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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

In early 2021 Linkfluence was acquired by Meltwater, in a deal that created a highly successful partnership. Since then there has been greater investment in the development of the Radarly Consumer Insights platform, and many new features and data sources have been included, bringing more value to Linkfluence customers. A lot of Meltwater enterprise clients adopted Linkfluence as a result, with Meltwater also investing in the commercial distribution of Linkfluence's platform.

So today, we’re excited to share that the next stage of this successful integration is for Linkfluence to rebrand as a part of Meltwater, as we become even more closely aligned companies. This is a huge milestone for Linkfluence and a testament to the success we’ve seen since joining forces 18 months ago. Linkfluence's product team will continue to operate as the Consumer Intelligence Center of Excellence of Meltwater to drive innovation and advancements within this category.

As of April 1st 2023, the Linkfluence brand will fully transition under Meltwater across all channels.

What will happen after the Linkfluence rebranding?

Linkfluence's product Radarly will of course continue to operate as normal, and Linkfluence customers will still have access to customer support and account teams through all of the usual channels. As far as Linkfluence's products and services are concerned, nothing will change for current customers. And we will of course continue to invest in Linkfluence's products to bring clients even more value. 

We are thrilled to have Linkfluence fully embrace the Meltwater brand and the new opportunities it brings. We are excited to take these next steps to have Linkfluence become an even closer part of the Meltwater family, and look forward to bringing you even greater innovations in Radarly in the coming months and years.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to reach out to us.

Linkfluence is Rebranding as Meltwater

As a leading innovator in the digital space, Meltwater has been paving the way for businesses since 2001. With our commitment to driving change and breaking down barriers, we are proud to introduce a revolutionary new update – our Arabic User Interface.

This powerful addition to our platform opens up a world of possibilities for businesses everywhere, enabling them to harness the full potential of their marketing efforts through our exceptional suite of tools and services.

The Why: Breaking Barriers and Building Capabilities

The Market: Conquer a Digitally Growing Language

The Value: Groundbreaking Features in your Native Language

The Usage: How to Set Arabic as Your Preferred Language in Meltwater?

The Impact: Empowering Businesses to Succeed in the Global Landscape

At Meltwater, we believe in embracing cultural diversity and catering to the needs of our diverse customer base. That's why we are proud to offer support in Arabic, one of the world's most widely spoken languages with a massive 313 million native speakers. 

Arabic is the official language in 28 countries, including some of the fastest-growing economies in the Middle East and Africa. As a language of the future, it's crucial for businesses to have a strong online presence in this language.

The Middle East is a digital powerhouse with a wealth of resources, governments promoting tourism, and a growing internet population primarily speaking Arabic. With Meltwater's Arabic UI, we are providing businesses in the region with the tools they need to stay ahead of the curve in the constantly evolving industry landscape.

Our Arabic User Interface provides a personalized experience for our Arab users, allowing them to seamlessly navigate through our platform and leverage its powerful features for better monitoring, analysis, and engagement.

Smarter Decisions with Arabic UI
Providing a native language option in the app simplifies data comprehension, enabling users to make faster, smarter decisions. 
The localized interface enhances user experience, leading to quicker, more effective navigation.

Increased Productivity
The streamlined interface enables users to focus on their tasks, saving time and increasing efficiency.

Effective Communication
You can track and analyze information more effectively, leading to better communication and quicker decision-making.

Wider Accessibility
The inclusion of the Arabic language broadens app accessibility and enhances users' reach to a larger customer base.

User Satisfaction Guaranteed
The Arabic UI demonstrates Meltwater's commitment to catering to its Arabic-speaking users, boosting user satisfaction and loyalty.

Users can easily set up Arabic as their preferred display language via two easy steps. 

2. From the Language drop-down under Preferences, simply choose Arabic.

Once done, all parts of the Meltwater UI will be automatically translated into Arabic. Search results will continue to display the language of their original search.

Meltwater is committed to breaking down language barriers and making its platform accessible to all. With the introduction of the Arabic User Interface, businesses in the rapidly growing EMEA region can now take advantage of our extensive features, such as media monitoring, social listening, and sales intelligence, to make informed decisions about their social and media presence.

The result is a more intuitive, efficient, and productive experience that leads to better communication, increased user satisfaction, and ultimately, improved marketing performance.

Join worldwide businesses that have already made the smart choice with Meltwater. Request a demo today and see for yourself how our Arabic UI can empower your business to succeed in the global landscape.

