Happy Holidays from Moreover Technologies

We wish you health, comfort, and prosperity this holiday season.

Getting Ahead with Competitive Analysis

In recent conversations with our clients, we’ve been hearing about the increased need for Competitive Analysis. Clients are telling us that it’s not enough to get a data stream from various media. They’re also looking for knowledge to help them and others make informed choices about the direction of products, services, marketing, and even staffing.

Whereas Media Monitoring is receiving a stream of relevant data, Competitive Analysis goes a step beyond that; it’s narrowing down that data until only useful and actionable information remains. It is understanding your strengths and weaknesses as well as those of the competition. It’s also about acting on that knowledge, which means sharing it with the right people.

Data: The Stuff Analysis Is Made of

So where can you glean the kind of information you need about competitors? Virtually everywhere!

Start by making sure you have online media covered. Corporate blogs and press release sites are a good beginning, but it’s not just official communications that matter. There are online news outlets, user blogs, Twitter, forums, social networks, YouTube, and more every day.

Even if all these areas are being monitored and analyzed, that still leaves the legacy media to think about. Are your competitors running commercials or getting radio or television buzz? Don’t forget that newspapers don’t always put everything online.

Sure, it can be information overload, but with the right tools, it is easily managed. Look for tools that will help you organize and analyze all media in a single location. Skip the headaches that come with juggling multiple tools for the various sites you want to monitor. They’re simply not worth the time or effort.

Analysis: Finding Meaning

Getting your hands on competitive information is just the start. Competitive Analysis is about being proactive in understanding what customers want and tailoring your message to them. It is about identifying trends in order to prepare for them ahead of time.

Tools for analyzing competitors should be flexible and thorough in the questions they answer including:

Where are competitors driving conversations?
How are they faring financially?
What social media are they using?
What new products or services are being launched?
What buzz is being generated around them?

Data like this helps you chart the competitive landscape. Now you will need to use that information to plot your course. For example:

Perhaps you have identified industry experts and will engage them to capitalize on and appeal to their existing audience. Where are people talking? Maybe Twitter or LinkedIn is where you should be making a presence. Or, there may be neglected pockets of potential users that you can engage.

If a competitor does something to receive bad press, now is the time to scoop up those disgruntled clients. Are your own past decisions causing negative ripples? Maybe some damage control is in order.

Distribution: Fuel for Action

Once actionable information has been gleaned, it’s time for sharing and applying it.That means getting it into the hands of the right people so it can be used effectively. Find out how others want to receive information and accommodate their preferences. The most common media for distribution are:

Company intranets/portals
Email
Spreadsheets
Feed Readers

Distilling and acting on competitive knowledge is helping our clients stand out, build stronger customer relationships, and make more money. Whether you are looking to enter new markets, solidify existing business, or update your business plan, competitive analysis can work for you, too.

What’s Your Rep? 6 Ways to Enhance Your Company’s Reputation

By Zachary Enos, Marketing Catalyst, 9Lenses

Sometimes business should ignore Mother Nature. Take “safety in numbers,” for instance. It’s usually a great survival strategy, but in business it becomes a liability. The more employees, customers, and exposure you have, the more opportunities your firm has, quite frankly, to fail. In today’s world, more people manage your brand than the “brand manager.”

The stakes are high. The social era equips every customer, employee, reporter, and media outlet with lethal weapons of brand destruction. Any cell-pic, twitter feed, or comment can bumble its way into the news. We’ve seen Twitter and YouTube debacles mar brands like Domino’s Pizza overnight.

In an effort to secure the castle, most brand managers focus exclusively on external threats. External reputation matters, but don’t forget that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” Investment in brand loyalty amongst employees raises up more defenders of the castle, whilst mitigating internal risks.

9Lenses teamed up with Moreover Technologies to bring you these six tips to balance your internal and external reputation. Moreover Technologies brings home the bacon by monitoring news and media channels for some of the world’s biggest brands, while 9Lenses deploys a social platform that collects employee sentiment and thoughts across every part of a business.

