focus on brand monitoring online with Aurélien Tissoux, director of the digital division of Publicis Consultants.
The digital influence is on everyone’s lips. But before thinking about weighing the opinions of its potential consumers, it is still necessary to implement measurement tools to listen to conversations and understand the feelings of Internet users. How do brands manage their monitoring in the era of social media? In which objectives?
To work on the digital influence of a big brand is a vast subject. What are the main objectives sought by these brands? Between monitoring, advice, identification of opportunities, crisis management …
The objectives logically relate to business and reputation, which are of course intimately linked. To act in favor of these objectives, several levers are mobilizable and complementary. Beyond those you mention in your question, do not neglect media relations, conso service, product experience or user who also contribute to the influence and reputation online. For a long time now, “digital” has not been a world apart, but its apprehension requires special expertise and methods.
Which monitoring tools do you use? And how do you sort out the many messages received, especially to identify those that may have a greater impact, or that are part of a more global trend?
We use the main tools of the market (Talkwalker & co) without ever neglecting approaches “by hand”. Successful tools exist, methods inspired by the mixing of large volumes of data allow new things, but one of the fundamental keys remains to put oneself in the place of the public, to follow its uses, which pass for example by simple Google queries , the use of certain apps, exchanges on certain conversational spaces, etc. We then sort using the tools, but also manually weighting, which in reality requires to consider all data, both to overcome the imperfections of automatic filters but also to understand all that is observable, in the prospect of very qualitative approaches.
Understanding the received messages requires to know perfectly the communities which carry them. How are teams organized to achieve this?
The challenge is to feed, observe, always follow the conversations, the places where the communities interact, all in a continuous way. The best way to be relevant on a subject is to observe it in the medium-long term, in depth.
How are these potential crises anticipated? Do you have several scenarios at your disposal, recurring good practices?
I consider that the fundamentals of crisis management have not changed so much. That said, the “digital” is a great tool, if only because it identifies these weak signals we were talking about. However, we can not anticipate everything or even see everything. In any case, the basics remain as complete as possible in the mapping of risks, permanent monitoring of this or these sensitive perimeters (here using social monitoring in particular), then the elaboration of scenarios, elements language, etc. So yes, scenarios are established, often simulations are carried out on the basis of likely crises, but once again, everything is not always anticipated and the management of the crisis is obviously key. The first good practice, in my opinion, is to take a moment to describe the situation, take a step back, contextualize, know where we are. It may seem obvious, but today we tend to consider that we must respond or intervene immediately. While it is essential to act quickly, we must not rush or overreact.