Keeping up with the evolving media landscape through Meltwater’s Media Intelligence Capabilities

Over the past 24 months, the media landscape has changed forever.

The latest figures from Hootsuite’s WeAreSocial 2021 Study show that Hong Kong’s netizens spend seven hours a day online and two hours of that is dedicated to time on social media. We have become digital-first media consumers. “The question Hong Kong’s business owners and managers have to ask themselves is what are those internet users saying, seeing and sharing about their brands whilst they are online,” says Ewan Ross, Vice President, North Asia, Meltwater, a global media monitoring and social media listening firm with a big presence in Hong Kong.

“Where are we having those conversations? The data tells us 84.3% of Hong Kong’s consumers are using WhatsApp, 83.7% are using Facebook, 65.6% Instagram, and 55.2% WeChat. Forums like LIHKG and HKGolden are also becoming havens for consumer conversations. If those conversations are happening online, then it’s vital businesses are listening online.”

Improving brand reputation

Understanding consumer behaviour, Ross says, is key to the way brands and marketers plan their strategies — and listening in provides excellent actionable insights.

“For example, by examining the online shopping habits of the people of Hong Kong we know that brand names matter to us. More than half of shoppers look for brand recognition before making a purchasing decision. That tells retailers that brand reputation matters, and they should do everything they can to protect it.”

It’s the ability to produce insights like this that has Meltwater garnering serious attention. In September 2022, the company won in the “Software – Marketing Technology” category at the Hong Kong Business Technology Excellence Awards. The awards honour outstanding companies that have made exceptional contributions to the pursuit of technological innovation in Hong Kong. Meltwater won for its ability to help clients “improve their analytics capabilities by staying on top of millions of social and news data to drive actionable insights”.

Meltwater was founded in Norway in 2001, quickly expanding to become more than just a global media monitoring company. Its services now include social listening

Helping clients make informed decisions

and intelligence, media relations and even key opinion leader (KOL) relationship management. Meltwater has more than 27,000 clients globally, including some of the world’s biggest and best-loved brands, like Coca-Cola, AstraZeneca, and Google. Closer to home it works with 370 Hong Kong-based corporations, including Mentholatum, Hong Kong University and Cyberport.

“Our suite of products can turn messy, unstructured data into tangible, valuable insights that allow businesses to make important strategic changes, to support their teams and departments in analysing trends, to measure the success or otherwise of their efforts, and to amplify their message across paid, earned, and owned media channels,” Ross said. “That is an incredibly powerful tool.”

By examining examining millions of posts each day from social media platforms, blogs, and news sites, Meltwater helps companies make better, more informed decisions. Local brands are also turning to Meltwater to make major decisions around influencer marketing campaigns, including choosing which KOLs to work with and tracking the return on investment of their campaigns.

“These direct relationships between brands and KOLs signal a huge shift in content creation away from traditional media towards individuals using social media platforms to build their own brands,” Ross said. “Content has been decentralised and this appearance of new kinds of storytelling, and a captive consumer audience, provides a chance for brands to work with creators to co-create a brand narrative.”

Ross said many Hong Kong businesses had adapted “spectacularly” to fulfil consumers’ needs and wants, so he was “not surprised that so many business leaders have quickly grasped the potential impact of digital and how they can gain critical insights from platforms like Meltwater to seek out and create opportunities, and even to improve business operations”.

“With such a competitive business landscape in Hong Kong, brands need every possible advantage to stay one step ahead of competitors and reach their audience in ways that are genuine and delightful, and that prompt an online conversation,” he said. “We’ve really solved the problems associated with a fragmented martech stack and created a hub that allows all units across a business to access rich media data, audience insights, and owned channel performance indicators.”

Meltwater provides social and media intelligence. By examining millions of posts each day from social media platforms, blogs and news sites, Meltwater helps companies make better, more informed decisions on insight from the outside. The company was founded in Oslo, Norway, in 2001 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with 50 offices across six continents. The company has 2,300 employees and 27,000 corporate customers, including industry leaders in several sectors. Learn more at meltwater.com.

Meltwater provides social and media intelligence. By examining millions of posts each day from social media platforms, blogs and news sites, Meltwater helps companies make better, more informed decisions based on insight from the outside. The company was founded in Oslo, Norway, in 2001 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with 50 offices across six continents. The company has 2,300 employees and 27,000 corporate customers, including industry leaders in several sectors. Learn more at meltwater.com.

16/F, YF Life Tower, 33 Lockhart Road, Wanchai, Hong Kong +852 2143-2937 meltwater.com/en/request-demo hongkong@meltwater.com

16/F, YF Life Tower, 33 Lockhart Road, Wanchai, Hong Kong +852 2143-2937 meltwater.com/en/request-demo hongkong@meltwater.com

Lenovo’s

Well-known around the world for their products ranging from personal computers to software, Lenovo continues to develop innovative ways to make life easier with their latest product, the Lenovo Scan-&-Go and Self-Service Kiosk, turnkey point of sale (POS) solutions for retailers.