Breaking Language Barriers: Experience the Power of Data & Social Listening with Meltwater's Arabic User Interface

The data analysts at the heart of the organization

Consumers have changed. And with that change, modern brands have embraced a new form of consumer insights based on social media intelligence to get to know their customers in real time, at the speed of the Web. In large organizations, this now means that Consumer and Market Insights and their teams of data analysts are in charge of letting the data do the talking. Their key mission is to provide people across the organization with key insights that will inform any decision making processes.

To achieve real competitive advantage, we need to ensure data is at the heart of everything we do. From marketing and consumer insights to IT, all departments must work closely together and leverage the power of data.

says Global Consumer Insights Director; Pernod Ricard, Florence Rainsard.

But as organizations put the customers at the center of everything, Data analysts are pressured to find pearls of insights within growing datasets while ensuring they don’t miss any essential insights. This is made increasingly more difficult as datasets grow. From data scarcity a decade ago, brands and CMI teams are now at risk of drowning into too much data. 

To this point, Statista predicts a continued surge in the volume of data created, hitting 90 zettabytes by 2022 and doubling by 2025. With the vast amount of data created daily, analysts face the huge challenge of deep diving into various data sets to draw valuable insights and inform business decisions.

Manipulating these fast-growing data sets takes a lot of time for analysts. Consequently, a huge amount of data is not analyzed due to the lack of time, resources and manpower dedicated to data analysis and this implies that potential actionable insights are being lost.

Mike Gualtieri, VP, Principal Analysts at Forrester says: 

"On average, between 60% and 73% of all data within an enterprise goes unused for analytics. That's unacceptable in an age where deeper, actionable insights, especially about customers, are a competitive necessity."

This is where AI comes in, allowing us to perform deep analyses at scale.

Tip: Learn how Meltwater uses AI and check out Meltwater’s AI Writing Assistant

Introducing Discovery BETA, our brand new AI-based Insight Assistant 

Today, we’re excited to introduce Discovery BETA, our new AI-based Insight Assistant, following months of successful private beta tests with a number of our clients. 

Discovery BETA is the powerful engine that analysts need to assist them while exploring their data sets more systematically and efficiently, resulting in greater time savings and improved data analysis quality. By running multiple proprietary algorithms automatically on their datasets 24x7, Discovery BETA does the heavy lifting for them and ensures they find insights they might have otherwise missed, making them aware of unusual changes and shifts in order to deep dive into them to validate / invalidate those changes. 

"Discovery helped us find a rapidly growing event that we were not aware of. It can help us to save lot of time when we need to understand what’s trendy at the moment, particularly activities initiated by consumers or competitors."

Yunhui Zhou
Senior Social Listening Planner
Pernod Ricard

Today, on its first version, Discovery BETA takes the form of a stream of learnings built on the fly, displaying cards that will highlight what has been detected by the system. It analyzes the displayed queries of a workspace, in order to highlight for instance: 

a hashtag, keyword or an emotion that has been spreading for a few days

 For each learning highlighted by the system you’ll get several interesting things:

A sentence explaining the context of this learning so that you can easily understand why this has popped up.

An access to a detailed view so that you can deep dive into this learning and confirm if this is an important insight to look at.

You’ll have the possibility to save this detailed view in a new or existing insight page to keep monitoring the trend during the next days or months.

You’ll be able to share this page or a snapshot of this page as like any other insight pages to disseminate this insight to other team members. 

Why is this fundamental for data analysts?

"Discovery is a fascinating feature, both for its ability to identify relevant information and for its accuracy. It simplifies the task of analyzing and identifying drivers of conversations with completeness and relevance. The potential of Discovery is immense, and it’s a major asset for anyone involved in social data."

Jean-Baptiste Mac Luckie
Senior Market & Business Insights Manager
Lacoste

"Discovery is very easy to use and perfect for marketers and strategic teams to focus on the most relevant information without requiring analytical skills, saving time and encouraging capability adoption."

Angela Vicente Moreno
Global Digital Insights & Analytics Excellence Manager
Bayer

The main benefit for analysts will be to save a huge amount of time:

exploring their data set as Discovery BETA points out any change in statistical patterns to facilitate their day-to-day work

understanding these learnings as it provides the necessary context to better understand why this learning popped up


"This new and powerful feature allows our analysts to save a tremendous amount of time."
Delphine Gandarinho
Deputy Head of the Press Office
Ministère de l'Economie, des Finances et de la Souveraineté Industrielle et Numérique

It’s also a huge help for data analysts to ensure to discover insights they might have otherwise missed. That way, they are pretty confident in the fact that they are providing all insights needed to inform their organization’s decision making.

