Interview with Robert Stalmach, CEO of Newspoint, a media monitoring company in Poland.
Hi Robert, how have brands' media monitoring needs changed since the social media revolution?
Diametrically. Social media has become a key communication channel for brands. Today, the internet is largely user-generated content. 2/3 of internet users consider the opinions of other internet users to be very important and consider them in their purchasing decisions. These phenomena are changing the way brands communicate with their recipients. Users are distrustful of information obtained from brands. They prefer to be guided by the suggestions of people they trust.
Therefore, since marketing budgets are transferred to social platforms, media monitoring must also focus on this area of data. Most companies already know that they cannot afford to ignore opinions about their brands on the internet, especially on social media. It took just a few serious communication crises for brands to realize the need for constant monitoring of social media. The growing popularity of social media translates into a rapid increase in data. This creates new analytical needs. There is a growing need for information analysis - observation and aggregation are not enough.
What are the expectations of Newspoint customers?
Very varied; each has different business needs and goals. We provide comprehensive, global media monitoring and influencer analytics services. We offer data from 75 languages and 170 markets. We structure this information and present it to our clients as a useful source of knowledge. We provide tools that enable clients to gain an information advantage, e.g. in managing communication strategies or responding to image crises. We help our clients to interact with users of various types of media, analyze data and draw conclusions from it.
Therefore, the expectations of our clients are expressed through diversified goals, the achievement of which is possible thanks to the analysis of data from media monitoring. The elements of the process include obtaining information from various sources, structuring the collected data, and drawing management conclusions.
What less obvious new ways are there for brands to use media monitoring data?
New applications go hand in hand with market trends. In the increasingly demanding labor market, using media monitoring in employer branding activities is gaining popularity. Changes in the allocation of marketing budgets thus increase the need to analyze the effectiveness of influencer marketing and the match of opinion leaders in different segments.
Thanks to media monitoring, many brands want to capture information about trends that can be translated into products sold in stores. For example, house developers consider the results of online opinion analysis when making decisions about the location and facilities of housing estates.
In addition, the importance of tools such as ours in capturing sales leads is growing. Companies from industries such as financial, insurance and transport services use media monitoring directly to reach potential customers.
How crucial is fast access to data in media monitoring?
Fast access to data is crucial in a world of incredible growth rates. The current pace of content growth is never seen before in history. When communication gains such a tremendous pace, the timing of data sharing is crucial. This is a huge challenge and task for us as a company whose goal is to provide the most advanced tools for monitoring, research, and media analysis. The speed of reaction to the content appearing on the Internet is a key factor in creating the information advantage of brands, and customers appreciate not only the speed of access to data but also its quick and professional analysis.
One expectation of our clients is to monitor the content in real-time or with a minimum delay concerning the time of publication. Therefore, ensuring the stability, efficiency, and scalability of IT systems in an environment needing to index billions of documents is, on the one hand, a technological challenge and, on the other, a potential competitive advantage of those companies that do it well.
What directions of development for the future do you see for Newspoint?
Above all, continuously developing our automated media monitoring and online analytics tools. Our goal is to ensure the best possible data quality (accuracy and number of results) and provide multi-dimensional analyses useful for marketers, PR, HR, and sales managers. This requires very advanced technology.
Brands, looking for new ways to focus the attention of consumers, focused on communicating with them through network opinion leaders - influencers. Therefore, they need tools that can comprehensively analyze the value of their communication with recipients by influencers on various platforms, in any language, and with the lowest possible delay. They should also support brand communication with potential influencers and facilitate measuring the effects of cooperation between the brand and the person promoting it.
Collecting huge amounts of data is no longer enough today. The challenge is to correctly classify, analyze, process, and interpret. So, more than ever, there is a need for end-to-end analytical solutions to answer the question "why?" And not just "what?". In influencer marketing - solutions that can compare the impact of influencer cooperation on the perception of the brand in the target group with the costs of such cooperation.
