Nestlé

Marcel Heitmeier has been working at Nestlé as a social media intelligence specialist for three years. Originally part of the Digital Acceleration Team, his first responsibility was to set up an internal social intelligence network.

In his current role, he is in charge of social media monitoring and early warning systems, as well as reporting. He also manages ad-hoc projects for the umbrella brand and all sub-brands of Nestlé Deutschland AG. In addition, his core tasks also include the planning and implementation of campaign, brand, and trend analyses for corporate and brand teams, including those within NESCAFÉ® (Dolce Gusto®), PURINA®, SANPELLEGRINO, and VITTEL.

The challenge

In Germany, Nestlé consists of a large number of brands and services that attract a lot of attention in the media and among online consumers every day. The team monitors these online conversations to ensure they are notified of any emerging crises in real time and to keep up to date on general industry topics and food trends.

To manage this, Nestlé looked for a solution that would surface particularly relevant sources and topics quickly. The Digital Acceleration Team implemented social listening with Brandwatch to do just that.

The aim is to pass on the insights gained from social data to all departments, promoting cross-functional collaboration.

Social listening has become an integral part of market research at Nestlé, and there is increasing demand for it from across the business.

The solution

As part of the cross-business collaboration, the team created a Morning Briefing Dashboard that’s specially tailored to the Nestlé umbrella brand which is clear and easy to use.

The dashboard can be accessed at any time of day, but teams can log in to take a look in the morning to check out what’s been happening online while they were away.

Setting up the Morning Briefing Dashboard

Step one

The needs of all stakeholders were built into the dashboard from the very beginning. This means agreeing on a set of sources (for example, particular sites) as well as target groups of authors. These sources could then be organized into neat lists (e.g. media) for further analysis.

Previously, the team had to invest a lot of effort into researching the authors they would include. But now, Brandwatch’s new Social Panels feature identifies the relevant target groups from Twitter bios faster than ever before.

Step two

In the next step, focus topics were defined, which could then be categorized with the help of rules and tags in the Brandwatch Consumer Research platform. The team then picked from the vast selection of visualizations available to present insights with. These visualizations show data in real time, meaning there’s no need to make manual changes every day.

Step three

Finally, email Alerts were set up for the internal stakeholders who are now informed of new articles or key mentions at the frequency they want to receive them. This means that stakeholders don’t need to log in to Brandwatch to receive insights. That said, the Morning Briefing Dashboard is always there for them to dive into to find out more.

Identifying and analyzing emerging trends

To get a quick overview of the relevance of an emerging topic, Nestlé first uses Brandwatch’s Reach Score in combination with sentiment analysis to determine the importance of individual mentions and to evaluate the course of a discussion.

For more extensive projects, such as a complex topic analysis, this kind of analysis serves as a valuable basis for further study. For example, to analyze relationships and / or the networks of influential people and platforms.

While the team focuses closely on relevant sources (using those source or author lists mentioned above), they cannot risk ignoring all other posts which could also contain emerging opportunities or crises.

To help analyze the broader conversation, Brandwatch’s AI assistant Iris automatically detects topic peaks within large volumes of mentions. It gives Nestlé the opportunity to quickly analyze the general online conversations about their brands so they can act quickly.

Another feature the team uses to stay up to date with all discussions about umbrella and sub brands, competitors, or even new topics, is Signals. These automatic email notifications inform them about abnormalities in the data, like sudden changes in sentiment. Again, this means they don’t need to be logged in to be alerted to key online incidents.

The results

The Morning Briefing Dashboard

Thanks to the Morning Briefing Dashboard, Marcel as well as internal stakeholders can access the context in which Nestlé brands are discussed every day.

Through early warning systems and trackers around brand health, campaigns, competitors, and trends, the Brandwatch platform keeps the team up to date with all relevant conversation across their target groups on online news sites and social media. The monitoring framework, which is tailored to the needs of Nestlé Germany, also enables an overview of all relevant mentions, beyond those predefined target groups.

An example of this is part of the Morning Briefing Dashboard, which enables Marcel to keep an eye on developments on social for Nestlé and for competitor brands. To track share of voice, the team monitors all available mentions and channels relating to Nestlé as well as those relating to competitors.

The time factor is incredibly important, especially because online conversation moves so quickly. The Morning Briefing Dashboard tracks all trends in real time, while Signals and Alerts are designed to notify the team to key opportunities or potential crises as they happen, even when no one is logged in to Brandwatch.

Blending data

Marcel attaches great importance to validating the insights found using social listening with the information his team gains from other sources, like surveys.