Moreover, it leverages our proprietary Insight Pages Technology to visualize, provide a deep dive of the analysis and disseminate the insights. Clicking on a card will generate an insight page on the fly detailing the specific data point. You will be able to save this page as an Insight Page in order to keep monitoring a detected trend or to share it across other teams.

Coupled with an advanced data structuring, our new AI-based Insight Assistant, will allow you to have a very strong consumer intelligence program allowing to surface rich, deep and powerful insights without spending hours and hours to analyze the data. Your day-to-day life will be easier than even!

What kind of algorithms is Discovery based on?

Being analysts ourselves for a long time, we know how critical it is to find relevant pearls of insight. That’s why we wanted to focus our first efforts developing useful advanced algorithms.  Detecting emerging terms that were not trending before in your data set is one of the most advanced algorithms available on the market. Thanks to this algorithm, the system is able to detect terms like keyphrases, names, entities, hashtags, affects or even emotions, topics that were not trending before. It’s a huge help for analysts to point out new trends or even a bad buzz as it is able to detect positive or negative posts. 

Our advanced algorithms also offer brand new capabilities to see at a glance clusters of images thanks to our brand new Computer Vision capabilities that we integrated directly into our new DiscoveryBETA tool. 

We also offer algorithms like detection of volume spikes to spot volume changes, either negative or positive, that occurred within your dataset, and also identify viral posts that are highly engaging. 

And this is just the beginning! We’re already developing more algorithms to expand the scope of Discovery BETA. As we do, its technology will grow and learn to highlight more and more relevant and actionable insights, so that you can perform smarter, better, and faster at work. In short, your assistant will grow to be smarter and smarter. 

Get your free demo today by filling out the form:

Introducing the beta of Discovery, our brand new AI-based Insight Assistant

Each day brands and consumers alike leave a trail of digital breadcrumbs. When traced and analysed, this litter of online activity can be used to provide organisations with business-critical information on their audience, competition, industry trends, risks and more.

Did you know that 90% of the world’s internet data was generated in the last two years alone? This equates to 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created on a daily basis. That’s billions of individual data-points containing infinite amounts of business-critical information that can be used to inform corporate decision making.

Although we’ve seen an increase in executives leveraging alternative data (data found from outside of their company’s walls), we’re still seeing many making business decisions solely based on internal data. Even more worryingly, a study by Gartner found that 95% of leaders continue to make business decisions using intuition and significantly underestimate risks as a result.

Internal data, such as sales volumes, financial numbers, CRM data etc. is, and will remain, important. There are a bunch of companies out there, such as Salesforce and Oracle, doing a fantastic job in the business intelligence space, however, internal data looks at the past. The caveat is that it’s a lagging indicator. You wouldn’t drive a car only looking in your rearview mirror. The same should go for steering your business. You need to look ahead to spot hazards and stay abreast of the competition. Alternative data, give businesses the information advantage they need to do just that.

Mining and blending both internal and external insights helps you to stay fully informed and gain a 360 view of your company. Only then can you sleep well at night knowing you’re making decisions utilising the most complete set of data available.

During this article, I’ll walk you through the types of alternative data sources that can be tracked, as well as a handful of signals that can indicate the route to take when it comes to strategic decision making.

A treasure trove of valuable alternative data sources

Publicly available internet sources are a treasure trove for executives. When analysed, they offer insights into your ecosystem and surface threats/ opportunities in tandem. Being able to assess your company against the backdrop of the wider industry and understand the context of the landscape you’re operating in is critical for success. Here are a few examples of external data sources often monitored by the c-suite for that purpose:

Predictive insights lead to proactive business decision making

The remarkable evolution of big data technologies has led to an increase in companies creating data-driven business workflow processes, however, many execs are struggling to make sense of big data. Let’s admit, we’re drowning in it – and some companies are finding it difficult to stay afloat altogether. The truth is, executives need insights as well as data.

Advanced technology such as machine learning, natural language processing and AI are increasingly used in enterprise solutions for the purpose of making sense of big data. By converting unstructured sources into structured ones that enable Search, Alerting and Analytical capabilities, businesses are better able to harness the alternative data around them.

