‘Media Intelligence’ Mobile App

My team has designed multiple mobile apps to support our desktop offerings. We continue to evolve our offering by working with large and small customers to understand what they need in a mobile experience. Initial offerings focused on the feature that is most critical to our customers…

media monitoring

Use case: read and review all significant coverage on a daily basis.

Use Case: Search on-the-go

Our app usage has always shown a clear Monday to Friday usage pattern across all global markets. With few exceptions, we see a ramp up of usage Sunday evening and a drop off on Fridays. Our service is an enterprise app and the majority of functions are things that our users do at work and (typically) on their desktop.

The two core use cases of our app are media monitoring and data / trend analysis to support internal reporting needs. Media monitoring, review the latest coverage to make sure there are no red flags or crisis issues, lends itself well to mobile usage. Customers also told us that they will check the latest coverage either via our daily email report or via the mobile app on the bus or subway on their way to work. Although our mobile app contains some overview analytics, the process of reporting is complex and does not led itself well to mobile usage.

After launching the first native mobile versions of our app, customers expressed interest in ad-hoc searching. Everything on our app runs off of searches. But most searches are complex involving a combination of advanced Boolean queries and source-based filtering. These are not easily executed on a mobile device. But customers expressed a need for an on-the-go search. They might be at a conference and hear about a new company or competitor that they want to check out. Or on social, they might hear about a new trending hashtag and want to understand if its something they need to start tracking. So to support these use cases, we decided to build Explore an ad-hoc search tool that lets users build very basic keyword searches but also experiment with slightly more sophisticated queries.

Use Case: Custom-tailored notifications

Every mobile app maker wants users to enable notifications for their app. For the vast majority of apps, this results in the user getting flooded with useless or unwanted notifications. So most users end up turning them off. Meltwater has always offered an instant notification for the basic email service we provide. The trick is to balance this feature out with a search that is so specific that the user really does want to know as soon as a matching result happens. For the right customer, our account reps can create these queries but our pricing model does not allow it for our low-end customers.

Although we offer the search-driven notification option already, the value is limited by the quality of the search and usually requires our account reps building the custom queries. Some accounts will have multiple executives on enterprise accounts, each with multiple searches that deliver notifications to each user. This is the killer app for us. A setup where we know the user’s needs so well that we can notify them about multiple issues in a single day because they care about the topic.

For the customers that can’t afford that level of support, there is smart alerts. These are alerts that are triggered by specific events (e.g. a product launch) for specific companies and organizations. Setup is via our desktop app and the user can choose how they would like to be notified… only on the desktop, via email or via push notification on their mobile app.