Technology’s role in breaking down organizational silos

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Where are your target customers? TikTok? LinkedIn? Instagram?

The answer is likely all of the channels above — and several more.

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Consumers are discussing and learning about your brand, products, and competitors across a variety of channels, from TV to social media, newspapers to podcasts. The fragmentation of the media landscape has changed the way that consumers access information about an organization and engage with brands.

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The challenge for organizations is how best to  understand and analyze consumer behavior across all of these disjointed touchpoints.

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Johnny Vance, Vice President at Meltwater, a global leader in social and media intelligence, has seen first-hand how the fragmented media landscape has created a shift in the way that organizations are restructuring departments and teams to respond to this challenge.

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“In recent years there has been this huge paradigm shift in the way that public relations, communications, and marketing teams are thought about. And this is largely being driven by the way that individuals consume news and information.”

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He explains how PR, communications, and marketing departments, which have been traditionally siloed within an organization, are now converging. “Companies need an integrated and aligned approach, across news and social media, with workflows that allow them to collaborate and ensure that everyone is on the same page.”

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Facilitating collaboration between internal departments has never been more important for organizations than today. When a social media message can knock percentage points off a company’s share price, businesses need to be on the front foot of social media conversations, not playing catch up.

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Meltwater, which was founded in Oslo, Norway in 2001 as the world's first online media monitoring company, has evolved the capabilities of its social and media intelligence platforms to help organizations adopt an omnichannel approach to communications and consumer intelligence.

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Kristin Pitman, Head of Enterprise Client Success at Meltwater, elaborates on the industry shifts Johnny Vance pointed out by explaining how Meltwater’s technology is helping global brands get their teams on the same page, saying, “The main benefit of the Meltwater platform is that it can service the needs of both PR and comms as well as marketing and social professionals. Before, these departments lived in silos and were using different products and platforms to work; now we have an all-in-one solution that allows these teams to collaborate.”

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Global brands are asking themselves questions like: Who is it talking about us online? Where are people mentioning us? Which messages are critical to our brand? This data can’t remain siloed.

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“Our technology helps customers better understand the what, where, who, and why behind consumer behavior,” says Johnny Vance.

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For a company like global cosmetics brand Shiseido, communication with customers is a two-way street. Amit Naik, Global Head of Analytics at Shiseido explains how Meltwater has made a difference:

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“Before we brought in Meltwater, we had 20 different operating platforms around the world. A unified platform helped us to set global governance and KPIs, and get everyone on the same page around that single [customer] record. We need to understand what our competitors and customers are doing to tap into trends that inform our product R&D. For us, Meltwater actually helps us improve our campaigns and customer interactions on a daily basis.”

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For the PR industry, the insights offered by Meltwater show the value of PR, which unlike their metric heavy counterparts in marketing, was traditionally hard to quantify. Davitha Tiller, Executive Vice President, Social and Integration at Red Havas says that she needs to demonstrate the impact that her company has for a client:

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“Our approach at Red Havas is all about redefining what a PR agency is and does...Meltwater really helped us to put a methodology around a custom scoring system we developed, bringing key metrics and measurements that we can report on.”

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The Meltwater approach has also been critical in the financial services space, where trust is paramount. Evan Escobedo, Global Lead of Media Monitoring Analytics and Insight at Western Union, explains:

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“Using data to look at a campaign and understand the effectiveness and potential risks when people are talking about Western Union across all these different mediums is critical to us. By using Meltwater as a platform, we're able to not just aggregate all that data into one place, but visualize it. Being able to interpret how that data aligns to our business priorities is tremendously helpful to us.”

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Johnny Vance says that the use of data will only become more important and there will be a widening gap between the businesses that act on data and those that don’t:

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“Businesses will continue to embrace technology to become more data and insights driven. We aim to help our customers measure and manage their impact across paid, earned and owned media across both news and social.”

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In other words, Meltwater’s all-in-one solution helps organizations break down silos to build a converged media strategy that includes paid, earned, shared and owned media. This way, when a business has a problem that could damage its brand reputation or share price, they are the first to know about it — not the last.

To learn more about Meltwater, visit meltwater.com.