Pandemic and Lenovo’s drive to success

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted many industry practices across many markets around the world, with retail bearing the brunt of the impact of health and safety measures put in place to combat the crisis as well as the uninspiring economic situation at the height of it. With many retailers taking up digital transformation initiatives to address the new building a better and demands and needs of the new normal, Lenovo saw an opportunity to seize.

Success in retail has been redefined by the COVID-19 crisis, as the integration of technology to ensure a safe, secure, and hassle-free experience for shoppers has become the top priority for retail industry players.

Lenovo’s suite of retail solutions for businesses aims to deliver complete solutions for retail companies that integrate the power of hardware, software, and services to get the best results.

Since 1995, Lenovo has been at the forefront of technological advancements. Currently, their advantage rests on cuttingedge technology such as augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), commercial Internet of Things (IoT) as well as smart infrastructure data centre solutions.

Lenovo sought to address the shortage of in-store staff shortages and a surge in demand for daily groceries stemming from the growing number of confirmed cases and social distancing measures.

Hong Kong retailers such as supermarkets and megastores decided to take the direction of transforming their operations and enhancing customer experience by swinging towards SelfService Kiosk solutions as opposed to manual processes that involve cashiers.

After collaborating with consumers and businesses to bridge operational and experience gaps with Lenovo’s technology, the company released the Scan-&-Go and its Self-Service Kiosk, a ready-to-use solution that addresses retailer problems in meeting the demands of a new market condition.

Scan-&-Go turning retail problems into retail opportunities

Supermarkets adopting the new POS system from Lenovo had to first upgrade their packing and delivery management systems and capabilities in order to maximise the benefits that the new POS system will offer.

Through these upgrades, customers were able to pick up items for their shopping in a touchless experience, as they can now simply walk out of the stores and have the store directly deliver their carts to them, all whilst supermarket staff use PDAs to complete the picking, checking, and delivery processes more efficiently. Given these advancements, retailers have experienced the operational efficiency of their stores skyrocketing as they are now able to handle and fulfil more orders compared to traditionally manual processes, with the time spent on each order being cut down to just 5 minutes on average.

The fulfilment rate has increased by 40% for retailers, whilst accuracy rests at 99% across more than 500+ retail stores and 2000+ retail chains that have installed Lenovo’s revolutionary POS system. Retail staff has also been better equipped and trained thanks to the efforts needed to maximise the POS system’s benefits.

Lenovo also released a kiosk with Scan&-Go integrated to aid the retail sector at a time when workforce shortages in order to turn their operations self-sufficient and automated to handle sudden increases in customer traffic. From an operational standpoint, retailers can take advantage of this development to further boost efficiency without compromising on service quality.

The autonomous checkout, Scan&Go order verification, and membership identification have helped retailers cut down on queues and optimise labour costs by reallocating retail staff to other higher-value tasks.

Self-payments have increased by 30% around Hong Kong thanks to Lenovo’s installation of kiosks around many retail stores and chains whilst the cost of data input equipment has been reduced by over half. Synchronising marketing data with electronic sales labels has also been made easier thanks to the kiosks.

Supermarkets that have had Lenovo’s POS system installed, along with the kiosks, have reported that it has increased their ability to handle more than a thousand orders per day in every store, resulting in a 90% increase in terms of operational efficiency.

Bringing in a better future for businesses with Lenovo

With their suite of retail solutions, Lenovo’s products offer retailers the advantage of increasing their store efficiencies as they fully integrate the tech whilst also helping them to address gaps in offline and online sales. Optimising in-store operations with a mobile-first approach with technology enables faster and more efficient transactions whilst minimising friction across touchpoints.

Deployment of the innovations is made hassle-free for retailers, as the solutions have been tested, validated, and deployed by Lenovo’s team of experts. The interoperability of hardware, software and services also allows for easier streamlining of operations, where businesses can gain more accurate insights from data generated by platforms, datasets and functions.

A supermarket in Hong Kong has reported that they have experienced no downtime and zero failure rate whilst using Lenovo’s retail solutions during the tests for product scanning and data processing. From this, the supermarket and its management were able to build confidence in handling the number of shoppers during peak hours without compromising on customer experience and satisfaction.

Lenovo Retail Solutions has also enabled the supermarket to enhance their services without the need for additional manpower, ensuring cost optimisation and guaranteeing the lack of queues for customers to enjoy. This service essentially transforms the shopping experience for customers and equips retailers with data-driven business results, all from disparate data collated and analysed by Lenovo’s technology.

Retailers now have the ability to empower themselves by growing beyond siloed digital point tools to unlock data and insights provided by Lenovo’s technology, as well as reducing hardware footprint and expense through the available Self-Service Kiosk solutions. It comes as no surprise that businesses in Hong Kong have taken up and celebrated Lenovo’s state-of-the-art solution, bringing in fresh opportunities amidst the challenges in a post-COVID market.

The Scan-&-Go Self-Service Kiosks have been recognised by prestigious awards, winning the 2022 German Red Dot Design Award and the Smart Technology - Retail Award at the Hong Kong Business Technology Excellence Awards 2022.