You may remember the clipping service: diligent people scouring newspapers and magazines for the keywords you had entered. Every week, you would receive a stack of copies in the mail of what the national press had written about your company or, for instance, 'process automation'. You could do something with that. But times have emphatically changed. A weekly update is now far from adequate and Facebook, Twitter, Klacht.nl, Kassa!, Radar Forum, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs, forums and news sites have now become more important than traditional media. Online monitoring tools capitalise on this. These tools collect data from more than four hundred thousand digital sources in the Dutch language and know how to correctly filter out the relevant information for our clients.
Online monitoring gives you instant insight into what is being said online about a certain topic. This way, you not only keep a sharp eye on your own organisation, but also on a competitor, the industry, a trend, etc. Moreover, the monitoring tool can also be set up to alert you when, at a certain moment, far more messages are being written about a subject than usual, or far fewer than usual. This way, the Dutch police gain insight into hooligans' activities and many of Capital Advertising's relations gain insight into the market.
Smart algorithms
Rather unique is the fact that such analysis tools can fully automatically determine the sentiment surrounding a particular development. With smart algorithms, all positive and negative statements about a particular topic on the web are automatically recognised and characterised as positive, neutral or negative. So ambassadors on the web can be distinguished from critics. And so the user immediately knows what to respond to. From a monitoring system, immediate responses can be made, making webcare closer than ever. But more can be done. We also use these tools successfully to monitor campaigns, for crisis communication and to make comparisons with the competition.
Companies are even able to spot sales opportunities based on the data we provide them with in this way. After all, the monitoring tool provides messages at market, brand or product level and can also link geographical data to the data, for example.
How is your brand being thought, tweeted and blogged about?
A wealth of information
Current communication has changed a lot with the advent of social media. Users of your product or service share experiences on social media and influence each other. With a positive, but certainly also a negative opinion. This forces you to excel in your business performance, but also to listen carefully to what the user wants. People these days can express their dissatisfaction anywhere and everywhere. If you are not aware of that, there can be nasty consequences. On the other hand, the internet offers a wealth of information that, if filtered correctly, can also be put to particularly good commercial use. So there are pull and push factors that make a closer look at social media analytics tools more than useful.