

But is this the only impact social listening has had on HR?

Social Listening Offers Profiling Opportunities

Social Listening Facilitates Head Hunting

Social Listening Facilitates Employer Branding

Social Listening to Keep an Eye on Competition

When crafted appropriately, a candidate’s online presence can work in their favour. The HR departments are able to gain a more informed impression of a candidate before the interview stage, thus helping with the screening process. For the candidate, social listening and media monitoring provide customer profiling opportunities. For example, companies will be able to see if a candidate has shared industry news, engaged with industry influencers, or published blogs to demonstrate their enthusiasm and knowledge.

Social listening and media monitoring also deliver the added benefit of finding talent for a company. If we set up a keyword search for ‘graduates’, as an example, we can then discover new and fresh talent before our competitors in the industry. The early bird catches the worm, right? Inga Boesecke, Meltwater HR Director Europe explains, “Social listening and engagement allows us to identify potential recruits who are seeking employment but perhaps haven’t considered or heard of Meltwater. We are then able to connect with them directly and give real insight into Meltwater as an employer of choice”.

Now we come to the other side of the coin: not only do companies expect to see more of a candidate, candidates also expect to see more of a company. Social media offers a good opportunity for HR to increase employer branding. Online profiles can show how fun, challenging, and inspiring it is to work for a brand, as well as offering employees the chance to have their voices heard as advocates. By running a keyword such on a brand's name we are able to see both negative and positive comments from employees, thus helping to manage brand reputation. Check out our Meltwater recruitment video on Youtube!

Social listening and online media monitoring have also changed the way companies can keep an eye on the competition through competitor monitoring. A well-established social listening and media monitoring search can help an organisation keep ahead of the curve on developments in the industry and in particular the big players within it. Nowadays we can find all vacancies adverts online; a quick search on a competitor enables us to see:

Where our competitors are recruiting. 
This gives a good indication of their expansion plans

Roles our competitors are recruiting for. 
If we know they are recruiting for a number of R&D jobs we then know new product development is on the way so that we can prepare for this and adapt our strategy accordingly

Hopefully, by now you have a better understanding of how social listening can be used outside of the PR and marketing department. 

4 Ways Social Listening has Influenced HR

If you’re like me you’ve noticed your social media feeds are flooded with #MeToo statements, stories, and voices. While it’s sad to think of the number of women who have been impacted by sexual violence, it’s also empowering to know that so many feel brave enough to share their voice via #MeToo. Sexual harassment and assault has been placed front and centre from both female and male perspectives, in essence encompassing a Me too-You too-We too-She too-He too dialogue. If anything positive came out of the Harvey Weinstein floodgates it’s that more people than ever are taking to social platforms to shine a light on sexual harassment and assault. Let’s dig into the social data of these #MeToo voices to see a more in-depth picture of its impact.

First, let’s look at the timeline of the #MeToo campaign using the Meltwater media intelligence platform. On Sunday, October 15 at 12 pm there were 295 mentions of #MeToo on Twitter and at 10 pm there were over 83k mentions.

Tarana Burke, an activist, creator of Just Be Inc., and sexual assault survivor has been empowering young women through ‘Me Too’ since 2007. Tarana’s efforts for awareness were brought to the forefront when celebrities joined what Tarana has been saying for years. On Sunday, Alyssa Milano advocated for awareness and unity for those who have been victimized by sexual harassment and assault by urging her followers to reply to her tweet with ‘Me Too’ if they had ever been sexually violated or harassed. Her tweet originated at 4:21 PM on Sunday, October 15 and as of Tuesday morning, her tweet had received over 22k retweets and 60k replies.

Below is a look at the life of this particular tweet. To better understand the tweet life metrics let me briefly explain how these work and what knowledge we can gather from this type of metric. The half-life metric shows the virality of the tweet. It allows us to see the elapsed time between the original tweet and the retweet that represents the middle-point of the total spread. Keep in mind that the maximum number of retweets analyzed is 1k. Of the 1k retweets sampled we can look at the time that passed between the original tweet and it’s 500th retweet, giving us the half-life results. Using Milano’s tweet, the 500th retweet came almost 11.5 hours after the original tweet. The 80% life, which is the 800th retweet came 1 day after the original was post.

