About The Blakeney Group 

Blakeney is a consultancy based in London that uses their expertise to help clients solve complex communications challenges. Their clients come from a wide range of industries, from entertainment to finance to utilities, with a variety of needs. To solve these challenges the agency identifies their clients’ key values and how best to communicate those values to their audiences and stakeholders. 

In this case study, we'll hear from Managing Partner for Blakeney Michael Pooley about how the team use Brandwatch and Cision to: 

  • Combine data sources for a holistic view of complex topics and industries 
  • Gain in-depth insights from qualitative and quantitative data 
  • Understand granular audiences and decision makers 
  • Prevent crises from escalating 
  • Debunk assumptions and discover "the unknown" 

Integrating Brandwatch and Cision for a holistic view

One of the challenges for Blakeney is that they often work with clients who are dealing with sensitive and nuanced issues such as sustainability and climate change, making communication strategy quite complex. With data from Brandwatch and Cision, they can show how audiences perceive their brand, how key stakeholders are talking about an issue, or what trends are emerging in their industry.   

Blakeney use Brandwatch and Cision together to measure not only social data, but also their clients' media presence.  

They use Cision to track the media coverage of their clients, including how their key messages are covered in the news, how the sentiment looks, and the differences between different news media. Meanwhile Brandwatch is used to research industries, topics, and markets in terms of the sentiment of conversations and audience insights.    

They have incorporated all that data and insight into their measurement framework, and teams holds quarterly reviews with each client to see what the priorities are for the account, or if they have changed, so measurement can be adjusted accordingly.   

Another priority for Blakeney is to enable the team to leverage Brandwatch and Cision tools. Internal training sessions were held to demonstrate the benefits of incorporating this type of data into daily work and to help colleagues to feel comfortable using this type of data and integrating it into their reporting and day-to-day account management. 

“Most people who are not researchers or analysts don’t know how powerful this information can be. It’s about demonstrating what case studies there are, what the value is, rather than how to do it. That can come later, once you've got their attention and whet their appetite.”
— Michael Pooley, Managing Partner, Blakeney

Going in-depth with qualitative and quantitative insights 

Communicating with clients' internal stakeholders helps the Insights team understand their business, their use case, and their challenges. But to get an outside perspective, they use Brandwatch data to understand the market in which the client operates, what the competition looks like, what topics are driving the conversation, and who the leading voices are.  

The ability in Brandwatch to dive deep into the data and move from quantitative to qualitative data helps Blakeney understand the nuances of an industry and what's behind the sentiment of a conversation. Some industries naturally have a higher percentage of negative sentiment than others but staying on a quantitative level and not diving deeper can risk missing valuable insights. 

“Sometimes quantifying things is really useful to see how the narrative is changing over time. But going deep into the data and looking at it qualitatively and trying to understand what the nuances are is important because it's never quite as extreme."
— Michael Pooley, Managing Partner, Blakeney

Understanding the opinions of decision makers  

A key use case for the Insights team is understanding decision makers. Blakeney has a large public affairs team, and it's critical to their work to know what policymakers are thinking, what they're saying, what their awareness is on certain issues, and whether they're talking about clients.   

With Social Panels, the team can build all kinds of audiences that are important to their clients, such as Chief Technology Officers or Chief Sustainability Officers. In this way, they can not only provide insight into what the public is saying about their client online, but also what senior decision-makers are saying, especially when it comes to complex issues like climate and sustainability.   

“Social Panels wasn’t a functionality that we had ever used before. But creating these proxy audiences actually works really well and has been really successful.”
— Michael Pooley, Managing Partner, Blakeney

Managing crises: Being proactive, not reactive    

Crisis management is another use case Michael points to when he talks about his work with clients. In one case, they set up monitoring for a water client. Because problems tend to occur at a very local level, they narrowed down the data. They created stakeholder groups with people who would be the first to witness a problem with local waters, using geolocation and keywords to add people who like to swim, for example. This way they can easily monitor any spike in negativity in that area and what is causing it.   

Another client, in the fast-food industry, faced a shortage during the pandemic, and they ran out of their key ingredients. In the setup they had for their client, the Insights team was able to identify a spike in online posts from people talking about not being able to buy food at the restaurant. Thanks to this early detection, the fast-food brand was able to post a timely response on their social media accounts, acknowledging the problem and alerting their audience.   

“The best kind of crisis management is where you don’t have to do anything because you have the setup, and you get those early warning signs. You can be proactive instead of reactive. You can avoid having to do any sort of crisis management because you’ve anticipated the crises before it’s going to happen.”
— Michael Pooley, Managing Partner, Blakeney

Debunking assumptions  

Another challenge that Brandwatch and Cision's data can help with is reducing the tunnel vision that clients have about their brand and industry. They see a few negative posts about them online, or they know they work in a more negatively viewed industry, but they overestimate the amount of negativity they receive overall. This view of themselves can also limit their actions and cause them to keep a low profile to avoid a backlash.   

Brandwatch and Cision help the Insights team debunk these assumptions and myths with actual data. Michael talks about one client who was convinced that a conversation was full of negativity, but the team looked at the data and were able to see a lot of positivity.   

"In fact, we see that the negativity is proportionally low, and they're missing out on associating themselves with these really positive things and the people who are their advocates online, but they don't know who they're advocating for."
— Michael Pooley, Managing Partner, Blakeney

Not only did the data show that the client was perceived far more positive than they thought, but it also revealed a problem. People are talking positively about the places the client maintains, how much they enjoy spending time there, but they don't have a strong association with the company that cares for those places. This presents an opportunity for the client to run an awareness campaign to associate the brand with these places and the positive feelings people have when they spend time there. 

"Brandwatch and Cision data helps to debunk things. It's testing assumptions. It gives you the ability to look outside your organization and not always look inward. It gives you the objectivity to look beyond your assumptions of what you think is right."
— Michael Pooley, Managing Partner, Blakeney

Discovering the “unknown”

 To understand a client's industry, the team does a lot of exploratory analysis in Brandwatch. It's not just to gain knowledge about a complex industry they're not familiar with, but also to discover the “unknown.” Digging into the data, diving deeper into the topic, and discovering unexpected things is one of the most exciting aspects of working with social media data, Michael says.   

The team were surprised at the extent to which niche and granular analysis is possible in Brandwatch. One client, who works in regenerative agriculture, wanted to find out how farmers in the southern hemisphere talk about soil online. The team found that farmers in the targeted regions talk about these types of topics in specific subreddits, and by analyzing this Reddit data, they were able to provide valuable insights to the client. 

“Brandwatch is amazing in terms of functionality, in the ways to access the data; and to slice and dice the data, and all the different ways you can create different outputs for different clients. It provides an almost infinite number of use cases for our agency.
— Michael Pooley, Managing Partner, Blakeney

Published on September 5th, 2024