United States

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

As more and more people want the values of the brands they engage with to align with their own, marketers are employing purpose-driven campaigns to create emotional connections with their target audiences. 

A purpose-driven brand is one that openly puts its core values at the forefront of everything it does. Purpose-driven marketing campaigns are a way for a company or brand to engage with a target audience based on their shared needs and interests—including supporting worthy causes. 

While many organizations give back to their communities, businesses that employ effective purpose-driven marketing strategies are successful in using those efforts to create meaningful content. Here are some of the most successful recent examples of purpose marketing on display in the world.

A Sense of Purpose that Resonates with Customers

Protecting the Earth is a priority for Patagonia. Their “New Localism” platform encompasses numerous goals, raises awareness about the hazards our planet faces on a daily basis, and brings their customers together to raise awareness in their particular areas of concern.

The #CrudeAwakening campaign’s goal is to protect coastlines from oil spills. This came about after the Refugio oil spill near Santa Barbara in May of 2015 which polluted coastal areas and harmed marine life. The power of the Patagonia customer community with the brand’s support resulted in three laws passed to impose strict regulations on offshore drilling.

Patagonia on Twitter: "#CrudeAwakening… "

2. Austrailia Metro Trains: Dumb Ways to Die

The Dumb Ways to Die campaign is a great example of purpose-driven marketing coming from somewhere other than typical consumer-driven sources. McCann-Melbourne, the agency that created the campaign, delivered a message to Melbourne, Australia's train-riding public that had been previously ignored or dismissed because of safety messages being typically received as boring by their audiences. 

Through the use of tasteful humor, the campaign used newspapers, local radio, outdoor signs, and a video that wound up going viral to get Melbourne’s train riders to think about safety. It resulted in 30 percent drop in near-miss accidents in less than a year.

Dumb Ways to Die

Sometimes a company isn't in the position to launch a social impact effort on its own. But when two companies with complementary missions partner together, the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts. A great example of this is the partnership between Uber and Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

Over July 4th weekend of 2017, Uber offered a discount code that, when redeemed, made an automatic donation to MADD. By partnering with an established nonprofit, Uber helped raise its social-consciousness profile and establish itself as a purpose-driven business.

MADD on Twitter: "Do your plans for tonight include @Uber? Enter promo code MADDNYE from 6 p.m. tonight through 6 a.m. & $1 per ride goes to MADD #UberMADD"

4. Ripple Foods - Our Progress, Your Impact

In 2018, Ripple Foods made Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies list for making a dairy alternative using pea protein. Instead of focusing their marketing toward vegetarians and vegans, they decided to take a more purpose-driven approach by showing milk drinkers the positive effects they could have on the environment by switching to their dairy-free alternative. 

In 2016, Ripple started “Our Progress, Your Impact,” an annual report to customers that summarizes the carbon savings, water reduction, and sugar avoidance Ripple’s customers have made over that year from simply purchasing their product. If your customers’ purchases have made an impact, quantifying that information and sharing it with them helps it make an even bigger impact.

5. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Friends vs. COVID19

What could be a better conclusion to an article about purpose-driven brands than seven of the largest and most influential companies banding together to take on this year’s largest challenge: the coronavirus pandemic. On March 16, 2020, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube released a joint statement citing the increasing impact of the coronavirus across the world and stating their commitment to keeping people connected as well as combating misinformation about the disease. This statement was a powerful message because it was backed by seven giants of tech committing their considerable resources to a global mission.

Facebook Newsroom on Twitter: "Joint Industry Statement from @Facebook, @google, @LinkedIn, @Microsoft, @reddit, @Twitter and @YouTube 
https://t.co/8H1XVFt2N0… https://t.co/IOFfW6EiKe"

Purpose-driven marketing proves that doing good and making money are not mutually exclusive. When you hitch your brand purpose to a social conscience, the result can be not only a better bottom line, but a loyal, devoted customer base that identifies with your organization as a whole, not just an individual product.

What Is Purpose-Driven Marketing?

