Tuesday, May 18, 2010
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Traditionally, the media monitoring industry has been offering local monitoring only. They claim that media monitoring is a local business, while international press cutting being expensive and requiring multiple external vendors. However, our experience shows that clients want it differently – they turn towards international online monitoring offerings for several reasons:
Reason No.1. Their business depends more on international relations – be it international competitors or international vendors. News about these – such as M&A, innovation and product launches is a key to understand upcoming changes even in the local market as well as to their ability to compete locally. Some call it market intelligence – others include it as part of their complete media monitoring programme.
Reason No.2. Most businesses operate across borders – either because their clients need their services in several countries or because they have started exporting and have an international strategy. Due to this, they need cost-efficient monitoring in multiple countries – available to the local branch offices as well as to the HQ.
Reason No.3. PR-offices need to benchmark brand coverage – and monitoring the coverage of competing brands locally as well as internationally gives valuable indexes for benchmarking.
Reason No.4. Online monitoring of international markets has become cheap and accessible, making it possible to test out new ways of using international monitoring.
Reason No.5. PR-offices act as the media and monitoring experts of their respective organisations. If they limit their monitoring to local markets only – they leave to other parts of the organisation to go externally for international monitoring (for market intelligence, sales intelligence and industry overview).
We have created a special offer to assist PR offices looking for innovative use of online monitoring within the organization. We believe this can strengthen the PR-offices’ position and credibility, as their expertise can be used more widely and budgets may be increased or even be sponsored by other divisions.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
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Everyone undoubtedly knows about Russia with its vast natural resources and the large internal market. However, not many know that the country lying south from Russia and west from China – Kazakhstan – is rich with the natural resources and business opportunities in no smaller degree. Kazakhstan has been one of the TOP 20 petroleum exporting countries in the world. Moreover, the country is also impressively rich with iron ore, uranium, coal, chrome, and many other natural resources. In the cities of Kazakhstan, one can see the traits of booming investments both from the West as well as, increasingly, China.
During the recent months CyberWatcher has secured strategic partnerships with some of the key companies within the areas of media monitoring and market intelligence in Russia and Kazakhstan. Thanks to that cooperation, CyberWatcher is able to deliver to its customers the news and market updates from the Russian-language media sources in Russia, Kazakhstan, and the rest of the Central Asian countries where Russian language is widely used.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
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…. in search for a social media strategy
On March the 11th Reuters announced immediate restrictions on their 15,000 journalists’ use of Twitter. Other media groups are considering similar restrictions. And CNN boss Jon Klein says he fears Facebook more than Fox News with regards to competition.
Why has traditional media gone from embracing social media to fearing social media?
Journalists have been among the early innovators in using social media in their profession. They use it to find stories, background checking and sharing of stories.
But in the race for being the first with breaking news – Reuters has even been challenged by their own journalists tweeting their own stories and giving followers a new channel for breaking news. What was meant as news teasers and marketing – turns out to be a menace to Reuters – potentially threatening their business.
Is it possible to restrict journalists’ presence in the social media? Sure. Will it work as planned? Not so sure. By nature, journalism is bound become attached to social media – and the motivation and involvement of journalists most likely will require also putting out stories and participating in the discussions more than just observing in this arena.
However, most obvious – media corporations – as with most other corporations need to establish a strategy for their involvement in social media. The sooner the better!
What’s needed is a basic monitoring of key topics including own activities and competitors. Also needed is a SWOT-analysis to pinpoint what can be achieved and to detect luring threats on this arena. But most important is to segment this whole environment to see which of the social media arenas is fitting their strategy – as well as making clear guidelines for the organization to feel that there is a plan to utilize this – and avoid simple lack of awareness and fear.
More about Reuters’ Social Media policy: http://mashable.com/2010/03/11/reuters-social-media-policy/
More about CNN and Jon Klein’s fear of Facebook: http://mashable.com/2010/03/10/cnn-facebook/
Thursday, March 04, 2010
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The media industry has faced big challenges in the Information Age. The old business model does not yield as large revenues as it used to. Ad and subscription revenues from print media are diminishing massively, but online media has not yet achieved the same level of revenues as its predecessor.
