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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

Creating a good public relations campaign requires a strict adherence to timelines, meeting milestones and gathering of necessary collateral. It is also even better to stay alert and be wary of potential red flags that could lead to a PR Crisis – especially when they are often unexpected. 

In the case of the Samsung Galaxy Fold, everything seemed to be going according to plan. The Galaxy Fold would be the tech giant’s — and the world’s — first foldable phone in the market, promising mobile entertainment on a bigger screen with flexibility. 

Just like every other campaign, Samsung offered news agencies and tech magazines a first look at the phone. Journalists were given review models a week before the official product launch. In return, Samsung hoped to get a good word out on the Galaxy Fold.

However, Samsung’s first foldable phone couldn’t fold. Journalists complained about malfunctioning phone screens and did their job telling the world about it. 

Videos of cracked screens flickering away went viral on social media within minutes. That alone was damning enough to convince the world that the Galaxy Fold was too good to be true. 

Could this all have been nipped in the bud before it exploded out of proportion? Is there no moving forward after this? While Samsung takes its time fixing what needs to be done, there’s much to take away from the situation.

Good media prides itself on being extremely up-to-date, cutting through the chatter and sieving out the latest trends to write about. Similarly, a good PR agency has to be equally on-the-ball, if not more so, in order to manage the public’s perception of a campaign or product. 

During the week before the Galaxy Fold’s official launch, Samsung was ill-timed in their response:

Problems with the phone surfaced after just two days of use. It took Samsung a few more days to recall all of its review units, cutting short a full 10-day loan period for journalists. At this point, news of such problems was being published. 

They weren’t clear about what went wrong

Journalists blamed vague instructions on using the phone. Some removed a plastic film off the screen which was essential in keeping the Galaxy Fold foldable, mistaking it as a run-of-the-mill screen protector. Others had undetermined issues. Nobody knew what was going on, and Samsung gave little clarification. 

They weren’t aware of growing negative sentiment and uncertainty

The Galaxy Fold came with a pretty hefty price tag and it wasn’t helping with product perception, with the phone malfunctioning before hitting the stores. After the incident with the media, the official launch date was delayed indefinitely. In the meantime, stores were cancelling pre-orders for the Galaxy Fold. Several media outlets labelled the Galaxy Fold as frivolous and an idea that was ‘doomed’ from the start. Samsung launched new products during this interim period but hasn’t really gotten back to addressing issues about the Fold. 

Samsung’s wager on the Galaxy Fold was a make or break opportunity. It would put Samsung up as a formidable trendsetter in the world of consumer technology. The publicised failures of the foldable phone meant little to the company’s overall revenue but were damaging possibilities of improving brand sentiment. Coupled with the Galaxy Note 7 battery explosions of 2016, Samsung had a point to prove on its reliability and was risking consumer confidence.  

What could have been done better, and is there recourse to the current situation? 

Ideally, a PR team is expected to tackle such situations ASAP. The team should be in full activation in the field to spot developments and keep a check on social sentiment. The key is to identify problems before further escalation.

But crises always occur when least expected. Rather than react to incoming storms of bad press, it is much easier to formulate a response when one’s already plugged into what people are saying. Having eyes on specific media outlets or influential voices provide comprehensive understanding of the crisis at hand and help in detecting potential storms before they brew too long. 

While traditional media monitoring is absolutely necessary, it is also time-consuming. In crucial moments such as Samsung’s Galaxy Fold screen issue, every minute is significant to PR professionals for coming up with actionable plans. A PR team cannot control products or reviews. They can listen, learn, and act accordingly – and it’s wise to arm themselves with responsive tools for such purposes.

Things to consider before selecting a media monitoring tool:

Is it armed with access to multiple news sources such as newspapers, magazines, blogs, local forums and social media?

Besides Instagram and Facebook, is the tool able to track social media platforms such as WeChat?

How often are they innovating their service? E.g., adding new channels or upgrading features?

Is it easily accessible on the go? Is it mobile-friendly?

Can alerts be created for specific trigger keywords?
 

On top of being able to do all of the above, Meltwater provides access to over 300,000 news sources and updates users with news on a regional and global scale. PR professionals can simply look out for specific keywords or media, allowing more time to craft PR strategies.

In the case of the Samsung Galaxy Fold, journalists took to social media first to demonstrate flaws before writing up their reviews on their media platforms. The virality of such content contributed to the extent of the crisis as well. Meltwater’s Social Echo feature is one way to spot the virality of an article on social platforms. With this feature, you can easily track the engagement related to the article on Facebook, as well as the number of times the article has been tweeted or retweeted on Twitter.

