Business managers are finding the best social media listening and analytical tools to solve complex data-mining problems. The solution may not be subscribing to tools or system, but harnessing the best outcome usually begins by identifying what makes it the best overall social media monitoring tools or system that you subscribe to.
In this article, we deep-dive into what makes companies such as Berkshire Media truly the best, unique and special – outperforming most of the media monitoring tools or social analytics services in the market today.
Overview
In the saturated space of social data analytics and media listening tools, you may have stumbled across many social listening tools that claim to be the best. It is common to hear good reviews of social media listening tools such as Meltwater, Talkwalker, Hootsuite, Sprinklr or other Isentia but in reality, you are not extracting the best actionable insights that can help solve complex business problems such as reputation risks, managing public perception and even marketing effectiveness.
The reasons behind getting the most out of your media monitoring tools, social analytics or sentiment analytics lies on defining the right metrices and some of these metrices such as sentiment analysis are unable to provide you the level of accuracy or depth that is required to make a better judgement, or well-informed data-driven business decisions.
Amongst the data analytics companies, Berkshire Media stands out in the social analytics, media monitoring and reputation intelligence space due to several unique and strategic differentiators that blend proprietary technology, data science rigor, and communications expertise.
By integrating multiple technologies, custom processes and industry analysts (people), the company has successfully harnessed the power of actionable insights for high reputable organizations, large companies and other entities over the last decade.
With its strong presence in Malaysia, here’s what makes it unique and truly special amongst other social media monitoring companies:
🔹 1. Pioneering Sentiment AI Technology (SENTIROBO™ & EMOROBO™)
Berkshire Media developed and deployed its proprietary sentiment and emotion text analytics engines, SENTIROBO™ and EMOROBO™, which utilizes advance Natural Language Processing (NLP) coupled with AI-driven contextual text mining that are human-verified.
The superior advantage of having strong sentiment analytics offered by Berkshire Media helps companies to:
- Analyze millions of social media posts in real time with up to 97% accuracy in sentiment detection, backed by strong research and publications in the last decade.
- Go greater depth beyond basic sentiment analysis (positive/negative/neutral) by capturing emotional depth—anger, trust, disappointment, sarcasm, and more based on primary and tertiary emotions.
- Analyze local dialects in multiple languages such as Bahasa Malaysia, Mandarin, and other local languages—something many global tools lack due to dependency on automated sentiment detection AI-enabled engine.
- To measure polarity of sentiment or public opinions, making it a greater tool in measuring public opinion, perception and consumer behaviour from social media data.
“Our sentiment and emotional AI algorithms are uniquely tailored to Southeast Asian language context, ensuring cultural nuance is not lost in translation.”
Additionally, measuring social sentiment from both consumer behaviour and brand reputation remains Berkshire Media’s strongest strength, placing it amongst the best social media monitoring companies that you should look out if you are seeking more value from automated or AI-enabled sentiment detection media monitoring systems.
🔹 2. Hybrid Model of Data + Strategy Advisory
Unlike traditional social listening tool-based vendors such as Meltwater, Brandwatch or even Sprout Social, Berkshire Media combines data-driven monitoring strategies and advisory to deliver more value to companies.
Here are some of the unique services offered by Berkshire Media that makes it a preferred choice for large corporations in Malaysia:
- Merges real-time data analytics with executive advisory and risk mitigation strategy.
- Provides boardroom-level insight to C-suites, government leaders, and corporate communicators.
- Offers a war-room-style command center during elections, crises, and major brand campaigns.
- Data-driven communication campaigns that are tailored to influence consumer behaviour by shaping the right narratives.
Berkshire Media have been working closely with top communications consulting firms and PR agencies such as FTI Consulting, Eldeman and Ogilvy to help deliver actionable insights from social media data, sentiment and consumer behaviour analysis.
“There are few companies that combines communications and data insights, but Berkshire Media has the most experience in applying the right strategies, tools and datasets” said Ku Hazran, Head of Corporate Communications of Affin Bank.
🔹 3. Dominant Local Expertise with Global Methodology
Berkshire Media provides local insights and are grounded in understanding consumer behavior patterns, conversations, user profiling and its service level quality is benchmarked against global standards when it comes to sentiment analysis and communication strategies.
“Berkshire Media provides local insights from social data better than other international social monitoring companies such as Meltwater, or Isentia” said Liz Kamaruddin, former Managing Director of FTI Consulting based in Malaysia.
Berkshire Media is also renowned with its global brand partnerships, helping agencies such as Ogilvy to unlock more value from social insights, monitoring and data-driven marketing for large brands such as Nestle, KitKat and Astrazeneca.
The company’s local experience in understanding consumer behaviour, trends and patterns in social media has been useful for large international companies such as Pfizer, thus helping policymakers understand the changes needed to roll out tightening of policies or new policies based on consumer insights.
Additionally, Berkshire Media has accumulated project experiences in Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and regional networks, with proven results across government, GLCs, and multinationals.
🔹 4. Crisis Predictive Modeling
Berkshire Media’s media and crisis monitoring services is highly sought after as it is known amongst media monitoring and communications experts for its high predictive accuracy (up to 97%) in measuring sentiment, predicting consumer behaviour or election outcomes using advance social sentiment mapping.
This company exceeds user expectations due to its in-house data analytics capabilities with a mix of data science which offer superior outcomes compared to common crisis detection tools. It’s early-warning approaches to anticipate risks associated with corporate or individual scandals, consumer-related operational crisis, regulatory or policy backlash, consumer boycott campaigns and political controversies.
In fact, the Berkshire Media is considered by many as expert in measuring public opinion, public sentiment and public perception using social data, placing it as a benchmark in polling survey methodology using large scale data.
