The Talkwalkers are coming..How can social listening protect your brand in a crisis and help prov...

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. This is a podcast for business owners to learn how to use technologies and tools for getting noticed. My name is Jim James, and today we're going to talk about social listening. I'm talking with Sophie Clark of Talkwalker, and it's amazing how they can use AI to help companies and brands to understand what's being said about them across all channels. Channels, and not just in text, but also photographs and in video. Now, Talkwalker is one of the leading companies in the social listening, and they've kindly agreed to share with us more about the company and how the technology works. So Sophie Clark is joining us on the mic from Luxembourg. So tell me a little bit about, about Talkwalker.

Our headquarters are in Luxembourg, but obviously we operate all over the world. But actually, yeah, we've been around for almost 10 years now. So, um, yeah, so in that sense, We're quite an established player in the social listening market. Yeah, so I guess social listening is just really a way of tracking and breaking down the conversations that are happening online. And obviously these days there are so many different conversations happening online that sometimes it's quite hard to kind of manage them and break them down and kind of really understand how to analyze them, I guess. And so that's where A social listening platform like Talkwalker can really help, particularly if you're a brand, because it's a great way of specifically tracking the conversations that are happening around your brand, or perhaps the industry that you're in. You want to kind of open up new opportunities for your, for your business, and you just want to understand kind of how the industry is growing and developing and discovering new opportunities there. And also, I mean, particularly at the moment, probably what is a kind of a crucial way to use social listening is around perhaps crisis management. Because obviously at the moment, there's a lot going on. There are potentially some negative conversations happening around certain brands. So if you're using a social listening tool like Talkwalker, you can kind of track and flag those conversations quickly and perhaps deal with them before they get out of control.

Yeah.

One area that we can help with is around sentiment of conversations as well. So that's where you can really kind of track if there are more negative conversations happening around your brand, and you can dig a bit deeper that way.

And so a couple of quick questions come to mind. One is, is it only in English, or are you tracking Mandarin, Spanish, all the different languages?

Yeah, I think at the moment we track 187 different languages. Good heavens.

Right, well, that's probably enough, isn't it, really?

Yeah, so it's definitely a global tool in that sense. And I think as well, in terms of kind of the AI around sentiment analysis, I think it's pretty spot on in most of those languages as well, in terms of being able to gain the accuracy around the sentiment. So yeah.

And then how does it work? So do I, if I have a brand or a client, do I put in some keywords and you search for that, or? Am I looking for what's trending and plug into that? Which way is it working?

Yeah, I mean, you can do it either way, really. So I suppose it really depends what your aim is in terms of social listening. So if it's really around perhaps brand protection or understanding your brand position in the market, you would probably search by your brand. So that would be just obviously kind of the name of your brand. Obviously, There's a lot of— some brands will have kind of different ways of— or people will talk about it in different ways. So you can search all the terms that people might be using around your brand. We also have image and video recognition as well. So you can search by your brand logo to see where—

What would you do? You'd upload your logo, would you? Upload your logo?

That's something that we are able to do. So we have a library basically of logos already. Obviously, our clients, if they— if their logo isn't in our database, they contact us and we can add it. But just generally, we have a big library of different brand logos. So even if obviously you're not searching for your own brand, you can still search for other brand logos. So for example, if you want to do competitor analysis, you might want to be, you know, if you're Coca-Cola and you want to see how Pepsi is doing, you can also search Pepsi and Pepsi logo and see how they compare.

Yeah.

So, so yes, you would basically, from a brand engagement or kind of brand perception element, you could type in your brand, search image, so see how your, your brand logo is being used in conversations. And you might find that it's popping up in places that you didn't know, perhaps in a good way, perhaps in a bad way.

Yeah.

And then in that case, you can, you can kind of do— take steps to, to rectify that and make sure you're not having any kind of negative sentiment towards your brand.

So what do you track in terms of channels?

So we track obviously all the main social channels, and we can also track essentially any content that is out there in the public domain. We're able to track it. So it's all the social channels, media, Yeah, blogs, kind of.

But if it's media behind a paywall, for example?