While there’s no need to stay fixated on screens for constant media updates, anxious PR professionals can remain calm with Meltwater’s notification system. Alerts on various topics and keywords can be created and sent to the user throughout the day, in real time, via dashboards that are intuitive, to know what’s going on. 

Though the Galaxy Fold’s screen problem is unexpected, fast responding media monitoring could still help set off protocols in addressing issues that were sounded out as well as to stave off pending negative reviews and news.

Solution 2: Streamline your data and consider your strategy

Now that there’s an understanding of general media sentiment across the Internet, important questions must be addressed. What are the specific issues that are hotly discussed now? And how are competitors reacting to the situation?

Before laying down any strategies, consider categorising data for a better overview of the situation at hand. Dashboards allow users to customise data that has come through the platform and analyse it with the help of various metrics. 

For Samsung’s case, a combination of metrics indicating the range of sentiment, top social posts, topic momentum and story sources can help paint a brief, yet practical outlook on the crisis. This information is further customisable in various forms such as pie charts, word clouds or tables for better understanding. Comparisons can also be drawn between social media and news sentiment, for instance, allowing Samsung to pinpoint its target audience and issues to address when it relaunches the Galaxy Fold. 

A dashboard on Meltwater’s Media Monitoring tool

Is there still a public relations future for the Galaxy Fold?

Granted, this isn’t the first time Samsung has had to explain itself for faulty electronics. Exploding Galaxy Note batteries had the brand on edge, though they have since further pushed for better quality management – along with a slew of smartly-designed campaigns and videos to boost confidence in their product.

Despite the delayed reaction to what most would perceive as a blowout disaster, Samsung has once again proved that it is listening to its audiences. Noting responses that people would mistakenly pull out the protective film on phone screens, Samsung promised that it would look to create better messaging in its packaging. 

It’s a small step, considering that troubleshooting works for the Galaxy Fold is still in the works. On a public relations front, Samsung has to address the more significant issue: how is Samsung going to rebuild confidence in a product that had already failed before it even entered the market?

It may seem like a dead end, but with a sharp ear on the ground, this is one that still has a chance to develop into something successful. Samsung has still yet to determine another official launch – competitors are no doubt keeping a close eye on this. As it prepares for its next chance at pushing the Galaxy Fold, there’s still time to listen and prepare for a relevant and swift response. 

Samsung Galaxy Fold PR Disaster: An Embarrassment Or Opportunity?

On social media, a single incident can quickly create a crisis and be detrimental to a brand – not just in terms of perception but also in sales – which will be remembered for years.

While a company can try to improve its brand reputation through content and branding campaigns, the brand perception is ultimately shaped by the opinions and experiences of consumers. Marketers must, therefore, be extra vigilant to protect their brand when a crisis strikes, not only during but also once the crisis period has passed.

Before deciding your course of action in terms of crisis communication, it is essential to measure the impact of the crisis on the reputation of your brand, in order to be able to respond effectively. It is therefore essential to measure:

What is being said about your brand during this crisis on social networks

Perceptions of the brand during and after the crisis

Top Tip: For insights on how to navigate a world drowning in Fake News, access of free, on-demand Webinar on How to Protect Your Reputation in a Fake News World and learn more about brand reputation measurement.

In a crisis situation, it is therefore very important to react quickly and pay attention to every detail. A crisis watch is essential in order to alert us to the feeling of our customers, to guide our communication strategies and to enable us to identify new media to target.

So we can start by including a watch on both the press and social networks. Even if your brand does not have a great presence on social media, these are often the place where the crises are discussed, so it is important to stay informed of what is said.

How many messages and articles related to your crisis have been published? How much of your crisis does it occupy compared to your usual media coverage? What days did the message peaks take place?

The case of H&M Mexico is a good example. The brand experienced a global crisis in early 2018 when it put on sale a  designer sweatshirt disagreeing with the brand’s diversity values. Meltwater’s social media monitoring tool to analyze the coverage of this crisis at a local level allowed them to follow what the journalists said and react accordingly.

In times of crisis, your negative hedge will be much larger than usual. The challenge will be to return this rate of negative mentions to a normal rate. It is therefore essential to monitor your brand’s sentiment score throughout crisis management.

Following the evolution of sentiment over time will allow you to identify and manage peaks of negative mentions, which you can explore to identify relays and key topics related to your crisis. You will also be able to follow the impact of your crisis communication on your web mentions day by day.