Another important metric of the tweet life is max depth, it helps you understand where the majority of the retweets originated and what their impact is. You can see if a retweet was from your follower, or by followers of your followers and so forth. The depth levels increase when a retweet comes from someone outside of the retweeters’ network. Milano’s particular tweet has a max depth of 5, meaning that at some point during the tweet life this tweet reached 5 levels, showing that the tweet had a high impact.

Alyssa Milano’s tweet garnered even more awareness from actresses in Hollywood including Lady Gaga and Reese Witherspoon. Through social data you can see the shift that Milano and others had hoped for, people were using social media as a way to unmask what so many women carry day-to-day. The #MeToo conversation allowed them to have a voice that focused on them without any distractions or having to go into detail.

It’s also important to see that the voices of #MeToo are global. While 56% of the conversation is being driven from the US, it’s also being discussed in places like South Africa, India, and Mexico.

Additionally, it’s not just women talking about it either, men are chiming in on their experiences as well and offering support. Using the Meltwater media intelligence solution we can see that between October 11-17 there has been 1.2M mentions of #MeToo by 950k users. When considering the number of mentions we can see that roughly 70% of the people talking about #MeToo are women, which means the other 30% of the mentions are coming from men.

Below are some tweets from men discussing sexual violence and raising awareness as well.

Jensen Ackles on Twitter: "For my wife, for my daughters, for all women...I stand with all of you.  This has gotta change.  #metoo #nomore"

HeForShe on Twitter: "Now more than ever, we need #HeForShe men to step up. #MeToo… "

The conversation has a fierce start on social platforms, but where does it go from here? Taking a sensitive, yet relevant topic and looking at it through the lens of social data allows us to keenly see what is unfolding inside and outside of the hashtag. These two small, but mighty words- ‘Me Too’- are holding the weight and carrying the voice of many. May the momentum continue.

#MeToo – How One Tweet Inspired a Movement

Everyone wants advice and insight on overcoming life's biggest challenges. Successful business leaders are often at the top of the list of trustworthy thinkers who are successfully navigating tough problems and coming out on top. Today's most influential futurists, analysts, and forecasters are shaping minds on social media by drawing from their own experience. Follow them and learn from them. Once you've gotten the hang of how they do it, the next step is to harness your own brand's internal knowledge base and define your business as a mover and shaker with a finger on the pulse. To get started, read our ebook on social media for executives, our essential guide to working with influencers, and finally the ins and outs of trendspotting.

These days tweets and Instagram posts are a dime a dozen. All it takes is a few strokes of the keyboard for aspiring influencers (and self-proclaimed futurists, analysts, and forecasters) to share their latest hot take on a variety of subjects.

It seems that the more content that people share, the more important it becomes to seek out those that cut through the noise. Influencers that rely on a combination of facts, data, and intuition to elevate their content are a breath of fresh air in what can otherwise be a crowded online community.

That’s exactly why we scoured social media to find the very best industry analysts, economists, forecasters, and brands that are shaping the way we think.

These influential futurists are worth a follow.

The Most Influential Futurists, Analysts, and Forecasters on Social Media

One individual futurist that has become somewhat of a legend on Twitter is Naval.

Naval Ravikant is the CEO and co-founder of AngelList and has invested in more than 100 companies, including Uber, Twitter, Yammer, and many others. He’s a deep thinker and offers counterintuitive perspectives to many of life’s biggest challenges such as happiness, wealth, and careers. 

Naval on Twitter: "How to Get Rich (without getting lucky):"

What makes Naval’s content so unique is that he’s able to connect seemingly unrelated topics and turn them into actionable advice. That advice is straightforward and simple, yet incredibly insightful.

Reading Naval’s content is a great reminder to all of us that it doesn’t take complicated messaging or marketing hacks to inspire action.

A former member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, Betsy Stevenson is a must-follow futurist focused on shedding light on complex economic issues. From affordable housing to the health of the U.S. workforce, Stevenson uses social media as a platform to voice change. 

Betsey Stevenson on Twitter: "There are two ways to look at employment growth--from the employer survey and the household survey. The employer survey gives a more accurate read, but it's still worthwhile to look at the household survey and it shows that employment has grown by only 64K since January. [1/3]"

What makes Stevenson’s message so powerful is that she strategically blends the objective (facts, data, and research) with the subjects (strong narrative). 

Data-backed storytelling plays a pivotal role in triggering an emotional and intellectual pulse that captures your audience’s attention and keeps them coming back for more.

