MELTWATER REVIEW

MELTWATER WORKSHOP REVIEW

As a student pursuing a degree in Public Relations-Corporate Communications at Mohawk College, I recently had the privilege of exploring the intricacies of media relations and brand monitoring through Meltwater with the guidance of Elaine Patterson, a Client Success Manager at Meltwater based in Toronto. This workshop was a thrilling experience through the growing world of digital communication. 

  

Our seasoned mentor, Elaine, walked us through the comprehensive features that Meltwater offers, providing us with valuable insights and practical knowledge. 

  

Elaine first introduced us to the Meltwater Academy; a series of online courses that are designed to help understand the Meltwater system a little bit better. Also, you can get certifications from the variety of courses and earn a badge that you can put on your LinkedIn. 

  

The media contact database within Meltwater was like discovering a goldmine that led to an endless network of journalists and essential media contacts. It simplified the process of creating and managing media lists. a crucial aspect of effective communication within the media. We also learned how to filter by beats, location, media channels and so on. These features will help streamline our communication goals. 

(A media list is a list compiled by a PR person to send out a media release or article to for publication. The PR person tailors this list according to the direction of his story). 

 

There was a mention of artificial intelligence integration into the meltwater database that’ll help crawl online and publicly available content to be able to generate media contacts. Safe to say Tim wasn’t going to buy into that idea 🤣. 

  

As we continued to delve into Media Monitoring, we came across the "Explore" section. Here, we could track when our stories hit the news cycle. It’s like a guide through a barrage of digital media content. In this section, we discovered two distinct search methods: the keyword search and the advanced search. The keyword search supplied a quick way to find mentions related to our brand. By adding specific keywords, we could refine our results. The advanced search allowed us to create complex queries using Boolean logic.  

  

We also touched on data analysis. We could visualize trends and use AI insights to understand spikes in mentions and analysis. 

  

Meltwater also offered the ability to export data in various formats, ensuring that we could share insights and reports with our team or organizations. 

  

At the end of workshop, I’m sure we were all well-prepared to apply our new knowledge in real-world scenarios also trust Tim to instantly put our knowledge to test with an assignment to develop a media list for our fictional product release. 

  

In all, it was an enlightening workshop. My takeaway from this experience was seeing the massive development in the industry from newspaper clippings to valuable tools like Meltwater and CISION. Also, the meltwater academy is something I definitely want to take a look at to further my knowledge in media monitoring. I also need that badge 😉.