In the last few weeks, many marketers have struggled to pivot their strategies, revise their messaging, and figure out what content to create going forward (including us).

When your brand is facing a challenge, be it a global crisis or an internal restructuring, the natural instinct is to get “ahead” of it. But is that always the right move? Sometimes it’s important to speak up. Sometimes it’s more appropriate to stay silent. But it’s not always an either/or situation.

When you’re facing rough seas, what matters is knowing when to speak and what to say when you do. But that’s not always easy to figure out, especially in stressful times. Luckily, there is a way to gain more clarity.

To help you decipher what communication is worthwhile, and what might get you in hot water, we’ve found that a few simple questions can guide you in the right direction.

Whether you need to sanity-check your content strategy or know if it’s the right time to send that company-wide email, here are five helpful questions to decide if what you’re communicating is on-brand, worthwhile, and necessary.

When something happens, your instinct is usually to say something, but every situation is different depending on the timing, climate, or message.

Sometimes responding too quickly may seem reactionary, while responding too slow can seem out of touch. Sometimes saying nothing can seem avoidant or suspect, but unnecessarily inserting yourself into a conversation can seem like bandwagoning. (Honestly, we’ve seen too many brands create the same pseudo inspirational COVID-19 response commercial. It feels cheesy and unoriginal at this point.)

Before you say something, here are 5 steps to take to mitigate a crisis in your marketing. But if you want to say something during a difficult time, think carefully about how it may be perceived, as sometimes good intentions can be overshadowed by a bad (or poorly worded) execution. Ideally, your communication should be proactive, showing that you’re not just “dealing” with a situation but truly leading people through it.

For example, months before Coronavirus made headlines, the Magic The Gathering card game designed a new card for Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths named “Spacegodzilla, Death Corona.” Worse, it was set to hit stores in April 2020.

In light of the pandemic, the company made the responsible decision to issue a simple announcement to explain the situation, announce the card’s new name (“Spacegodzilla, Void Invader”), and detail how they would proceed going forward. By responding in a calm, proactive way, they were able to avoid fanning the flames and get back to business as usual.

In challenging times, everyone has their own unique feelings, fears, worries, etc. What you say can often help, hurt, or influence those feelings, so it’s important to be intentional about what you say, how you say it, and when you say it.

If you’re not sure what to say, this is the time to use your empathy. How are people affected right now? What are they experiencing? What do they want and need to know?

Before you speak to customers or vendors, think about your team, too. They are the face of your brand, so they need to be on the same page—and feel equally value. Whether it’s your employees or customers, sometimes it’s helpful to do the legwork to find out what people are feeling, and how your communication can best serve them.

For example, we polled our team to find out how they were feeling about our Coronavirus response. This helped us understand how we could support people, whether it was communicating more info on COVID-19 related policies or providing more transparency around how it’s affecting our business.

Oftentimes brands want to speak up just to feel like they’re “doing” something in times of crisis. But there’s a difference between stepping up and adding to the noise. Over-communication can be a nuisance when it’s clogging up your inbox. It can also be a sign of rocky leadership if you’re announcing policy changes every day.

Before you blast out that company-wide email or draft another tweet, ask yourself how this communication will contribute to the current climate. Will it provide much-needed information? Will it help people in some way? Will it confuse them, or make them ruminate on a problem they don’t need to worry about?

Respect people’s time and energy. Only communicate if you’re providing clarity or valuable information that is genuinely helpful, in both big and small ways. (Interestingly, a recent survey by GCI Health and The Harris Poll found that 93% of people are interested in non-COVID-related content right now.)

For example, to help people adapt to working remotely, Hubspot uses their Instagram to offer simple tips to make your workday more productive. This is a thoughtful way to provide value to people—even in a simple Instagram post.

View this post on Instagram What are some ways that you “change it up” when you’re working remotely? #GrowBetter #WorkFromHome #RemoteWork #HubSpot A post shared by HubSpot (@hubspot) on Mar 20, 2020 at 8:01am PDT 

There is nothing more risky (or unnecessary) than inserting yourself into conversation that you don’t belong in. Over and over, we’ve seen brands go through the wringer for trying to hop onto a trend or news story that they don’t need to. At best, these attempts are misaligned and off brand. At worst, they can become a PR disaster.

