Meltwater is a household name in communications and media intelligence.
When I came into my role at Under Armour all five of our PR agencies were Meltwater clients so it was incredibly seamless to plug into their media intelligence reporting and even combine across agencies.
What I learned during my time at Under Armour is our firm and many of my peers across communications are not leveraging all of Meltwater‘s capabilities. This includes their phenomenal Summit that takes place every summer and brings together thousands of communications professionals to learn about what’s moving our industry. And don’t get me wrong, the networking parties and celebrity speakers are A+ as well.
I had the pleasure to sit down with my friend Dino Delic, Strategic Communications Advisor at Meltwater to catch up on what’s new at his firm and get the first peek at their communication survey.
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How would you describe your firm to your family at Thanksgiving?
Well, I've always said Meltwater is a search engine for news and social. Companies use it to find out what's happening online with their brand, industry, customers, etc.. As for me, I describe what I do as the free coach at the local gym. Not a personal trainer trying to charge by the hour for a package of lessons. Not the salesperson trying to sell upgrades. But rather I started a run club and invite people who don't want to be amateurs to join me and others in developing their skills and their careers along the way. It's weird but you know I love analogies :)
What communications problem are you solving?
There is a real problem with people not knowing what it means to be data-driven. 87% of people in an industry survey say data is essential for comms strategy, but only 45% of people say they are proficient with data for comms. Can you imagine if that was the case with driving. I live in LA. At least 90% of people would agree that having a car is essential here. But imagine if less than 50% of drivers had a license/knew how to drive? What would that look like?? That's comms today. There is no driver's ed. Just a bunch of cars being sold without anyone providing good free driver's ed courses to make us all better. I'm hoping to change that with our program.
Meltwater just interviewed 270 communicators for a big research project. What were the findings?
That there is no such thing as a B2B, B2C, healthcare, pharma, tech, non-profit, higher ed, retail, etc… communicator. There are 4. Just 4 types. You're either reactive, proactive, strategic, or you are a trusted advisor. We found that people have distinct workflows they follow.
What industries have been the quickest to adopt your services?
Again, there is no pattern among industries. We actually filtered and visualized the data according to industry, size, spend, revenue, structure, even how long they have had meltwater. There were no statistically significant patterns. Except everything always boiled down to those four workflows. Some of the best publicists aren't data-driven, and that's fine because PR is art and science. If you are a really good artist, you might not need data. Until one day you need to justify your investments or demonstrate impact. And the people who are all science, obsessed with capturing every single clip, they never innovate and come up with creative ideas. They're just playing with numbers. The best teams are blend of art and science. Creative risks, with data to optimize performance and iterate.
What's a recent case study from a brand that brings to life your capabilities?
Genevieve Brammall is by far my favorite example. She is a former journalist turned publicist and PR leader. She is a perfect blend of art and science. She got a new boss and when he grilled her on her use of Ad Value, she didn't get defensive, she didn't invent a new metric. She got curious and she asked him what his definition of success was. He gave her his honest thoughts and she designed a measurement framework built off that definition that is still in use today. She has won awards, her team has gotten promotions, she has gotten extra headcount, and she has led campaigns and initiatives of strategic importance. When her parent company was bringing over a streaming service from america to australia, they put her in charge of the PR AND the marketing brief. How many PR pros do you know who tell marketing what to do?
What makes Meltwater unique?
Maybe I'll spin that and say why am I still here after 16 years? 2 reasons.. No other company has given me anything this exciting. To work with such cool brands and work with cool departments like PR and Marketing (versus engineering for example) means everything is always new and exciting. And that is music to my ADHD ears. Also because we have a long way to go still. We've been the number one player for a long time, but our clients still need help. I want to work somewhere that's challenging, and honestly, that's what makes Meltwater unique.
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In conclusion, in case you missed it: here’s a link to Meltwater’s survey on modern communications.
And here’s a customer case study in their own words from Genevieve Brammall from News Corp AU that revamped their communications measurement program to measure a PR Value Score instead of Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) — focusing their leadership on metrics that matter such as PR driving customer engagement.