Perhaps one of the most promising areas in which AI helps us to make better business decisions is predictive insights. Using historical and real-time data, specially trained algorithms can look for patterns and signals which indicate what could happen in the future and alert you to real-time opportunities and threats as they grow.

Using external data, you can predict potential IPOs, growth patterns, investments and more. Extracting these trends can give you the edge you need to prepare for disruptions in the market, seize opportunities as they arise, and mitigate risks by solving business problems before they hit.

Systematically connecting the dots across different data sources instead of looking at them in isolation is vital. In doing so, companies can get to grips with casualties and surface insights used to benefit all functions of the company, from marketing, sales, R&D, HR and beyond.

Here are a few examples of signals that executives from various industries are using to inform critical business decision making.

As the saying goes, “no man is an island” – the same applies to businesses.

Each day your competitors leave behind plenty of online breadcrumbs that can be used to anticipate their next move and where your industry is heading. Competitive intelligence looks beyond financial data to provide you with an unbiased and comprehensive overview of your competitors’ strategies, company’s position in the market, customer perceptions, and rising trends to enable more proactive decision making.

Common ways businesses are conducting competitive intelligence include tracking conversation development around patent filings, R&D investments, hiring trends, and fluctuations in ad-spend with the aim of:

Predicting their competitor’s future focus areas

Defending market share from existing and emerging players

Evaluating the impact of current strategies vs how customers are responding to competitors’ strategies

A look at open job listings in competitor companies will show where they’re investing in terms of human resources and the new skills they are after. Significant discussions in the media or on social can indicate critical customer feedback, while financial changes indicate gaps in the market or new opportunities to take market share. Each of these factors demonstrates the wider position of the market and can help boards predict the impact of future decisions.

A search on the hiring trends of key automotive brands found AI giant, Tesla, to be at risk from competitor Volvo. The analysis showcases that Volvo is hiring x2.5 more engineers than Tesla and we see an uptick in jobs with Artificial intelligence, Machine learning & Virtual reality skills. Tesla should use such insights to defend their tech positioning.

News and social media information is a form of alternative data that’s growing in popularity among investors across the globe. Online media is filled with what the financial industry calls signals – or events which can indicate the growth trajectory (or lack of growth) for a particular company.

Below are just a few forward-looking signals used by investors to surface opportunities and discover potential threats since they offer a good indication of how a brand might perform when it reaches public markets.

Expanding on the above, employee turnover and mass layoffs are also indicative of the performance of a company. By tracking online news around mentions of mass layoffs (and the common job titles being let go), staff turnover, changes in leadership strategy, a new direction focus, poor company culture etc, as well as financial documents, investors are using insights to confidently plan where to part ways with their cash based on the general ‘health’ of the organisation.

From crowdsourced ideas to detailed consumer feedback and sentiment, insights drawn from alternative data are enabling product developers to get a much deeper understanding of their users and changing consumer behaviours.

The healthcare space is one example of a sector making positive strides in product development using external data. According to the Google Knowledge Graph, 1 in 20 Google searches are for health-related information. As long as a Google search remains more accessible than a visit to a doctor, there’s a good chance most consumers will continue to consult their search bar leading up to a conversation with a professional. If analysed in aggregate, this search data can be extremely helpful for healthcare professionals looking to better serve this population.

Search data gives us a micro glimpse into the public’s mindset, fears, concerns, curiosities and more. The use of such data points also helps to eliminate biases, so your teams can research and develop products that solve real problems. Leading pharmaceutical companies are also leveraging insights to inform the areas that stakeholders need further educating on, for example, side effects of particular vaccines.

The value of external data and predictive analytics has also increased significantly in the agricultural sector and is changing the culture of farming.

Platforms such as the CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research) and the CIAT (International Center for Tropical Agriculture) are developing models to create strategic foresight scenarios which consider the impact of climate, water resources, and technology on agriculture. Farmers can use insights to make decisions, significantly reducing risk and increasing their chances of successful yield. And the industry has seen great success from doing so. In 2014, during a dry spell in Montería (Córdoba), the CIAT recommended farmers delay planting their rice crop. This advice was followed by 170 farmers. By leveraging external insights, farmers were able to mitigate risks. It’s estimated the farmers who followed advice avoided crop losses valued at over USD 3.6 million and produced a better crop yield in comparison to the neighbouring communities who went ahead with the rice farming as per usual.