Only address something if it’s relevant to your brand and you think you can add value. If a newsworthy natural disaster will delay your production or shipping, it’s appropriate to give people a heads up about it. Or if your business is well suited to speak about a topical subject, it might make sense to share your perspective or expertise. But even then, only do it if you think it will assuage concerns or contribute something helpful.

For example, knowing that teachers nationwide are scrambling to figure out how to teach remotely, Trello created a useful guide to their product to help teachers stay organized. This was a helpful and authentic way to provide value within their area of expertise.

Even positive communication can seem opportunistic if it doesn’t come from the right place. Are you donating masks and encouraging people to come together as a community, or are you trying to get a gold star for doing something charitable during a crisis? The type of content you create should be inline with your larger mission.

People have no tolerance for brands trying to pat themselves on the back, so anything you say needs to come from an authentic place. Your Brand Heart (purpose, vision, mission, values) can serve you well here, helping you clarify what words and actions truly align with your brand.

For example, Square’s mission is “to help sellers of all sizes start, run, and grow their business.” Now that many small businesses have to transition from brick-and-mortar to online, Square is helping their community by creating content about how to make the transition easier.

View this post on Instagram We put together information and resources to help you get started bringing your brick-and-mortar business online. Click the link in our bio or visit squ.re/resources for more. A post shared by Square (@square) on Apr 22, 2020 at 10:36am PDT 

Even if you make a mistake, it’s still an opportunity to follow through on your brand values. Own up, be transparent, and take steps to make things right. The more honest and authentic you are, the more people will be willing to trust you in the future. (You may even be able to turn that mistake into valuable lessons that others can learn from.)

The good news is that challenging times can feel rocky, but they’re also an opportunity to show up for your community and strengthen your relationships. As you pivot your strategy, think of how you can provide value and focus on cultivating those connections.

This article originally appeared in Column Five.

This article was written by Josh Ritchie from Business2Community and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@newscred.com.

5 Questions to Ask Before Your Brand Joins a Conversation

When it comes to PR campaign management, public relations specialists often feel like they're spinning many plates. From researching relevant journalists to crafting engaging pitches to reporting – you name it, it’s on their list. Managing this can sometimes become overwhelming, public relation pros aren’t superhuman after all. This is when technology becomes an executive’s best friend. While PR solutions can't stop those plates from spinning, there's integrated end to end PR solutions out there that can help more easily manage the process.

Whatever stage of the PR campaign process you're at, be it planning, delivery, measurement or optimization, integrated public relation solutions can assist you with all your public relations needs. During this article, we’ll cover how such solutions are transforming PR campaign management.

Digital transformation refers to the integration of technology with the aim of solving traditional business problems or creating new and optimised processes that result in operational changes. Like many offices, digital transformation is also making waves through the PR department. Remember, you don’t have to start big when it comes to transformation, you just need to start; and if your PR team is growing, it’s wise to start sooner rather than later since the bigger the team, the more complex things become. Which leads us to the first traditional business problem that new tech is solving...

How is PR campaign tracking transforming?

One challenge large public relation teams and PR agencies come up against is keeping track of who's doing what and the status of projects. Typically, larger teams’ resort to spreadsheets to provide visibility and enable collaboration, but PRs are quick to call out the shortcomings of using spreadsheets, including:

1. Spreadsheets are difficult to share, both internally and externally
2. There’s no clear indication of who's working on what when
3. Multiple versions of the truth
4. Reporting is painful
5. There are no easy data visualization options.

Much to the relief of public relation professionals, new tech is now available that encourage teams to collaboratively work in tandem, while eliminating back and forth conversations that cause critical information to fall through the cracks. Meltwater Projects is one example of such tools.