I. “Our House:” Nurturing Your Internal Rep.

1) Listen to Your People

Quality people drive quality organizations. If you want to turn top employees into raving fans, you’ve got to help them fall in love with your company. How? It’s not that complicated: in fact, you foster company fans in the same way you’d grow a friendship. Friendships deepen when both parties really listen and hear one another.

You can do the same thing in every part of your company. Find a way to ask all of your people to comment on your business’s every process, system, and goal. You want to find out how your stakeholders perceive your organization’s health. Your people want to contribute! They want to be heard. Reward those who contribute at the highest level because high participation rates increase the quality of the resulting data.

2) Track Perceptions

Listening is only the first step. You must then act on the insights offered. Tell your people “we heard you, and seek to solve the problems you identified.” Next, create implementation teams and workflows to promote the best ideas offered. Reengage those teams over time to drive accountability, feedback, and execution.

Great employees can spot disingenuous engagement efforts a mile away, so make sure you’re genuine. If they’re given the opportunity to speak and your company doesn’t respond, you can kiss your internal fan base good-bye.

3) Empower Don’t Manage

Imagine for a moment, two coaches. The first, feels like he works hard but his team slacks off. They just won’t follow “the plan,” so he compensates by barking orders and refuses to hear any thoughts but his own. Does he drive performance? In a Machiavellian sense, sure. But in a world where his office tirades can be splattered all over your brand, his approach is a major liability.

The second coach is quite the opposite. “I hired great people, “ she reasons, “they ought to know how I can optimize their performance.” She combines her people’s feedback with her experience to create relevant KPIs. She distributes resources to empower not control, reduces permission seeking, and rewards employees who give back. She rocks, and people love working for her. Her employees become little brand evangelists who use their circles of influence to spot and mitigate brand assaults before they spread.

II. “Outside the Gates:” Building a Siege Proof Exterior Rep.

4) Build Trust

You’re halfway there! Your house is in order. Now it’s time to look outside into the mysterious beyond. This is a customer-centric world. Invest significant time, energy, and resources into discovering precisely who your customer is and what makes them tick.

Customers trust those who help them understand and solve their problems. Be that source of educational content on your chosen topic of expertise. Blog where they read and publish in their newspapers. When someone offers positive feedback, leverage it to gain the trust in his or her circle of influence.

5) Target Niche Markets

As a marketer, I can tell you that great messages are tight. I can beat industry standard “click through” and “open rates” every time if the offering is tightly linked to my prospects personalities, pain-points, and needs. If you hit the nail on the head, adoption becomes viral and is rapidly passed from one relevant prospect to another, effortlessly.

A Belgium based company called Engagor helps clients like Volvo Group, McDonalds, Ikea, and the European Parliament target their brands toward niche clients by managing their brands online. Engagor partnered with Moreover to give clients confidence that websites of every size in every country were being thoroughly tracked, so Engagor clients could micro-sell their brands to key niches. Using technology like Moreover’s Newsdesk to track brand impressions in micro-markets is key to braking into niches.

6) 360 Your Rep

Even a king can fall to a stray arrow, so too can a healthy firm fall to a news article on an obscure website. You’ve got to find tools to help you see, assess, and respond to brand mentions in online/print news outlets, social media channels, word-of-mouth rumors, and tv/radio spotlights. In short, you need to see your brand from every possible angle—360 insight.

The world is moving too fast to drop the ball on this one. One of the best places to start is with news outlets. Take the Business Intelligence team at Shell Oil. They’re constantly on the lookout for tools to keep their team informed. Industry trends, brand mentions, competitive positioning, and political landscape refocus their strategies, constantly.

Like Engagor, Shell leverages Moreover Technologies’ Newsdesk service to set highly targeted news feeds that parse critical stories and brand mentions for employees at every level of the company. With one service, they get a nearly 360-degree view of their brand, market, and competitors all in one intuitive interface. That’s exactly the sort of technology communications professionals can leverage to snapshot their reputation from every angle.

New Styling with Today’s Newsdesk Release

Good morning! These are the styling changes you will see when you log into Newsdesk today.

The Email Tab Gets a Facelift

The Email Tab has been improved with a sleeker look and more user-friendly layout.