James Clear is an American author, entrepreneur, and photographer who writes about habits and human potential. As his website states, the central question he’s trying to answer through his work is, “How can we live better?“

What makes James such an intriguing futurist is his focus on the individual person and their potential impact. He believes that the best way to change the world is in concentric circles—starting with yourself and work your way out from there.

James Clear on Twitter: "If you want to be in the top 1% of a particular domain, then you can’t take your cues from and follow the social norms of 99% of people.

This is harder than it sounds. We are wired to imitate. The further you want to climb, the more carefully you need to construct your tribe."

Similar to other top influencers, James’ message is relatable and easily understood (there’s that theme again). The more difficult a problem is to solve the more important it is to break it down into simple, easily explainable terms.

As Leonardo da Vinci once said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

Now let’s switch our focus to some of social media’s most influential companies and how even brand accounts can help enact positive change.

Storytelling is a superpower that can be harnessed by companies and brands to shape the future.

The team at First Round have mastered the art of storytelling and it is reflected in the quality of their content and the more than 200,000 people that follow them on social media.

First Round on Twitter: ""Inflection points are just sustained implementation of a very reasonable thing. Often, the role of the great leader is not to come up with a brilliant strategy, but to convince people to stay the course with a very basic strategy." — @stripe's @Lethain

https://t.co/2E8aoUS3ox… https://t.co/YqXzlRq45f"

Great storytelling is about taking a piece of the human condition (so things like birth, growth, emotionality, aspiration, conflict) and conveying it in a unique situation. Acclaimed Pixar director Pete Docter puts it perfectly:

“What you’re trying to do, when you tell a story, is to write about an event in your life that made you feel some particular way. And what you’re trying to do, when you tell a story, is to get the audience to have that same feeling.”

First Round leverages stories from their community to impact the journey of current and future entrepreneurs.

A brand would have a tough time being classified as a “futurist” if they didn’t embrace technology of the future to share their message with the world. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) leverages YouTube to create content centred around educating an audience of more than 35,000.

But what truly makes a16z a must-follow futurist brand on social media is their PR and content marketing strategy.

Avoiding the generic, their team covers heavy topics like artificial intelligence, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, machine learning, and lots more.

AI: What's Working, What's Not

 The Andreessen Horowitz team understands that you don’t need to convince everyone to subscribe to your content to be successful—all you really need is a small, dedicated group of individuals.

Many venture capital firms follow more or less the same power law of returns investment strategy. Whether this strategy entails investing in a certain geography, demographic, or trend, differentiation between VCs is hard to come by. 

However, Sequoia Capital is bucking that trend and making a name for themselves by developing thought leadership in a future led by entrepreneurs. They are able to accomplish this by publishing a world-class weekly newsletter called Seven Questions.

While many brands stick to traditional websites and social media channels to distribute their content online, Sequoia Capital is building an owned media outlet that allows them to control the results.

The Seven Questions content strategy is simple: hard-won advice to founders.

As any great futurist knows, solutions to life’s most difficult problems do not come easy. But the more we can learn from those that have gone before us, the better we can position ourselves for success in the future.

You can’t predict the future without first studying the past and Sequoia understands that better than most brands.

3 Takeaways from the Most Influential Futurists, Analysts, and Forecasters

Before we go, we wanted to leave you with three key concepts from these social influencers and what makes them so successful:

Persuading a large group of people to adopt a new idea often requires breaking down complex topics into easily digestible themes and concepts. The simpler the better.

Individual people can make a big impact by aligning with other individual people. Those individuals slowly form a group and eventually a large community.

Life’s most difficult challenges are not easily overcome. Solving these challenges takes patience and persistence as well as the dissemination of relevant and useful information to an engaged audience. 

The untapped expertise at your company could be a social media gold mine when harnessed the right way. Chances are your executives are keeping track of industry trends and the social zeitgeist. Are they ready to take the plunge and position themselves—and your brand—as forward thinkers who are defining their market? Read our ebook on social media for executives, as well as our essential guide to working with influencers and learn the latest best practices on expanding your audience on social media by sharing your company’s thought leadership.

Influential Futurists, Analysts, and Forecasters to Follow

We’ve all been in either one of these scenarios:

1. You come across a movie trailer that caught your attention… until you saw that it was rated 30% on Rotten Tomatoes along with many negative reviews. Nah, not worth it, you thought.

2. You are searching online for accommodation for your vacation in Bali and come across a listing with great pictures. You scroll down to the review section and read that they have low hygiene standards. Nope, you close that tab and continue your search.