Projects is a central workspace for digital assets, media lists and earned media, where teams can coordinate and collaborate. The feature assists marketing and PR teams with modernising how they execute campaigns, from managing tactical tasks and assignments, organising earned coverage, to reporting on the end results. 

1. Spotlight your hard-earned media coverage
2. Make it easy for you to understand the status of an ongoing project
3. Effortlessly communicating impact to stakeholder
4. Creating a record of your team’s accomplishments
5. Become more efficient

How are advances in PR campaign management helping professionals connect the dots between paid, earned and owned media? 

Traditionally, earned, owned and paid for media acted as different pieces of the overall puzzle, but this is no longer the case. Breaking down siloed working between PR, marketing and comms has been a priority for a number of years, however, since the introduction of social media and a number of technology advances, the choice is no longer there.

One of the trends we’re seeing in the market is the convergence of paid, owned, and earned media and the teams managing them working more closely together. The good news for those working in public relations is that marketing teams tend to have higher budgets. However, for those used to managing public relations in a more traditional way, increasingly being asked to compare paid, earned, and owned media can be a little daunting.

If connecting the dots between all media types is something you're struggling with, don't sweat. Integrated PR campaign solutions enable you to define, manage and measure all media types holistically from one platform. Want to understand which top editorial stories had the biggest impact on social media or SEO? How paid is driving press? The impact of public relations on web traffic? How public relations is impacting marketing effort? An all in one solution helps you complete the puzzle! In a few clicks, you can prove the tangible business impact across paid, earned and owned media initiatives and see across the entire funnel from one centralised interface. This is benefiting public relations and marketing pros in a number of ways, let’s take social media as one example.

Did you know that journalists make up 25% of verified accounts on Twitter?

The platform is a haven for PR specialists. When we partner this with the fact that a PR crisis can erupt on social media at any given point, the power of social media as a PR tool is extremely clear. All in one PR suite allows users to create and schedule social content without leaving the tool. More often than not, solutions allow users to view conversations and threads in a simplified inbox, so you’re able to stay on top of conversations across channels and respond quickly to fans and influencers. You’re also able to measure your social media performance across multiple handles or individually, so you can quickly measure how your PR efforts have influenced social media engagement.

How is PR campaign measurement transforming?

It’s no secret that when it comes to reporting, for years PRs have lagged behind their digital marketing counterparts. While digital marketing pros have the ability to track and quantify most of their efforts, PRs have historically been tied to justify their existence using metrics their board didn’t understand and that didn’t truly reflect their goals. But finally, that has changed. Finally, new technology means proving your worth to the c-suite will no longer be an uphill battle. Finally, the public relations department is about to change from cost centre to a strategic function driving ROI.

Building on the AI-driven insights already available in the Meltwater product, you can now gain access to a new generation of measurement capabilities, including PR Attribution and PR Customer Scoring.

PR Attribution

Tired of juggling many things at once, then not being able to truly attribute the value of earned media to revenue? Well now you can, with our brand new ‘PR Attribution’ feature, built within our end to end PR campaign solution!

Placing a value on your earned media and the traffic it directs to your website has always been difficult, but with PR Attribution, communications professionals can do just that. In a nutshell, our PR Attribution feature helps you easily gain insight into the coverage that’s converting to revenue. Speaking in the language of your board is critical for securing more budget and influence in the boardroom. With PR Attribution, you’re able to demonstrate how your PR campaign is contributing to the bottom line – a sure way to win the c-suite over!

PR Custom Scoring

We understand that not all coverage is created equal. A positive PR hit in the title of one of your top tier publications will put a bigger smile on your face than gaining a negative mention, or one alongside your competitor in a publication you’ve not actively tried to target. PR specialists often manually tag press hits into coverage quality categories which can be a mundane and painstaking task. Thankfully, this scene is a thing of the past! Meltwater is the first company to bring innovative PR Custom Scoring to market.