The newspapers’ publishing industry is naturally concerned about this well-documented trend. One area of where some of its representatives want to limit everyone else is the right to link to the content that newspapers publish online.
That would mean that neither Google nor other search engines nor content aggregators could link to the content of the online media anymore, despite the fact that they actually drive traffic to these websites. That could lead to the situation where, for example, Twitter users wouldn’t be allowed to provide short links to some interesting articles in the online media anymore. That is what some advocates of restrictions on Internet want to do in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.
We in CyberWatcher believe it is a dangerous precedent, not only because we ourselves index the web content and provide links to it for the companies worldwide (and essentially tell to people to go to the websites of the newspapers). We also believe that this hampers one of the major rights available on the Internet – the right for freedom of information, without infringing the copyright of the content owner. If someone refers to a book, categorize it as a novel - and gives the information on where the book is available to buy / to read – does it make sense to restrict this person from doing it? Of course it’s then up to the author of the book – or publisher – what are the terms of reading the book or news article.
Obviously, the news publishers need to justify the costs they incur. However, we believe that once the content is put out freely available in Internet, everyone should be given a right to refer to this content – be it by indexing and structuring the data or simply by providing links in email.
Hence, we support the campaign initiated in the United Kingdom called Right2link.
Thursday, February 04, 2010
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Tourism is the 3rd largest industry in Norway, and in 2008 Norway was visited by 4,4 million international tourists. But how can we get to know what visitors think of Norway as a tourist destination? What do tourists particularly like about the country? What leaves them cold or unsatisfied, while visiting it?
Internet provides tremendous opportunities to track opinions, views, and rumours that people share regarding visiting particular destinations. There are many travel-related blogs that have outpaced major tourism magazines in their visitor numbers. In addition, many dedicated bloggers, who normally write on different topics, tend to describe their experiences with travelling publicly.
Norway as a country caring about its external image and investing heavily into the development of its tourism industry is naturally concerned about its image in the social media. One bad rumour of an unsatisfied visitor can have a long-lasting negative impact on people deciding whether to visit Norway or not. Therefore, CyberWatcher signed an agreement that assists the Norwegian tourism industry to deal with this challenge – now it will be possible to listen in to tourists commenting on Norway throughout Europe. Besides finding key signals, there will also be developed a social media portal presenting feedback and search opportunities.
We hope that this will become a good-case-practice for representatives of a tourism industry anywhere in the world – how to capitalize on social media in order to improve the external image towards potential visitors.
The area often referred to as ex-YU (ex-Yugoslav countries) is a significant region in Europe – covering 6 countries with a total population of about 22 million. Slovenia is economically the most developed nation among ex-Communist countries in Europe, a member of the European Union since 2004, with Croatia being close to the membership, and Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro having made significant progress in this way. This gradual integration into the European common market will undoubtedly increase trade between ex-YU countries and other European nations.
CyberWatcher aims at assisting exporters from Balkan as well as companies in other countries wishing to establish business in the region. Timely and relevant information is perhaps one of the most crucial components of commercial success, when entering a new market.
By now, no one monitors the online media in the Balkans as extensively as we do – even compared to local vendors. Throughout all six countries, CyberWatcher covers almost 1200 online news sources, crawling for updates every second hour. We also keep a research capability, covering search backwards for the last 12 months.
Four regional partners have already signed up to act as resellers for our monitoring service, with its integration into their product portfolio – situated in Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia and Macedonia: contact details here. All of them are already established vendors of monitoring and research services, while the partnership with us has enabled them to gain a new strategic advantage.
Within 2010 we will establish specific monitoring services for exporting industries as well as for political monitoring and research. We will invite anyone with an agenda to strengthen the trade in the region to contact us to see how we can cooperate for the best of the region.
The CyberWatcher team has, for quite a while, felt the need for a space to express our views (e.g. on what is happening in our market) and to post some news from our own company. Simply sending out press-releases and publishing corporate news at the corporate website started to feel somewhat impersonal and too rigid a way to communicate our opinions and happenings.
Hence, we decided to keep our own blog. We hope that it will help our partners, clients – both actual and prospective – as well as anyone interested in our company and in the industry we work in to understand better who we are, what we do, and what we believe in.