These experiences are not uncommon, and they both demonstrate how detrimental a single user review can be in diminishing the credibility of a brand or product. A single review can change the minds of consumers even if the Marketing team has done a good job with promoting it.

User reviews have always played a crucial role in the consumer decision-making journey, and due to a few recent developments, their influence will only continue to grow. The first is Google’s optimisation of their review feature, which is now closely linked to SEO rankings for both web and map search. Also, Google has made the review process more seamless, adding in prompters to consumers to ensure they give a clear review that will benefit other consumers. With Google making it much easier to share and read reviews, we can expect the volume of Google reviews to grow over time.

The next driving force is the growth of social and e-commerce platforms. E-commerce companies have been around for some time, and a large part of their business model relies heavily on users sharing their experiences through reviews. User reviews assure shoppers that the product or service they are intending to buy can be trusted, reducing risk and uncertainty in the buying process. As e-commerce companies move towards social commerce, the volume and speed of user reviews will see a boost.

Review tracking – now a business must-have

User reviews are a type of word-of-mouth, but unlike speech that disappears once it is spoken, these reviews remain online. A user review can range from generic ones like “I love/hate it”, or in-depth ones that go into detail about what exactly they like or do not.

When brands start tracking reviews and mining this data at scale, they are essentially listening to the organic voice of their consumers. Customer pain points, what they care about and their buying behaviour are insights that can be derived from tracking these conversations. No longer do companies have to pay big money to market research firms to get this kind of insight – that information now exists online and in huge volume. And this is why is it crucial for companies to engage in text mining to extract that data.

The strange thing is that despite many brands acknowledging the need to track user reviews, it is still not a mainstream practice for many organisations. I believe this is attributed to several factors:

1. The perception that it is not practical 

As the saying goes – you don’t know what you don’t know. And many organisations do not know about the existence of companies that provide review tracking services as scale.

2. Many organisations believe they can rely on manual tracking 

The first thing that people think about when I mention review tracking is keeping an eye on reviews on their own brand on a limited number of platforms. This manual process involves randomly visiting review pages and transcribing any new user reviews onto an Excel spreadsheet. It is a time-consuming process that limits the kind of data they can get.

3. No best practice or methodology in place for organisations to scale 

Let’s say your organisation takes the first step and engages in a review tracking service to extract all that data. The next question to think about is what they should be tracking. Not many people can begin to imagine the scale of this task at hand.

Just to give you an idea of the magnitude of what should be tracked – let’s imagine we are a B2C electronics company. Think about the various products we own and the variations of each product. These multiple product listings sit on different e-commerce platforms and discussion forums. Next, to truly understand our consumers, we also want to track reviews of our competitor’s products, and the number of competitor products out there feels almost endless. Manual tracking doesn’t seem so viable now, does it?

User review tracking seems like a huge undertaking, but the good news is that Meltwater can automate the entire process to give you the relevant insights. As I have shared during the FUTR Asia event, Meltwater has the ability to do web crawling at scale. We can extract user reviews from any site with HTML pages such as Google reviews, TripAdvisor and e-commerce platforms such as Lazada.

More importantly, our powerful Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology enables attribution tagging. What this means is that it automates the reading, analysing and categorising of user reviews with near-human accuracy.

When this data is exported to Meltwater’s analytics platform, what you get is a comprehensive report that gives you a deep understanding of your consumers in an instant. It is exciting to imagine the potential strategies and initiatives brands can drive with the new knowledge and insight they get from external data.

If review tracking is something your organisation would like to explore, feel free to reach out via LinkedIn or email me at mimrah.ch@meltwater for an exploratory session.

How To Understand Your Consumers’ Voice With Review Tracking

It's possible to predict a trend before it becomes widespread. Knowing how to read the social zeitgeist can inform thought leadership, help you find influencers, and determine business decisions. Learn how to forecast trends from an expert by downloading our on-demand webinar, Secrets of a Trend Spotter Revealed.

Trendjacking is wildly popular. It can garner you kudos or widespread condemnation from fans and influencers. In the always-on social media sphere, knowing when to trendjack or calmly step away from the ledge is a delicate dance. Cultivating the skills necessary to read and react to the social zeitgeist during the crucial six hours after a trend starts to spread is invaluable. Here’s how to keep ahead of the curve, so your attempts at trendjacking results in a win.

Infographic: Should I Trendjack on Social Media?