With our new feature, PR Scoring, professionals are now able to consistently measure the value of media coverage based on their own goals, objectives, and scoring criteria. They no longer have to use a ‘one size fits all’ approach for measurement, because let’s be honest, it doesn’t always work. Metrics that work for a small PR agency won't necessarily resonate with a global conglomerate. We're sure you'll agree that tailoring metrics to your company’s actual business needs is critical. With PR Custom Scoring, you have the ability to support multiple scoring models so you can have different measurement metrics for different projects or take into consideration how negative sentiment affects the overall score.

PR Custom Scoring moves away from generic and static legacy metrics and provides a customisable dynamic scoring model that can be as agile as you and your business. That way, you can define the success metrics that matter to you and report on them accordingly with metrics tailored to your KPIs.

The number of full-scale end to end PR suits is on the rise. This is a huge win for PR and marketing pros since they can now effectively benchmark results since data is sourced in the same way. When multiple vendors are in play, things can get confusing. Not all vendors measure metrics the same way, so it’s impossible to benchmark your teams and compare apples with apples. A single vendor approach helps you find a single source of truth when it comes to data, so you can rest well knowing your reporting is consistent.

To summarise, the new generation of PR campaign management empowers pros to:

Prove tangible business impact across paid, earned and owned media initiatives

Create custom PR attribution scoring metrics to rank coverage

Effectively benchmark measurement by gaining a single source of truth via one integrated platform

Hopefully, by now you have a better understanding of how advancements in technology are transforming PR campaign management and helping PR pros modernise how they execute PR campaigns to increase efficiency, reduce spend, drive more in-depth insights, and improve agility. Want to learn what this could look like for your organisation? Fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch!

Transforming PR Campaign Management

Over the past 10 years, the importance of tracking conversations across the media has grown rapidly. This is mainly due to the explosion of the internet, specifically social media. Having the ability to identify what’s being said about your brand is now critical, so critical that the thought of missing a media mention keeps marketing and public relation professionals up at night. During this article, we’ll cover the importance of media and social media listening tools in helping you monitor critical media mentions, but before we jump in, let’s first define what a media mention is.

A media mention is a reference to a keyword across all types of media. A media mention can take many forms, for example, it can be your brand name, your competitor's brand name, an industry trend or a new product you’ve just launched. Media mentions can be both positive and negative, depending on the context of the wider conversation.

Media monitoring is the action of finding and analysing mentions containing the keyword/s you’re looking for across media types. Professionals use media monitoring tools to assist them with tracking mentions about their brand target market, competition, brand, industry etc. in real time.

There are a few ways you can track media mentions including:

Using a media monitoring tool to search for content

Different brands have different needs, and when budget is a constraint, some businesses naturally turn to options one and two since they’re free. However, like many free things, while there may not be a monetary cost, you do pay the price elsewhere. Free ways of tracking media mentions usually lack the breadth and depth of sources needed to have full visibility; and when you’re only able to see a small part of the wider picture, you lack confidence in the data too.

Missing a media mention might not sound like a big deal, but that mention could be critical to your business. Critical media mentions alter the business landscape – and not just temporarily - today’s top stories power the professional world long after the headlines hit. This is why full visibility of media mentions is so important.  When executives are aware of critical media mentions, more often than not they spark a reaction and drive strategic decisions. 

Why is it important to have full visibility of media mentions?

In a world where brand reputation can be made or slain at the tap of a tweet, concerns about visibility blind spots are valid. In addition to brand reputation management, monitoring media mentions help companies:

Optimise campaigns and amplify their message

How to ensure you never miss a media mention

If lack of media visibility stressing you out, we're here to help ensure you never miss a media mention. With Meltwater, you can see nearer and farther since we offer the most comprehensive content network globally across news, social media, print, and broadcast media. We’re committed to investing in a wide breadth of content, from national, regional, suburbia to global, multilingual, trade and niche. Our AI-powered crawlers set the industry standards, adding millions of new articles and mentions every day, expanding our current database of 1.3 trillion documents.

While our source base is extensive, that doesn’t mean you have to waste time sifting through unwanted material; we make it easy by sending you only what’s relevant and filtering out the noise. Here’s how we ensure you never miss a media mention. 

