New features bring focus and business context to powerful visualizations

For communications professionals, context is king. Whether it’s protecting brand reputation, performing market research or measuring the success of a campaign, understanding the who, what, when, where and why of any conversation is vital. This week Zignal launched two new features to its media intelligence platform: Smart Filters and the Data API. Both of these features from Zignal focus on further contextualizing media intelligence data for communications and marketing professionals so that they can provide actionable insights to the broader enterprise.

Smart Filters: Instantly Know What’s Driving your Metrics

Smart Filters easily and quickly isolate specific information within a large dataset. This data can be isolated around a combination of keywords or phrases, the country of origin, the media source, the type of sentiment and influencer level. With the ability to quickly hone in on information, communications professionals can easily identify the drivers behind the metrics — be they influencers, topics, or competitors.

Smart Filters assist communications professionals in more ways than merely providing instant context. These metrics can be used to measure how specific events, topics or influencers affect brand reputation. As such, Chief Communications Officers can quickly provide timely and accurate reports to the executive team. At the same time, marketing departments can conduct ad hoc market research without having to write hundreds of additional lines of boolean code.

Smart Filters in Action

In a crisis, time is your worst enemy — communications teams must pinpoint relevant issues, sentiment, influencers or other trends at speed of light. For example, United recently experienced an incident where two girls were denied entry to a flight for not adhering to the United Airlines dress code. The mother of the two girls complained about the incident on social media and a PR crisis ensued.

In this example, Smart Filters immediately isolated the conversation, focusing only on the media mentions about the girls who were banned from the flight. As you can see below, Smart Filters provide a much more precise and relevant view of the data. Mentions drop from 3.6 billion to 67.3 million, the word cloud eliminates superfluous terms and it becomes clear that net sentiment around the event is predominantly negative.

Additional Uses for Smart Filters

The speed and agility from Smart Filters are ideal for conducting market research. For example, if a company just launched a new product in a foreign country, Smart Filters could track the success of the product in that specific region and establish baseline KPI’s against the incumbent competitors.

Smart Filters can also track if an issue snowballs into a full-blown crisis. If a tweet about a CEO’s high salary gains traction in the media, the communications team can keep a pulse on the conversation by quickly creating a smart filter for the CEO. With accurate data on the situation, a swift and appropriate response can be quickly implemented.

Data API: Add Business Context to Media Intelligence

Zignal’s Data API allows enterprises to integrate their media and social intelligence data with other datasets within the enterprise, such as a CRM or Business Intelligence system. Since Zignal centralizes media intelligence, the Data API provides business context across multiple data sets. Through this process, Zingal helps align cross-departmental workflows and informs corporate strategy. This last point is particularly crucial for corporate communications leaders, who are now expected to report into the C-Suite on a daily basis.

There are two parts to Zignal’s Data API: the Analytics API and the Newsroom API. The Analytics API returns counts or quantitative results for the specific queries, and can include metrics like total mentions, total impressions or sentiment. These datasets can then be viewed in tandem with data from other existing systems. The Newsroom API acts as a single endpoint that returns stories and metadata for predefined queries.

Data API’s in Action

Back in January, President Trump criticized Toyota’s plans to build a new factory in Baja, Mexico, on Twitter. One of Trump’s mandates on the campaign trail was to bring more jobs back to the U.S. and he claimed this new plant would have the opposite effect. The tweet created a firestorm on social media — with the spike in mentions mirroring the decline in stock price. By combining the two datasets, a direct correlation can be drawn between the falling stock price and the tweet from President Trump.

Corporate communications requires getting granular with context. Only through understanding exactly what events cause an increase in media traffic, the influencers that are driving the conversation and the effects media intelligence has on other key metrics in the enterprise can communications teams fully maximize the potential of their media intelligence data. Zignal’s new Smart Filter and Data API features make this easier than ever before.

If you would like to learn more about how media intelligence can benefit the entire enterprise, download our White Paper – “Establishing a Mission Control Mindset” for Media Intelligence.