The Scottish people have embraced immersive technologies, supported a movement towards more liberal human rights policies (by and large) and embraced low-carbon behaviours faster than many of their global counterparts. How do we know this? Well, we’ve done the research and looked into what Scottish audiences, in particular, are talking about.

Through survey data, event info, government policies and behavioural insights, a brand can start to gain a fundamental understanding of who they are talking to in a specific location. However, gaining this insight can involve a lot of manual labour and can be very time consuming.

In a fast-paced environment, where popular themes and discussions change daily (within greater conversations) it can be difficult to keep up using traditional methods. As brand custodians this presents us with a few difficult challenges when speaking to Scottish consumers – especially in a digital world.

It’s easy to miss mentions about specific topics, as well as brand complaints and slander due to the sheer magnitude of information on the internet. According to statistics directly from the Scottish government, 97% of adults said they used the internet at home. With this level of accessibility, drastically higher than in most parts of the world, a flood of opinion-based content can be released about your brand, and you might not know until it’s too late.

Scottish audiences have phenomenal access (compared globally) to the internet and are not afraid to share their opinions online – which makes this audience a potentially lethal opponent to any brand.


Scots are tech-savvy. And, this isn’t an assumption based on connectivity alone. In a report by Public, 3 Scottish cities were named among the most digitally savvy urban areas of the UK, namely: Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Generally, we know that tech-savvy audiences expect user-friendly, familiar interfaces, instant gratification and high levels of customer service and delivery.


Scotland is a leader in terms of global conversations and highly conscientious. Twitter data shows that topics, such as climate change and politics have been highly prioritised by Scottish audiences.


Mobile take-up is high, reportedly at 70% since 2016, according to Ofcom. Therefore, a mobile-first approach is necessary for brands targeting emerging audiences.

So, with all of this in mind, you’ve got a powerful audience embracing digital on a daily basis. How will you ensure that your brand stays positioned in a positive light? And that you meet these growing needs of this computer literate and plugged in market?

The Herald Scotland claims that one third of Scots are ‘addicted to social media’. According to a survey by polling firm Censuswide Scotland, ‘17% of Scots feel anxious if they cannot access their social accounts, while 14% say they could not go 48 hours without visiting them’.

In light of this, your brand needs to be where its consumers are, monitoring the conversation on popular social channels like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. So, how do you do this “social listening”?

You can start with media monitoring software and set the monitoring location to Scotland. Essentially, this software will trawl social channels for you looking for specific keywords or mentions of your brand, which you choose. It centralises the instances where these words or related themes have come up into a dashboard, where you can quickly see top tweets and posts in a few minutes. This helps you to assess which of them needs to be addressed urgently as the top mentions will have the biggest social impact.

At the same time, you can view the sentiment of each post, marked by positive, neutral or negative indicators. You can also see an overview of sentiment for all mentions, over a time period that you select. This way, you can quickly establish if there is a crisis brewing or if your consumers are generally saying positive things about your brand on social media.

There are a number of metrics you can set to monitor and help you stay on top of social, and each is easily downloadable or in ready to report format.

Beyond the social, lies an equally important world of media and editorial content from third-parties and journalists looking to discuss relevant topics and brands. It’s easy for your company to be in the public eye before you’ve even become aware of it, and while most journalists will request a direct comment from you in line with a mention.

However, in the famous announcement from Forbes, we as humans create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, which is almost unfathomable. There’s no way that you could manually crawl through all of that yourself. A search engine is a good starting point but it doesn’t allow you as much control over what you need to see first and how you can share that data. In the same breath, the digital landscape is about more than just your brand. It’s about threats and opportunities too.

Monitoring the media with a data-driven mechanism allows you to suss out your competitors, identify opportunities for new creative ideas and products and find out who is doing what you do, but better. You aren’t limited in terms of the keywords you can use, which opens up a gateway of curated information that can revolutionise the way you do business.

Other important benefits to monitoring Scottish media

If you think back to earlier in this post, we spoke about Scots being a generally tech-savvy audience with high expectations. In light of what we know about media monitoring, this is an extremely relevant point. Scottish consumers have expectations for excellent customer service and many of them turn to the media to have these expectations met – particularly social media.

With monitoring software, you can pick up on complaints about your brand even if they aren’t tagged, clearing up disputes from disgruntled customers before they escalate. You can also preemptively offer your services and exceed expectations when it’s so easy to see who is talking about what.

