Social media and online forums have become a major part of our day-to-day lives and an indispensable means of communication and the distribution of information. Ireland’s largest media monitoring and evaluation company, Kantar Media, provides monitoring across press, broadcast, online and social media outlets for a wide variety of firms.
IFTN spoke with Social Media and Marketing Manager Roseanna Ellis about what Kantar Media does. A number of IFTN readers' questions were posed to Roseanna about how Kantar’s work relates to the Irish film and television industry.
What are the advantages of officially monitoring social media or internet monitoring?
“When monitoring any type of media, the benefits should be two-fold: you should gain insight and save time. When it comes to online and social monitoring, you’re dealing with high volumes of data and a broad scope of coverage, finding one mention from the billions and billions of sites out there can be like looking for a needle in a haystack!
“Our aim, when working with social media clients, is to allow them to view all topics that are relevant to them in a single location, with built-in insight tools, so no time is wasted collecting mentions from a myriad of different sources. By listening to the buzz around your campaign, you can identify and engage with your audience, influence potential audiences and analyse the success of your promotional efforts, allowing you to refine and re-focus your campaign to effectively target it to gain maximum impact.”
How does Social Media monitoring help me in developing my brand, i.e. film title, TV format, etc. - what insights does monitoring give me?
“From a research perspective, social media monitoring will give you a good idea of how the landscape is currently. You can monitor any topic you want so if you’re thinking of a specific TV format, for example, you could monitor shows in a similar format and judge the reaction. You’ll receive insights such as
- sentiment - if the commentary positive or negative
- influencer identification - who are the people driving the conversation in your area and how likely are they to influence your audience
- reach - how many people are seeing the content generated around the topic you’re monitoring
- and location - where are your audience based and where do they ‘hang out’ online
“You’ll be able to identify key topics that are of importance to your audience too. Using this information, you can create an informed plan for your brand, identify who to target, what their likes and dislikes are, if you’re using a hashtag is it unique enough, what platforms should you use and so on.”
I’m releasing a feature film next year – what would you recommend in terms of monitoring the development of interest in an audience in the lead up to a release?
“When it comes to monitoring a new release, we’d always advocate a cross-media approach. The different media types now often inform and create content for each other – think of the ice bucket challenge, for example, a social media phenomenon that was reported on across press and broadcast. The lines are becoming more and more blurred, people can rarely identify the source that they’ve received their news from - was it online, on radio, TV?
“For something like a film where word of mouth will drive an audience, social media is definitely a key source you should monitor. Use this to ‘listen’ to the reaction from other media sources. If there is a review on TV or radio, look to your social monitoring and see if commentary has increased after the piece airs. Likewise, if you do some promotional work, use your monitoring, firstly to see where it lands in traditional media and secondly, to see the impact that has in the online buzz.
“Social listening can allow you to engage with and influence your audience too. Used correctly, it can bring your film to life. Earlier this year, I went to see ‘Frank’ and tweeted about it afterwards. Their social media team were obviously listening closely to the online commentary and they replied to me as a character from the film. Not only did it make me smile, it also pushed me to tell more people about it (both on and offline!). It was simple but very effective.”
Can I monitor mentions of my brand on Social Media that may not necessarily be tagged to my page?
“Absolutely! Our social media monitoring is keyword-based, meaning you can supply us with any words you want to track – whether that is your brand name, a competitor or an industry topic – across all public social media pages. Our social media team will then work with you to add any possible variations of these words, taking into account the use of slang or the creation of hashtags, and then activate your search.
“The system will then capture any mention of your keywords, whether these are on or off your page, whether or not your handle is mentioned in the comment, and so on. Social media monitoring will allow you to see mentions beyond what you’d usually see as the moderator of a page, i.e., the mentions that you wouldn’t receive notifications for.”
What platforms are Kantar able to monitor on Social Media and can the results be broken down to demographic?
“The scope for online and social media monitoring is enormous! We currently monitor over 3 billion sites and add 900,000 new posts into our system every day. The only limitation when it comes to monitoring social media is that it is only possible to track what is publicly available – if a user’s profile is set to private then no monitoring tool can reach the content they generate. While it’s frustrating not being able to reach all content, I suppose, as users, we should take comfort in the fact that Big Brother hasn’t completely taken over!
“In terms of breaking down the content, there are endless ways to slice and dice your data to garner information on your audience. The best news is that you don’t need to be a statistics whizz to do it. While our systems allow you to download your data and crunch the numbers, we also provide dashboards with pre-loaded graphs and charts so you can see your key performance indicators at a glance.”
Internet monitoring is obviously a global service – how does Kantar identify all monitoring in different regions of the world, do you have a localised team per region?
“What’s brilliant about the internet is that it puts global information at our fingertips. When it comes to monitoring, that ease of access means that a physical presence in a country isn’t necessary to capture the relevant online news there. Currently, we have the ability to monitor content across 190 countries in 57 languages. We use specialised web spider technology to trawl online news and social media sites 24/7 – so we can provide clients with relevant content as it happens, regardless of location or time differences.
“In some cases, this can result in a massive amount of data, which can be overwhelming for some users. As a result, we have localised hubs around Europe to provide training and support. We’ve found it also helps to have a local knowledge of the media landscape to have a better understanding of potential issues. It is also possible to restrict your search to provide content from specific countries, making your results more refined, easy to understand and instantly actionable... which, at the end of the day, is what you want from your monitoring – that you’re able to identify and interact with your audience as things happen.”
Fine out more about Kantar Media on newsintelligence.kantarmedia.ie .