So no, we only track strictly non-paywall conversations, obviously anything that's in the public domain. So yeah, not behind a paywall.

Right. And then it's from a sort of a repeat refresh, if you like. Is this happening sort of once a day, or is it a continuous Search.

It's in real time, so it's continuously pulling information that's out there on the internet whenever you search. So it is really, you can track your brand in real time.

And then in terms of, um, from a dashboard perspective, um, what am I going to be seeing if I've got, if I put my brand, we work with INEOS, for example, as East West PR, we've been helping the new Grenadier 4x4 launch in Asia. So what would I be seeing if I use this? And we've got coverage in Indonesia, past Indonesia, in Vietnam, Malaysia. I'd be able to track those keywords across those markets, and what would I see from a dashboard point of view?

Yeah, so obviously we have kind of different levels of entry. We have just on a very basic level an alert service, which is a bit like Google Alerts. So obviously, that's completely free entry. So you can obviously set up an alert every time your brand is mentioned or a particular trend or whatever. And you can set those up so you get them either daily, weekly, or as soon as they happen. We also have the Talkwalker Quick Search element, which is kind of like our lowest kind of barrier to entry after the alerts. And that is essentially, it's a really good way to just kind of keep, to do some research essentially around your brand and your trends. So you can obviously, as I mentioned before, search for your brand. And then within that, you will see we have kind of different widgets, as it were, so you can kind of dig down to different levels. So you can see initially the mentions and engagement and reach that you're your brand is getting on a given time period. So you could search for the last 7 days, the last month, 3 months, that sort of thing. And then we also identify things like influencers. So the people who are talking about your brand or whatever you're searching for, the people who are talking about it most and get the most engagement. So that's a good way to kind of identify if you're looking to do maybe an influencer marketing campaign and you're looking for the right people to work with. It's a good way to kind of start your search essentially and just see who's talking about you in and you can do a bit more research as to if they're talking about you positively, if they're working with your competitors, that sort of thing.

Okay, so quick question about that, Sophie, then. Am I gonna get the contact details of those influencers or you see the hashtag or you see their—

You would see the channel, yeah, basically the channel in which they're mentioning you. So if they're tweeting about you, for example, it will show you the tweet. And yeah, and again, with the kind of the quick search element, you can also look for influencers, you can look at kind of demographics of the people who are, talking about you. So looking at kind of the percentage split between female, male, the kind of the interests of those people, the occupations. So this information is essentially pulled from kind of public profiles, essentially. So if it was kind of— if you mention in your Twitter bio that you are a student or, you know, that loves animals, then it's going to pull that information.

Right, right. Yeah.

That's how we know that you're a student. So just to reiterate, everything That all the data that comes through Talkwalker is kind of publicly available.

Yes.

On the public domain.

And can you then give us an example of a client that's using Talkwalker and what they've done with the information that they've got then?

I can. So I can talk a bit about application in that sense. So we kind of work around, we call it our PMP framework. So it's our Protect, Manage, Promote. framework. So these are kind of like the 3 main areas or 3 main use cases that companies would use it. So to protect their brand. I mean, one example we do share often is around— I don't know if you remember a year or so ago, I think it was Hong Kong Airlines accidentally sold their business class tickets at a knockdown price.

Yes, I do remember that. Yeah.

Yeah. So in that sense, They were able to kind of detect that this was happening because they'd set up these alerts to kind of track all the conversations that were happening. So they obviously saw a peak in the conversation suddenly that was unusual, that they weren't expecting, and were able to dig in deeper and see that the conversations that were happening were around the fact that there was this great price on a business class flight.

How interesting, Sophie.

Yeah.

And so are you also tracking, for example, WeChat and Weibo then?

Yes, we do Weibo definitely, and WeChat I think as well, yeah.

Okay, and then so going forward then for Talkwalker, are you finding this sort of text, will there be video next? You say you've got already, you've got a photograph search, will there be a video search do you think next?

Yeah, so we do already do kind of in video images, so we can search As I say, if people are posting videos on YouTube or whatever and your logo would appear in the background of that video, for example, it would show as a mention for your brand.