By now you hopefully have a better understanding of the dynamic use cases of alternative data and the value it brings. Want to discuss leveraging this for your organisation? Fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch!

Using Alternative Data & External Signals for Decision Making

Tracking KPIs and reporting on them is the #1 most read topic on the Meltwater blog. Here, we discuss for the first time the importance of standardizing this effort across your organization, especially if you’re overseeing a multi-region operation. For a complete guide on KPIs and reporting for PR and social media, read our comprehensive ebook, Everything You Need to Prove PR ROI.

In the U.S., there is widespread acceptance and understanding that key performance indicators (KPIs) are critical for all communications professionals to translate the value of their work and find ways to more effectively execute their campaigns.

When teams are small, it’s easier to keep everyone in the loop on the KPIs vital to your success and to understand how all of your work ladders back to your goals. But once your company has expanded and has multiple regional communications teams engaging with multiple audiences, things become more difficult.

In some regions, standardized reporting and a focus on ROI is not the norm for communications teams. If you are used to being measured on awareness and impressions, the corporate office’s attempt to deploy a standardized dashboard can be seen in a negative light.

That’s why it’s important to align your teams and create buy-in on the reasons behind globally standardized KPIs. Doing so will also highlight how each regional team’s activities can affect the global brand sentiment. With this groundwork in place, comms professionals can amplify team efforts, more effectively deploy resources, and develop a more cohesive brand identity.

When companies expand globally, keeping track of the various communications teams and activities in play can feel daunting, and some groups may fly under the radar. Left unchecked, that means some locations may be underperforming or executing on ideas that may seem like a good idea at the time at the regional level but could be damaging to your brand as a whole (like a campaign serving up a “hot chick” driver from Uber).

Localization is a necessary component of any successful global strategy, but it’s important to remember that each of your local team’s efforts is still a reflection of your brand. This means that you need a brand voice that is flexible but maintains global consistency, as well as a shared understanding of what success means for your company.

Start by briefing your regional teams on your global comms goals and identify the unique opportunities for each region. KPIs will help explain what your company is prioritizing and keep your global team efforts focused, but you should not bundle everyone’s stats into one number.

Your global KPIs are a valuable pulse on your company’s overall efforts, but KPIs could vary significantly based on your region. However, these KPIs are critical to track on both a global and regional level to understand how regional activities are contributing—or detracting—from your goals:

Share of voice: How often your company is mentioned compared to your competitors. Your competitive company list will vary by regions, so there should be company-wide competitors, as well as region-specific.

Sentiment: The tone of the articles and/or social media activity regarding your company. By analyzing region-specific KPIs, your team can understand where a more hands-on media approach may be needed. Also, you may be able to proactively address a pending issue that has come to light in one region before it spreads to other regions, helping to save potential global brand damage.

Key message penetration: How often your company is mentioned alongside key themes. Your thought leadership measurement will likely involve key message penetration, and your team must keep a global lens when picking these themes. Trends may vary significantly from one country to another, and certain words or phrases may not resonate in the same way across countries. Use your regional comms leads as sounding boards on new ideas before developing a global campaign that may be offensive or carry a different meaning across borders.

Whichever KPIs you choose to track—and there’s plenty to choose from, so take your time—you need a system in place to review this data. KPI dashboards are a common way to set up views that are inclusive of both regional and global stats. This ensures you’re looking at the full scope of your data and can then easier know which regions to conduct more follow-up with.

Breaking down regional team silos is an ongoing process that requires active communication. Consider hosting monthly or quarterly meetings for all of your regional comms leads to connect, as well as separate meetings with each individual team and their agencies or freelancers. Because time zones can become complicated, record your meetings and distribute notes and action items so that anyone can access the material and stay focused between meetings.

Following these tips will further help set you on the right track, as well as adopting the right tools like Meltwater to help you make sense of your global data with ease.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to effectively set KPIs, download Meltwater’s PR Measurement: 8 Benchmarking Benefits Crucial to Success for the data-driven KPIs, tools and reporting frameworks you need to deliver the best results on your campaigns.

The Meltwater Blog

Linkfluence is Rebranding as Meltwater

Breaking Language Barriers: Experience the Power of Data & Social Listening with Meltwater's Arabic User Interface

Introducing the beta of Discovery, our brand new AI-based Insight Assistant

Using Alternative Data & External Signals for Decision Making

Globally Standardized KPIs for Enterprise Comms Reporting