A strong Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) proposition can create a lot of value for a business as shown by the wide acceptance of ESG investing.
Take the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited (HSBC) for example. It began to ramp up its ESG solutions by offering businesses an expanded portfolio of financing with ESG elements in it.
Additionally, homegrown Telekom Malaysia™ has been ranked highly from an ESG perspective, drawing attention to the telco’s ability to fulfil the regulator’s quality of service (QoS), key performance indicators (KPIs) and lower regulatory risks standards while charting a cybersecurity framework.
Now, it is relatively easy to see why businesses are drawn to launch ESG initiatives but how can one really tell?
When multinational financial services company Western Union began to assess its own reputation, it realised that it needed far more basic insights into its progress as a company especially where ESG standards were concerned.
Western Union’s Social Listening, Analytics & Insight Global Lead, Evan Escobedo, said its social listening, analytics, and insight department found it difficult to access and make sense of the ocean of relevant data that were being generated daily.
The company needed a solution that could track and evaluate the brand’s reputation across broadcast news, digital news, blog forums, and review sites as well as a multitude of social media platforms.
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 insights from the outside. This offers huge potential in helping businesses with their ESG communications.
Escobedo said Meltwater enabled his company to manage its reputation on a global scale, measure the impact of its communications against key internal objectives and stay on top of industry changes with customised reports and human analysis.
“They collaborated to customize a scoring model for Western Union that measures the true sentiment and prominence of media mentions in conjunction with traditional metrics like volume and reach. We see them as an extension of our team — tremendously reliable and responsive.”
“Meltwater is a full package. Being able to have the platform and the professional services organization that you can trust is why I enjoy working with them so much,” Escobedo added.
Meltwater is able to set up custom categories and alerts, as well as listen to what stakeholders are saying about initiatives undertaken by businesses and their competitors, its Country Manager for Malaysia, Kunalan Ramasamy, said.
Meltwater is also able to track ESG campaigns and gain insights about third-party partners.
“With our comprehensive and integrated data, it’s easier to keep abreast of how your brand and industry are stacking up in the ESG space — which in turn helps us craft impactful initiatives or content strategies in the future.”
Kunalan added that times are changing, and being sustainable is now viewed as a large part of the decision-making process for stakeholders.
“Investing in tools that help to measure ESG efforts is crucial to drive relevance in your communications strategy towards the public and your stakeholders, further positioning your brand in an authentic and positive light,” he added.
Find out how you can access an ESG communication evaluation report that Meltwater is taking to market by signing up here.