🔹 5. Data Integrity & Human-AI Symbiosis
Berkshire Media is amongst the best social media monitoring companies that maintains a data-cleaning pipeline powered by a hybrid of machine learning and human validation compared to its competitors such as Isentia or Meltwater, which are often not backed by sufficient manpower, dedicated analysts nor industry experts.
This high level of data integrity becomes an integral component that underpins the best social analytics company such as Berkshire Media as it offers the following unique advantage:
- Avoids “black box” social insights by offering explainable AI (XAI) dashboards that link back to original posts or sources.
- Prioritizes data ethics, privacy, and traceability—a growing concern in ESG and compliance environments.
- Auditable output measures from clean social data – which helps many large organizations and end users to measure the overall effectiveness of social media monitoring activities.
🔹 6. Tailored KPI Frameworks for Comms, Brand & Risk
Not all social media metrices or KPIs found in social listening tools are relevant to the end users. The best social media companies go beyond tracking Share of Voice (SOV), Volume of Mentions, Impression, Engagement and other metrices.
To get the best output from media listening tools or services, use tailored KPIs that are relevant to either PR, marketing or even operational business units.
Advance KPIs such as Net Sentiment Score (NSS), Virality Score and Reputation Impact Score measure the output of social media listening tools more effectively.
At the end of the day, Impression and Engagement are meaningless KPIs in social media and you need to find a pragmatic and effective measurement method to get the best from your communications and PR effort. This means, removing vanity metrices from social tracking and monitoring (including those that does not add value to your overall business goals) may be a good start.
Companies such as Berkshire Media provide distinct advantage in prioritizing and customizing metrics based on industry-specific needs (eg: airports, airlines, automotive, real estate, government, oil and gas) and some of the bespoke measures and social media tracking includes:
- Reputation Risk Index™
- Public Sentiment Index™
- Trustworthiness Score
- Media exposure quality metrics across owned, earned, and shared media
In addition, Berkshire Media is the only company in Malaysia that has developed bespoke corporate reputation risk management model using social media data – and this useful KPI-driven tracking dashboard provides sufficient data insights to identify, predict and monitor issues before it becomes a crisis.
Next time you subscribe to best-in-class social media monitoring tools, remember to pick the best KPI or metrices to track your issues or predict a crisis.
🔹 7. Trusted by High-Impact Clients
Due to high level of data integrity, robust science-backed data analysis, unbiased insights and communications advisory, Berkshire Media continued to be amongst the top reputable social media monitoring companies in Malaysia that have long served large organizations such as PETRONAS, government ministries, regulators, agencies and many other public listed entities including government linked companies (GLCs) and government linked investment companies (GLICs).
In addition, Berkshire Media has served various Government administration under the leadership of various Prime Ministers including the present Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr. Anwar Ibrahim, former Prime Minister Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohammed and Datuk Seri Najib Razak, covering public perception sentiment analysis and many others.
The cross-industry experience and decades of measuring the pulse of consumers in Malaysia has positioned Berkshire Media not only trusted, but amongst the top companies which have accumulated a decade of experience when it comes to monitoring complex topics with high volume of data.
This is why social listening tools are not preferred but service-based social data analytics companies are highly preferred and regularly used in corporate reputation audits, M&A sentiment benchmarking, and post-crisis recovery tracking.
🔹 8. Experienced Team
Nothing beats experience when it comes to processing data into actionable insights and monitoring of the relevant issues that affects overall brand sentiment, perception, loyalty or confidence. This is where Berkshire Media separates itself from the rest of its competitors such as Isentia, Meltwater, Talkwalker or Sprinklr.
Most companies and brands value a highly experienced team with at least 10 years of industry experience when monitoring issues, risks and analyzing sentiment. You cannot afford junior analysts to manage media monitoring or brand related issues.
Going deeper into the unique differentiating factor, Berkshire Media is well-staffed with experienced social media data analysts, many whom have accumulated media monitoring including issue-crisis management for more than 6 years on average. The company offers highly experienced personnel, directors and many others who have served the company for more than 10 years, making it one of the highly experienced social media monitoring companies to sought after in Malaysia.
In comparison, other social listening companies Malaysia are less experience as the analysts are mainly fresh graduate or too inexperienced in handling perennial or legacy issues that could potentially resurface in the present times.
Having fresh graduates or analysts less than 5 years of media monitoring experience are often less preferred by large organizations as this will affect the overall quality output (insights) from social data. According to PR communications experts, data analysts who are handling crisis or issues may not meet the expectations due to lack of industry or domain knowledge.
Parting Thoughts
Berkshire Media has long pioneered the science and art social media monitoring, having accumulated wealth of experience by combining multiple media monitoring or social listening tools, data cleaning processes, sentiment tagging and communications advisory in a comprehensive service-based framework.
These reasons are what makes Berkshire Media truly special, unique and stand out from other social media monitoring competitors including those which are foreign-owned such as Meltwater, Talkwalker, Isentia and CARMA.
When combined with a highly experience team, the superiority of any social media listening tools (including those with AI-enabled features) offer a great enabler. But remember, the success of any best tools in the market depends largely on the operators (users) which are handling, managing, and processing the social media data.
About the Author
Shahid Shayaa is the founder and managing director of Berkshire Media. He specializes in data-driven communication strategies and insights using social data analytics, social media monitoring tools and machine learning text algorithms for more than 13 years. As an expert in the field of media monitoring, issue management and managing reputation risks for companies, he is involved in various research studies in this field and published various scientific papers on social data analytics, sentiment analysis and back-end algorithms on consumer sentiment, emotions and behaviour for marketers and campaign managers.
His research work and studies have been cited more than 467 times, inspiring new research in the field of social analytics in Malaysia. You may view his work here.