Our long-term strategic partnership with Twitter gives us unmatched access to the platform’s data. As part of the premier partnership, our clients can gain access to their “full firehose” – the company’s deepest, real-time data stream which includes 100% of all available tweets. As a full enterprise partner of Twitter, we capture approximation 350 million tweets daily and enable analysis to be built on top of the most complete data sets possible.

With over half a billion visits a month, Reddit is one of the most visited websites globally. But despite its enormous popularity, Reddit has largely escaped the attention of businesses. This is mainly due to difficulty in tracking and analyzing the network. However, thanks to our partnership with Reddit, customers can now track the network's conversations in our user-friendly analytics platform, alongside data from Twitter, Facebook, discussion forums, blogs, and other sources. Use unmatched Reddit data, combined with Meltwater industry-leading analytics, and you have a research source to understand how topics are discussed online and spot rising trends to enable more strategic and effective campaign decisions.

While the debate around whether ‘print is dying’ continues, right now, it’s clear that print isn’t dead. And if PRs are to be diligent with capturing every mention, they should consider monitoring print as a channel too. At Meltwater, we pride ourselves on being a one-stop-shop for all your media monitoring needs, that’s why we also offer printed media clippings and analytics through our trusted global, and local print monitoring partners. 

Listen up! Interest in podcasts is growing rapidly, with 32% of Americans now listening to podcasts monthly (up from 26% last year) - your media mentions monitoring strategy should reflect this industry development. To help you understand and analyze this growing industry, our new podcast monitoring capabilities allow customers to stay on top of over 25,000 podcasts globally, we’re also adding over 3,000 new podcasts to the platform every day, in over a dozen languages.

Looking for a media partner, why choose Meltwater?

Meltwater continues to invest in delivering a wide breadth of content to more than 30,000 brands worldwide. We're doing this by growing the World’s largest news and social media database. Our industry-leading AI-powered crawlers, and a network of global partnerships with content providers such as Twitter, Reddit and Dow Jones, help us capture more content than anyone else. More content means more reliable analytics that help you find the insights you need. We utilize artificial intelligence to discover content from all corners of the internet. With the most comprehensive network of content partnerships globally, Meltwater allows customers to get full-text access to premium content not freely available online, including print and broadcast content, from a library of over 1.3 trillion documents. What's more, we add over 500 million new documents every day! While this all sounds very tiring, from a client perspective, it's a smooth ride!

We understand that the modern user expects simple and elegant consumer applications. That’s why our solution prioritizes simplicity and efficiency with a sleek new intuitive navigation and design that has streamlined user experience at the core. Fill out the form to learn how you can benefit from consistent data and full media visibility.

How to Ensure You Never Miss a Media Mention

The recent innovation in artificial intelligence will fundamentally change the PR pros’ toolbox. Here we discuss how predictive analytics, sentiment analysis, and reporting will soon get an even bigger boost, allowing PR to concentrate on the work they do best.

In reality, you don’t need to wait long to see how AI can improve your personal life. From calling a rideshare to arrive in minutes or getting an answer from Siri, AI is already saving us all time and money while making our days more convenient.

But what about when it comes to our work?

When it comes to transforming industries, AI has (so far) received a bad rap for its potential to replace humans and take away jobs. And in some industries, this may very well be the reality. But in public relations and communications, our prediction is that it will be actually the opposite—that AI will pair with you to make you far more data-driven, streamline your workflows so you can focus on what you do best, and help you amplify your message at a scale far beyond what is imaginable.

Let’s take a look at three ways AI will enhance public relations, with a few you can already start using to make your work faster and more effective:

1. More Targeted, Dynamic Journalist and Social Influencer Outreach

We all know that the way we currently reach out to influencers (both social and news media) en masse leaves a lot to be desired. It’s a two-sided problem: PR professionals don’t have enough time to curate hyper-relevant lists or tailor their messaging to each influencer directly, so influencers often get hit with a barrage of generic pitches that they end up just ignoring.