The keywords contain clues as to how people perceive your brand during and after a crisis. Use  a social media monitoring tool  to quickly gather branding information so you can do it:

Identify the key topics: What are the common concerns raised? Do people associate your brand with the crisis?

Related Hashtags: It is not uncommon for customers to band together by labeling their complaints under a derogatory hashtag. Keep track of these hashtags over time for more information beyond brand endorsements or customer messages on social media pages about your brand.

In order to address the most appropriate response, it is important to understand what the media and the general public feel about your crisis situation.

What are the most common topics? Distinguish the impact of press and of social media because the content broadcast on these two channels can be very different.

This indicator will then be interesting to follow during your crisis management, to make sure that your answer is correctly integrated by your community, and to adjust if necessary.

Who are the main broadcasters of your crisis? Are they detractors or ambassadors?

By identifying media and influencers about your business, you can prioritize your communication. Determine the best way to show appreciation to the heroes and positive spokespeople during the duration of the crisis.

Which social media publications related to your crisis have the most impact (engagement, sharing, etc.)?

You will be able to identify influencers who are relaying your crisis, and opinions that arouse the most consensus in relation to your situation.

Does your crisis have a very local, national or international reach?

Because every content can be critical in times of crisis, it’s important to have a news feed updated at your fingertips in real-time.

Identify the impact of the crisis on business and customers

Of all the measures that companies need to focus on, the customer response to a crisis is ultimately the most important.

The feedback that customer relations teams receive in terms of calls or emails is the most direct feedback on the potential impact of a crisis on the current financial results.

Depending on the type of business, customers may be the best public to filter the noise they hear. If they ask questions, you will have a clear point of reference as to the extent of the problem you may be facing.

For consumer brands, customer engagement can be measured simply by the decision not to buy a product, so tracking sales in real-time is essential.

The conclusion to be drawn here is that the measures must be adapted to the type of business and relationship with the customer.

It is also important to monitor the impact of your crisis communication on the perception of the brand after the crisis has been minimised.

If your brand has completely recovered from the crisis and customers have forgiven and forgotten.

Whether it is appropriate to launch new content or branding campaign, or if your PR team is facing the crisis again.

Evaluate the “consequences” taking into account the time needed for the discussions related to the crisis to stabilise or diminish.

If the crisis is among the most important web search keywords related to your brand.

As for the case of Wonder Woman with ThinkThin, with their promotional operation co-branded. Unfortunately for thinkThin, it’s their brand name that has caused a disagreement with the audience’s expectations of the film. Presumably, if their bars had been named thinkHealthy, there would have been no near-crisis.

The mainstream media and social media condemned the film for about a week, and by the time it was released in June 2017, we found almost no mention of this ill-conceived partnership.

And although they did not cancel the campaign, neither brand promoted it on social media. Wonder Woman has become a huge blockbuster and neither brand has been boycotted.

Rebuilding your brand’s reputation after a crisis requires tact and good timing. It is therefore essential to write a crisis report in which you will analyze and mention the plan implemented to minimize the crisis. This will help you to:

Identify influencers who have stood up for your brand and who could become your spokespeople in your post-crisis campaign.

Detect key complaints that should be addressed in official communications

Determine whether your brand should continue as usual or better communicate by taking corrective action, based on the volume of crisis-related discussions, conversation keywords, and sentiment about your brand.

If you’d like to learn more about how social media monitoring tools can help you determine a crisis and keep your brand image up to scratch; request a free demo of the Meltwater tool.

How to Measure the Impact of a Crisis on Your Brand Image

When a very public mistake or mishap occurs within your organisation, a public apology – and a commitment to right the wrong – is in order. 

A swift mea culpa, coupled with some affirmative action to make good and ensure that the likelihood of such an event occurring again is minimised, is the correct approach and will generally help an organisation win back the favour of its customers. Moreover, if the response can be injected with a little humour (where appropriate of course!), so much the better. 

Here we have highlighted examples of winners and losers when it comes to public apologies in the aftermath of a PR crisis. 

Last year, KFC went through a highly publicised crisis when “operational issues” with new delivery provider DHL caused a mass shortage of chicken at its fast food outlets across the UK. One of the most bizarre consequences of this was police forces in London and Manchester having to issue statements urging the public to stop contacting the emergency services about the shortage, as it was “not a police matter”! 

