Marketers and brands told to embrace online revolution

“Newsrooms, conversation engines and digital-social command centres would be a key platform not only to monitor the online conversation but this cutting-edge hub also helps the company generate the right contents to targeted consumers at the right time,” Michel Mommejat, managing director for digital engagement in Asia-Pacific at FleishmanHillard, a leading holistic public relations agency, said yesterday.

The command centres feature the latest hardware including screens, servers, social monitoring systems and broadcasting tools. The size of the centre depends on the requirement of each client and its business direction.

Through technical support and expertise from FleishmanHillard, the brands would invest in this new digital monitoring platform to listen to and learn from social conversations and leverage those collective date for a digital marketing plan to create and amplify the right contents for real-time engagement with customers.

Each commander centre should have a minimum of five well-trained staff to operate the newsroom, which also allows further involvement from media agencies, content creators and the company’s clients.

FleishmanHillard targets clients in the business-to-business as well as the business-to-consumer industries in Thailand.

In Asia, the leading brands in Singapore, China, Indonesia and India have now adopted this new data management system. For the Thai market, the agency launched the new service this week.

Singapore-based Philips is a case study. The company has developed its own command centre to pull up data to identify insights, trends and the performance of communications. With the data, Philips could drive people to its store or e-commerce site and its on-ground events effectively.

“During the six months of a campaign in Singapore, the company reached a more than one million audience. That was a huge impact result,” he added.

The benefit of a command centre is that a company can get the right insight to inform it to make the right decision to deal with any crisis once it surfaces on digital media.

In response to this demand, the PR agency also provides FH2020 as a solution to react to a social media crisis through monitoring traditional and social media, running crisis simulations and establishing command centres within a client’s existing technology infrastructure.

FH2020 also includes a crisis guidebook and training programmes. This solution is deployed in more than 20 clients, tackling issues in over a dozen languages including Thai.