Want to really connect with and understand your Scottish audiences? Have a look at our media monitoring software and see how easy it is to do so. Simply contact us and we’ll give you a free demo.

Media Monitoring in Scotland – A Brand Gateway in a Promising Market

Now that the formalities – and an extremely awkward atmosphere – are out of the way at the United Nations Climate Action Summit, environmental activists and climate change analysts are left frustrated with the paradox of inaction sitting in the cavernous hall. The biggest emitters – namely the US, China and India – have offered little to effect change.

Amid the fog of collective resignation at the assembly hall, there were a few rays of light flickering through the throngs of stuffy, suited bureaucrats discussing ways to settle their disputes. The positive outcomes – 70 countries pledged to boost their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) in 2020, almost eight billion dollars in fresh funding from both the Green Climate Fund and Bill Gates and a band of countries and companies have committed to ending coal reliance.

However, a little voice of hope, despair and fury torched the conscience of the reluctant leaders at the summit like the inferno engulfing the Amazon rainforest now. Her braided pigtails slung over her fiery red blouse with eyes fixated at the cumbersome world leaders. The unassuming Swedish 16-year-old Greta Thunberg took them to task with a speech that unabashedly pointed the finger of blame to the bureaucrats in the room. Thunberg, who has addressed the British Parliament and staged protests against her nation’s administrators, admonished the weak steps countries have implemented like only providing financial aid.

The salience of Thunberg’s voice thundered in the media space. Between 20 to 26 September, there were more than 7.5 million social mentions of the young student-activist since her impassioned speech while news outlets around the world mentioned her 93,800 times. However there was a polarity between supporters and detractors on the merits of Greta during the summit. Supporters called the firebrand girl “inspiring” and praised her for being a role model to people who have Asperger’s Syndrome, a developmental disorder suffered by millions. Contrarily, there were some who believed she was a child being exploited by climate change activists and her efforts were unhelpful to the cause by shaming those who had the wherewithal to enact change.

A key point of discussion amongst the myriad of topics was Thunberg’s arch climate change nemesis, US President Donald Trump. Netizens and commentators on social media highlighted the divisive tweet that the “leader of the free world” made in response to Thunberg’s speech. In his tweet, Mr Trump professed that Thunberg “seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!”. This, in Mr Trump’s nutshell, dismissed any reciprocity from the US.

Donald J. Trump on Twitter: "She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!… "

Meltwater also discovered that 21.5% of the total social mentions of Thunberg originated from the US. This is unsurprising as the summit was held in New York and also included the highly publicised spat with the Commander-in-Chief. However, a quick glance at the top five countries highlighted an anomaly – the two other biggest emitters, China and India, were far from that number, with China not even on the list. In fact, there was not single Asian country, aside from India, in the top ten. Does this mean that social conversations on climate change were not prominent enough in Asian countries? Probably, and hopefully this insight can help spur key leaders to raise awareness in their regions.

Social media analytics on Global Climate Strike

Another event that preceded the UN Climate Action Summit is the ongoing Global Climate Strike (GCS). Climate change activists have been in full force globally with more than 3.58 million social mentions of the event since its launch on 20 September. Strikes were reported across numerous major cities including Melbourne, Singapore and even Thunberg’s home, Stockholm. The majority of the mentions were aimed to generate awareness of climate change and calling people – from students to postal workers – to go on strike on Fridays to pressure decision makers. While on the other side of the spectrum, topics ranged from conspiracy theories of the climate action movement and debunking facts put forth by the activists. 

We don’t know if Thunberg’s furious plea had the impact that was intended with participants at the Summit. What we do know is that her words struck a chord with the international public like we haven’t seen before. Inspiring us to pay attention and put pressure on our leaders. Only time will tell if this enthusiasm and fervour is here to stay.

Social Media Reactions: Greta Thunberg, UN Climate Action Summit 2019

If you stop and think about it for a minute, you can trace almost every aspect of human society to news and social media, in one way or another. The media is a vessel for storytelling, and storytelling, is a mechanism for how we formulate opinions, make buying decisions, educate one another and express our identities as part of greater communities and beliefs. 

The news media is topical, locational and categorised, and consumers as a whole have varying levels of access to it, in accordance with their place in society. As that access grows, and the world wide web becomes a staple ingredient in the recipe for integrated communication, so it forms more of a crucial cornerstone to modern life as we know it. It is a place where brands must exist within their consumers’ lives as they do, physically.

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