KFC responded by taking out full-page ads in the national press, featuring one of its famous buckets with the company name rearranged to read ‘FCK’ instead of ‘KFC’, to reflect the mood of its chicken-deprived customers. It also acknowledged that “a chicken restaurant without any chicken is not ideal.” This humorous response to what was a serious situation for the company was very well received, and no lasting damage was done to the brand. 

One of the highest profile cock-ups to take place anywhere in the world in recent years was the Oscars blunder in 2017, when an envelope mix up resulted in Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway mistakenly announcing ‘La La Land’ as Best Picture winner, when the actual winner was ‘Moonlight.’

Beatty had a duplicate card with the winner of Best Actress, which had been awarded to Emma Stone for La La Land immediately prior to the Best Picture announcement. Beatty paused as he read the card out but continued anyway, wrongly announcing La La Land as the winner. The La La Land production team and cast were already on stage collecting the prize and delivering their speeches before a representative from accountancy firm PwC came onto the stage to inform them of the error. 

PwC was in charge of supervising the counting of the ballots for each award, as well as the presentations on the night. Following the error, which could scarcely be more public, given that around 30 million people were watching it live in the US and many millions more worldwide, PwC issued a statement saying “We sincerely apologise to Moonlight, La La Land, Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, and Oscar viewers for the error that was made during the award announcement for Best Picture.” 

PwC added that it deeply regretted that the incident occurred and said it appreciated the grace with which the nominees, the Academy, and the host Jimmy Kimmel handled the situation.

Adding to the embarrassment felt by PwC in the wake of the blunder was the fact that in the week leading up to that year’s Oscars ceremony, PwC’s Martha Ruiz and Brian Cullinan, who were responsible for overseeing the counting of the votes and are the only two people who know all the winners before they are announced, gave an interview to the BBC in which they outlined its “watertight system” for ensuring that the awards presentations pass without a hitch.   

Following the ceremony, PwC assumed full responsibility for the blunder and promised to fully investigate what went wrong with the system to prevent such an error occurring in the future. Given that the profile of the event could barely be higher, that PwC have emerged from it with their reputation fairly intact is a credit to them and the steps they took in its aftermath.     

Facebook has a long history of introducing features that ride roughshod over its users’ privacy then apologising only in the aftermath of public outcry. Indeed, the very genesis of Facebook, called Facemash, which was launched in 2003, a year before it evolved into Facebook, was a site that lifted pictures of Harvard students from the university’s intranet without their consent and invited other students to rate them on their “hotness.”

In the intervening years, Facebook has repeatedly failed to protect user data and privacy, despite offering assurances that it would do so. 

One of the most egregious instances of this was the Cambridge Analytica scandal, when it emerged early in 2018 that the political data firm had harvested the personal data of up to 87 million Facebook users without their knowledge or consent and used it for political purposes in the 2016 US presidential campaign. 

When the scandal first broke, Facebook vigorously and indignantly defended itself, arguing that people had consented by virtue of their privacy settings. But the backlash only intensified when it was reported that Facebook’s privacy settings were buried across 20 pages of the site, and that Cambridge Analytica were one of many organisations guilty of exploiting that by harvesting Facebook users’ data without their knowledge. 

Eventually, Facebook’s chief privacy officer said Facebook would move all the privacy settings into one place (without offering an explanation as to why they weren’t in the first place), something Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised to do “within weeks” of another privacy breach eight years previously but failed to follow through on. 

Zuckerberg then went on an apology tour, giving interviews to a variety of global media outlets in which he eventually apologised for the privacy breach but still qualified it by claiming that Facebook cares about its users, and used his soapbox to disparage other tech companies. 

Zuckerberg frequently refers to Facebook’s users as the “Facebook community”, but a community typically has rights and makes decisions for the good of the group as a whole, so by that rationale, Facebook’s users are not a community, they are a user group, because as majority shareholder, Zuckerberg calls the shots and the users essentially have to like it or lump it, and that shows no sign of changing anytime soon.   

In 2017, Pepsi drew a barrage of negative publicity for an ad featuring Kendall Jenner, in which she quelled a riot by offering a police officer a can of Pepsi, a gesture which elicited cheers from the onlooking protestors. 

Given that the US was at the time (and still is) mired in controversy over the killing by police of African American youths, and the Black Lives Matter movement was gaining momentum with protests over perceived unlawful killings happening all over the country, the idea that a protest could be quelled by a can of soda was tone deaf to say the least, and highly offensive to many. 

Following the ad’s release, Pepsi was eviscerated on social media, as they were seen to be capitalising on the Black Lives Matter movement to sell soft drink. The daughter of civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Bernice King, even weighed in, posting on Twitter “If only daddy would have known about the power of Pepsi.” 