Gone are the grey spaces and lines. The Edit Template button now appears in the upper right corner and the name of the Newsletter or Alert being edited appears at the top of the screen.

Search Results in Expanded Mode

To facilitate future design upgrades, the Search results now only appear in “expanded mode”. The grid view has been removed.

If this is something that you would like to see reinstated, please contact us.

IE Improvements

To ensure continued compatibility with Internet Explorer, several behind-the-scenes changes were made. The Expanded View was made the singular display for search results and some minor display bugs have also been fixed.

Bug Fixes

Analytics: You can set the colors for charts again.
Dashboard: The “User Comments” widget now updates automatically.
Email: The Last Send Time always shown for Alerts and Newsletters.
Search: Clicking the “Clear All” button on the Refine Panel resets the Relevancy Slider as well.

We always want to know how we can improve Newsdesk. If you have any ideas, let us know in the comments or contact us by email.

Happy Thanksgiving from Moreover Technologies

In the United States, this is the time of year that we pause to reflect and give thanks. After having a great year, Moreover has much to be grateful for.

Most of all, we appreciate our clients, all around the globe, for trusting our products and services. And for giving our sales people, client services team, developers, marketing, operations professionals, and executives the opportunity to shine. It’s with pride and appreciation that we strive to exceed your expectations.

We’ll remember that as we stuff ourselves with turkey, watch The Game, and celebrate with friends and family.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Dilemma of More Data

Today’s blog post was inspired by a recent conversation between some Moreover employees. My hope is that this post will give you some insight into who we are as a company and why we do what we do.

Numbers Do Lie (or Can Mislead)

Moreover is strong in the Media Monitoring field — our online news coverage is second to none. But why do some other media monitoring brands tout vast numbers of social media sites, compared to our more humble-sounding index?

The answer lies in what information our customers are trying to glean from their research. There is a considerable amount of noise that becomes a distraction (information overload). Effective monitoring of impactful sources is the driving force behind our efforts to grow and maintain pertinent coverage of social media.

Quantity of Data vs. Quality of Understanding

Just like any media monitoring company, we have competing goals. We want more coverage and more data, while keeping the tools that our clients use lightning fast and giving them only the data that helps them solve their needs.

That “only” is important.

Beware the Big

Moreover owns the ping server Weblogs.com. We have access to data of millions and millions of blogs posting content daily. We know where to look if we’d ever want to inflate our numbers, but we won’t.

Instead, we choose a “White List” approach, in which sources are vetted before they make it into our clients’ search results. When our Newsdesk clients run their searches, the data they want is more likely to be at their fingertips, rather than scattered amongst poor quality data.

More data is better only so long as it can be seen and used. Adding more content to sift through can make finding usable content more difficult. Having too much data can be worse than too little when it hinders the discovery of relevant content.

Drawbacks and Trade-offs

Of course the White List approach has its own issues. An important blog may not be covered when it’s needed. And, it makes it harder to track all mentions of keywords across all social media.

To mitigate this, Moreover’s Client Services and Editorial teams work with our clients to add the blogs and other social media that are important to them. This customer-focused coverage expansion process ensures that we provide broad coverage across multiple industries and niches. We also look at our own data for mentions of new sites, while seeking out other high-value sources of data.

A brief note on “full coverage”: With countless blogs being created and abandoned daily, it’s unlikely that anyone has full coverage. It is more accurate to say “less incomplete coverage”.

Pride in our Numbers

Moreover is proud of our 3.5 million social media feeds and our 55,000 online News sources. The number that makes us most proud, though, is our 90%+ customer retention rate. That number clearly shows we are on the right path. And we’ll continue to grow our source list in ways that bring customers value and help them find the data they need to solve their unique problems.

If you’re a Moreover customer and there are sources that are relevant to your needs that Moreover does not monitor, let us know. Our Client Services team will be happy to work with you to get these into our coverage.

Getting Better Search Results is the Theme of This Week’s Newsdesk Enhancements

This week’s enhancements give you even more control over the precision of your search results and help you share the latest news more effectively with improvements to the Newsletter, keyword highlighting, and article extracts.