Wow. So from a compliance point of view, this could be really very important for, for example, anti-piracy, counterfeiting, use of logos and so on unlicensed.

And also from another way people use it is around kind of sponsorship ROI. So particularly around sports matches, you can kind of see exactly how much exposure your brand is getting by the different channels that it's being kind of— the image, as it were, is being pushed through.

Wow. And then in terms of the kind of clients that you've got, I mean, you've mentioned an airline. Are they mainly multinational big companies? You've mentioned you've got an entry-level product and a slightly more expensive one at €6,000, but that doesn't seem to be that expensive for the service you're offering. So what's the profile of your clients?

Yeah, so it's a real mix of clients. Obviously we have a lot of multinational brands that use our product, but also smaller. So yeah, SMBs also can use it as well because obviously there's different— I imagine they'll be using it in slightly different ways, but there's definitely Definitely different, I guess it's different benefits you can gain depending on whether you're a smaller company or a large company as well.

Yeah, and then one other question then is about if companies are looking to use the service, does it have any limitations in terms of access? Is it, for example, blocked in China or is it globally available? Because, you know, working in China, things like Google, YouTube were blocked.

Yeah, so currently we track Weibo and WeChat, but we're not tracking TikTok at the moment, no.

So Sophie, this sounds amazing, Talkwalker social listening. Is it accessible? How affordable is it for business owners?

No, it's definitely not only for multinationals. We have a lot of SMB customers as well, and essentially our pricing model is a fair pricing model that's based on data consumption. So essentially, the more volume of conversation around a brand, the more data we estimate they'll need, and then we price according to that. So obviously, kind of bigger multinationals might need more data than a smaller SMB. Yeah, I mean, obviously, the prices on the website are kind of an indication of the range. So yeah, as you say, we have the free alerts and free access to the— an element of free access to Quick Search. And then we have the basic entry-level package. Which I think on the website is marked at £6,000, but then after that, it's really the packages are tailored per client, as I mentioned before, based on the amount of data that they would need.

So Sophie, what about as an agency like mine, East West PR? How would that work? Do I need one account for each client, or can I have one account for multiple clients?

So we have agency clients who, yeah, would basically purchase the package via us and are able to use it with their clients. Yeah.

Okay, so you can have any number of brands if you like, there's no limitation in terms of search terms or brands like there are?

No, I mean, there are obviously, there are limitations within the package based on kind of data allowance. And so how many mentions you're searching and kind of historical mentions and things like that. So again, I mean, that's something that can, it needs to be really just discuss when you're setting up the package exactly your needs and therefore kind of how you'd be using it, how much data access you'd need, that sort of thing. We're not the only company that offers this. We are definitely one of the more established companies on the market at the moment. I think where we really stand out is our artificial intelligence essentially is all developed completely in-house. So that means that any of our clients, if they, you know, need something specific or they are finding limitations within the product, they can really work with us and we can kind of, you know, essentially develop kind of in partnership with our clients. So in that sense, the kind of the product is always evolving depending on what our customers need. And on that AI front as well, I mentioned earlier, we do, we offer obviously like sentiment analysis. So that's kind of one of the areas where you can track your kind of brand reputation. And our sentiment analysis is one of the best compared to other brands in terms of the accuracy and being able to detect, for example, sarcasm and things like that. So, you know, just basic text read by a kind of computer might not be able to detect sarcasm, but with our kind of AI technology, as it were, it can— it has more accurate reading in that sense.

Sophie, if people are interested in Talkwalker, where can they find out more about you and Talkwalker?

Yeah, so they can head to the website, so it's www.talkwalker.com. And yeah, and it's possible to sign up for a free demo there, so we can kind of take anyone through the product and really understand exactly how they'd be using it, so we can show the kind of the true benefits.

So thank you there, Sophie Clark of Talkwalker. Thank you for listening to this episode of Speak PR about social listening. And if you'd like to listen to more podcasts, you can find them on Spotify and iTunes and all other players. You can also get them at our website at eastwestpr.com. And so with that, I'd like to wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you keep on thinking. Social listening.