Pepsi eventually pulled the ad, but a few months later, Pepsi’s CEO, Indra Nooyi continued to defend the ad, demonstrating that the company still didn’t get what all the fuss was about. 

PR Apologies: Winners and Losers

Meltwater is a global company with 55 offices around the world. We are interested in supporting and partnering with our clients on a local level. From sourcing hyper-local editorial and broadcast publications for our global content database to support our clients in one of a dozen languages, building a partnership with our clients is always top of mind.

As Meltwater grows, we want to ensure we can connect with our clients and continue to partner with you. Many of you have already taken advantage of our in-app chat in your local language. Across the globe, work is increasingly done at different times, on mobile and online. We recognize our clients’ work isn’t limited to the normal 9-5 work day. Our clients need answers on their own terms — and that means 24 hour support, 7 days a week. So, we’re proud to announce three chat channels our clients can use to connect with Meltwater, 24/7:

Additionally, we now surface relevant articles and in-app tutorials while you are in the Meltwater Media Intelligence application. These articles and in-app tutorials allow you to learn when it works for you.

At Meltwater, we pride ourselves on being an ongoing partner to our 30,000 clients. Whether jumping on a call to assist in creating an internal newsletter or report for your boss or setting up new employees on the Meltwater platform, we want our clients to have personal and open communication with Meltwater.  With these new chat channels, our clients can communicate with Meltwater 24/7. 

Introducing a New Way to Partner with Our Clients

We've posted before about how to get the most out of all the work you put into creating high-impact visual content. And how companies are making the most of highly visual online channels. Here are some great tips on a wide range of visual content and how to make sure it gets your audience's attention.

It’s easier than ever to create and share content.

In fact, we all create and share content regularly for both personal or business reasons. This simply means that there is a vast amount of professional and amateur content out there for everyone’s consumption. It’s crowded.

The result is that it can be quite difficult to catch the attention of an audience when you need to. If you want to catch your audience’s attention with content, one of the best ways to do so is by making it visual.

Visual content has proven to be among the most efficient and effective ways to communicate a message. It is in fact, your best chance to go viral if you want to gain the attention of an audience at scale.

So if visual content is the best way for you to stand out, how do you best leverage its power? What types of visual content work?

Before I answer that question, let’s take a step back…

What do you stand to gain from creating great visual content?

The article ‘5 Ways Content Marketing Can Benefit You’ outlines what you stand to gain from using better content marketing.

Become recognized as a leader in your industry

Give you an advantage over your competitors

When using content marketing, visual content is mainly used to create visual cues that complement the information or message you are trying to present. The idea is to make the information;

With this in mind, there are several different types of visual media content that you can use in different circumstances to effectively convey your message.

It is important to also mention that depending on your objective and the scenario in which you are delivering the content, different types of visual content will be more suitable for your specific case in point.

Below are the main types of visual content, which if used appropriately can easily help you go viral.

The different types of visual content that can go viral

The epitome of visual content is the infographic, and it should therefore be a great place to begin our list.

The infographic crystalizes a lot of information into one easily viewable visual that is less intimidating and easier to understand for any viewer or reader.

In fact, in the social media realm, infographics are liked and shared 3 times more than other any other type of content. Additionally, 60% of content marketers are predicted to use infographics in 2016 as compared to last year.

Probably one of the main reasons for this is that using infographics in content marketing is known to increase profits by as much as 12%.

These are all valid reasons for why infographics are essential, but here are an additional 10 reasons why infographics are important.

Infographics are best used when you have a lot of statistical data that you want your audience to visualize, or if you want to breakdown a lot of ‘hard-to-understand’ content into a more understandable and easily viewable format.

Photos and images are important for several reasons. For brands, they allow audiences to put a face on a brand and therefore make your brand more relatable. Additionally, using photos to show ‘behind the scenes’ of a brand can help audiences better understand and become more curious about a brand.

Photos can also be very helpful in showing off your products and services. In this case, the use of photos is especially useful if you want to show your products in action. This is probably one of the biggest contributing factors as to why 90% of the general public say that images influence their buy-in and purchasing decisions.

When using photos and imagery, be sure to reflect your brands unique selling point. Additionally, be sure to capture the brand’s values through color imagery, composition and so on. If you use relevant images, it has been found that you will be able to drive 94% more views than if you don’t have any images in your content. Plus, 65% of the information in images is more likely to be retained after 3 days.

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