Social Listening and Audience Intelligence

At Ofwat, we are aware of the mass of social data available about the 17 water and waste water companies we regulate, the wider sector and water in general but we don't have a tool which enables us to effectively and accurately monitor and evaluate this data, to provide us with valuable insight.

We do very basic social media listening (tracking brand mentions, reactive monitoring in the case of an incident etc) but want to increase our capabilities and use the data to generate insight that can inform our planning; both in terms of our communications and also our wider regulation. We are looking for a tool to make the best use of available data to inform our work.

We mainly use Twitter and LinkedIn as our social channels, but are growing our Instagram and Facebook following as our new strategy has a new focus on customers.

We have three main objectives: • Track and monitor the progress of Ofwat's social and digital presence. Through audience analysis and segmentation, we want to be able to identify influencers, understand our following and be able to analyse our campaigns/content to improve overall social performance. • To understand and assess how water companies use social media to communicate with their customers. This moves the use of social listening away from a purely communications tool into a wider regulatory tool. We will use this to: i. Give us insight as to how companies are communicating with customers and other stakeholders on social - which channels they are using, how proactive or reactive they are and the types of content they are promoting ii. Understand more about customer sentiment with regards to water companies: what are customers feeling when they engage? iii. Benchmark or rank companies against each other - e.g. which companies are most or least responsive to customers iv. Alert us to unusual spikes or peaks in companies' social media data that might suggest an issue we need to explore v. Monitor companies' performance in real time, for example during an emergency incident. An example is the Beast from the East extreme weather in late February/early March 2018. A number of water companies were affected with large numbers of customers off supply. Here, we used social media to give us a sense of the scale of the problems, customers' sentiment and companies' response. We would like to be able to do this in a more systematic and automated way, providing real time reports on the situation as needed • To understand the attitudes of the general public towards water. In order to fully understand customers, and therefore shape our communications and policies, we need to understand their views and attitudes. How do different customer groups talk about water and in what context? How can this be used to track social trends, for example the impact of fast fashion? How can we use this insight to inform our campaigns? Are there influencers who we can work with or opportunities to get involved in new conversations?

Additional information: For Further Information,please contact [email protected]