Imagine a world where using an AI technique called natural language processing, we can analyze the messaging of the PR professional’s pitch to find out that it is a new product launch about golfing targeted at millennials. In the meantime, we can also analyze previous articles written by social and news influencers to find those who write often about product launches, golf, or millennial consumer tastes. We can automatically curate a list of these specific influencers to coordinate a much more relevant match and, thus, a much higher likelihood that the influencer will be interested in covering this story. Over time, as you maintain relationships with these influencers, the AI can even sort out which influencers have higher open and response rates to your pitches and suggest them for future, even more effective campaigns.

For an overview of how you can already use natural language and pitch analytics to automate pitch personalization, watch our webinar on media outreach best practices.

It’s no secret that our information world is becoming more and more visual; it’s rare these days to find important news or social posts that don’t contain images or video. In fact, think about the number of times your brand, product, or service may appear in an online photo without the article or post explicitly tagging you!

Cutting-edge image recognition technology cannot only automatically detect objects, scenes, and faces in images, but actually name the people, brands, and products within. Take this photo, for example:

Image recognition can ensure that in addition to monitoring text mentions on social media and news, you are capturing visual conversations about your brand. This is particularly helpful for visual mediums like Instagram and Pinterest, where consumers may be posting photos about highly positive or negative experiences with your company that you currently may not be aware of!

3. Automated Reporting with Smarter, More Accurate Sentiment Analysis

Today more and more PR pros are looking to make data-driven decisions based on campaign performance, social listening, and competitive benchmarking. However, building reports on these activities can require wading through data from a variety of sources, building spreadsheets, and turning charts into easily digestible graphs. Media intelligence tools are already here to automate these process. But what about the analysis and lessons learned. By detecting patterns and changes over time, AI already lets us translate trends into words, as in Meltwater’s new Insight Reports Builder (in just 15 minutes, we can give you a personalised tour!)

Tip: Read our blog about Meltwater's AI Powered PR Assistant

A key tool for understanding brand perception in any modern PR report involves looking at audience sentiment. Sentiment analysis, already an important part of any PR professional’s media intelligence toolbox, lets you gauge how customers are feeling about your product, service, or brand as a whole. However, traditional methods of sentiment analysis either rely on a ton of tedious manual work or inaccurately gauge an article based on its cumulative sentiment (think of it as essentially summing up all the positive and negative words in a document).

Luckily, new advancements in natural language processing will make sentiment analysis more accurate and actionable. We can now drill down to each specific person, product, place, or company in an article and analyze the surrounding sentence for how this writer feels particularly about this entity.

“That Subway commercial was annoying and too long, but the Doritos ad was amazing.”

Older techniques would consider this sentence negative, as there is one positive word (“amazing”) and two negative phrases (“annoying” and “too long”). But if you managed communications at Doritos, a negative tag on this sentence (if buried within one of many long articles) would’ve made you potentially miss a great endorsement and throw off your reporting. The next generation of sentiment analysis would discern that this sentence is actually positive in relation to Doritos (and a win for your team!).

As you can see artificial intelligence is an extremely helpful enhancement, not a mysterious looming threat. When we let the machines do the heavy lifting—the counting, the categorizing, the detecting—it frees us up to do even more of the strategic and creative work we signed up to do in the first place. Let’s look forward to the amazing developments to come in this field in 2018 and beyond.

Artificial Intelligence in PR: Where We Are and Where We're Headed

When a customer opens your email, they usually skim it for relevant information. Subscribers typically read the first line, check out the picture and glance at your Call-to-Action (CTA). That’s why creating a compelling CTA is so important. It’s one of the few items within your email that can draw attention and encourage the reader to act.

What makes one CTA better than another when it comes to affecting your conversion rate? We’re glad you asked. To help distinguish between good and bad calls to action, we’ve created a list of CTAs that sell, and a list that repels. At the end of each list, we explain why they work, or don’t work.

We scoured inboxes and created a list of 50 CTAs that sell, and broke them up by category.

All of the calls to action are descriptive and provide enough information for subscribers to act. You don’t even need to read the entire email to understand its purpose.