Precise Search Results:

Under the “Extras” tab, there are options to set which keywords get highlighted and which keywords the extracts center around. This is most useful for searches that use AND.

New search Parameters:

Start of article searches, START/x:(word1 OR word2)

Use the start option to specify the first x words of an article that your keyword(s) must appear in. This helps to improve the relevancy of your results as it ensures the search terms are mentioned early on in the articles.

search: START/150:(OECD OR “World Bank” OR IMF)

- Returns articles that contain the words OECR, “World Bank”, orIMF in the first 150 words.

Near searches, (word1) NEAR/x (word2)

Use the near search to specify the maximum number of words between your search terms. This allows you to qualify search results by specifying relationships between the keywords in your search.

search: (Vodafone “T-Mobile” O2) NEAR/10 (iPhone iPad)

- Returns articles than contain Vodafone, T-Mobile or O2 within 10 words of iPhone or iPad.

Multiple occurrence searches, MULTIPLE/x:(word1 OR word2)

Use the multiple occurrence search option to specify the minimum number of occurrences of your keyword. This is especially useful in avoiding single passing mentions of keywords, thereby boosting the relevancy of the articles.

search: MULTIPLE/5:(ScotRail)

- Returns articles that contain at least five mentions of ScotRail.

Wildcard searches now work for phrases:

search: “flu vaccin*”

- Returns articles that contain the phrases “flu vaccine”, “flu vaccines”, “flu vaccination”, “flu vaccinations” etc.

A More User-Friendly Newsletter

We redesigned the Email section to give you better control of the way that Newsletters can be formatted. There is now a larger area to edit your Newsletter contents, and you instantly see the effect of styling changes on your email such as turning on keyword highlighting and user comments. Expect further enhancements in a few weeks time!

You can now hide or show:

Paragraph Breaks
Highlighting
User Comments

It works great in conjunction with the custom highlighting and extracts above.

Contact your salesperson or Client Service to learn more.

And the PRSA ICON 2012 Winner is…

Moreover is a proud supporter of PRSA and we look forward to helping everyone we met in San Francisco meet your media monitoring needs.

We are pleased to announce the winner of the Apple iPad drawing: Congratulations to Karen B from Pioneer Natural Resources of Denver.

For those who were not able to take advantage of our PRSA offering and would like a free trial including a customized dashboard and alerts, please fill out this form and a sale representative will be in touch soon.

Moreover represents at PRSA 2012 San Francisco

Please join Rick @ricklombardo and Jim @jimcollish through the 16th at the PRSA 2012 International Conference. Once again, Moreover Technologies is a proud exhibitor and this year you’ll find us in Booth #26 next to Google. Enter our drawing to win an iPad and take a first hand look at Newsdesk our award-winning solution. Come by and Rick or Jim will set up your own customized Newsdesk dashboard with automatic alerts. See how you’ll never miss a beat with Newsdesk from Moreover — and enjoy a cup of coffee on the guys with a Starbucks Gift Card.

New Newsdesk Features Live Now

Newsdesk now in German and French. Commensurate with our growing presence in international markets, we are very pleased to announce that Newsdesk now comes in 4 languages: French, German, Spanish, and English. You can switch to your preferred language via the Settings page which is in the dropdown menu top-right of the screen.

Much improved article clippings feature. It’s considerably faster to copy (‘clip’) articles from one feed to another, thanks to Newsdesk now remembering which feeds you have recently clipped to. The Clip/Email/Delete buttons now also stay visible on the page as you move down the list of articles so you no longer have to scroll back up to the top of the page to email, remove or copy an article.

Cleaner User Interface. The links that appeared top-right on the screen are now inside a neat dropdown menu, so the screen looks much less cluttered.

Enhancements and bug fixes.

We have updated the feed dropdown menu so it no longer remains visible after moving the mouse away.
The analytics download button now appears for all browsers again.
Articles can now be clipped over to regular, non-clippings feeds.
When you hit enter after typing in keywords, it runs the search as opposed to producing a carriage return.

Let us know what you think about the new features in the comments.

Helping Companies Turn Mass Media into Media Intelligence