Calls to action should encourage an instant reaction. All of the CTAs above use urgent language to do just that. Words like “now,” “today” and “limited time offer” show a need to act immediately.

There are a few traditional calls to action like “shop now” and “read this post,” but the list also has quite a few original ideas too. For example, “Love to share? Please do” isn’t a call to action that you see every day. It’s okay to think out-of-the-box and be creative when you write a call to action.

Now for the not-so-great calls to action. Here’s a list of 10 CTAs that could repel your customers.

Most of the calls to action on this list don’t provide any real information. For example, what does the CTA “continue” mean? Is it encouraging a customer to continue to a website? Is a customer supposed to continue shopping? Or should a subscriber continue on to a brand’s Facebook page? There just isn’t enough information to inspire a customer to act. CTAs play an important role in the UX sphere, helping drive people to their next action but they can't get there when a challenge or obstacle is in the way. In this instance it's a lack of clarity. 

The call to action “Get our custom report” focuses on the business, not the customer. A CTA should focus on the customer. In this case, it’s better to explain how the report helps a customer. For example, “Download now to increase your traffic” defines the value of the report to the customer. By getting specific about what you're offering them in exchange for their action, they can progress to the next stage and feel like they're important to your brand as opposed to another number, while you focus on your business. 

Some of the calls to action are just bad habits. You don’t need to tell customers to “click here” anymore; everyone understands the concept of clicking on a link.

You want customers to act quickly so why would you ever use a CTA that says “get it later?”

You don’t need to write out your entire website address. Instead, just create a CTA that says, “Learn more on our website" and link to it appropriately. This will help you in terms of search results, which factor in the words you hyperlink from various channels. 

Any sell sheet without an effective CTA is missing a huge opportunity. These simple yet targeted phrases or links are directly responsible for encouraging your audience to take the next step toward becoming a buyer of your product. Without a CTA, your sell sheet will amount to little more than an unprofitable writing exercise. Here are some tips that I have developed from my product marketing experiences that will help improve the response rate to your sell sheet:

Put your CTA in the appropriate place on your sell sheet. On a product’s sell sheet, the CTA will typically be included with the company’s information, and with the physical details of the product. It might be included in a list of items, or in a separate text box, or simply lined-up on the bottom of the page.

Keep CTA text short, simple, and actionable

It doesn’t need to be long or complicated. Keep it as simple and attention-grabbing as possible. Your buyers don’t have time to be wasting trying to figure our what to do to get more information about your product.

On the printed version of your sell sheet, make sure that the links are short and easy to follow, not long and complicated. On the PDF version of your sell sheet, make sure that all of the links are live and that readers can click-through. You can even incorporate CTA buttons on PDFs, pop-ups or opt-in pages. 

Don’t just send them to your landing page

On the sell sheets for my books, for example, I simply tell them that my books are available from “B&T” and “Ingram”. Every book buyer at every library, university book store and library, and every bookstore retailer knows exactly what this means, and within minutes can order my books. I also list “Amazon” so that the general public can get more information and buy my books.

I also offer an email address for more information, as well as my publisher’s website address. All very simple and effective. Your users don't have to be a website visitor of yours in order to acquire your products. Plus, it's easier for them to order your product from a third-party sometimes and that's okay. Website traffic isn't the be all and end all if it's not the best place for the user to go to. 

The Meltwater Blog

What Is Purpose-Driven Marketing?

5 Questions to Ask Before Your Brand Joins a Conversation

Transforming PR Campaign Management

How to Ensure You Never Miss a Media Mention

Artificial Intelligence in PR: Where We Are and Where We're Headed

Calls to Action: 50 That Sell and 10 That Repel

4 Brands Getting Content Marketing Right

Research Reveals Secrets of Social Sharing

How to Win Back Your Customers After a Bad Experience

Boost your Media Coverage? Ideas for Creating News Stories Journalists Will Love

How Brands Should Apologize

Optimize Supply Chain Risk Management with Media Intelligence