• by Karl Greenberg , July 28, 2011

Nissan has tapped global media-monitoring company Synthesio for a global Web "listening" and analysis project spanning 28 countries across Europe, the Middle East, and India. The firm says the project gives Nissan ongoing Web listening and human analysis in various languages, detailed geographic breakdowns of online conversations, identifying the top topics of concern in each country, top influential Web sites and individuals per country, periodic qualitative analysis and so on.

The goal is to give the automaker Nissan social intelligence about its consumers, markets, and competitors worldwide.

Synthesio has also worked with Toyota, Volvo, Peugeot, and Honda on various projects. Ben Farkas, Synthesio's U.S. sales director, tells Marketing Daily the company got the nod after a large-scale evaluation with some 10 competitive vendors, and that the project is being handled out of Nissan's Europe office. Synthesio is based in Paris, with its London office handling the project, he says.

"The idea is to get a deep understanding of marketing within each of the countries by monitoring all conversation pertaining to Nissan and their product lines across the Web, including social media -- Twitter, Facebook, and specialty social networks pertaining to each country," he says. "For example, in Brazil and other South American countries the most prevalent social network is Orchid; in China, it's Sina Weibo."

David Parkinson, digital engagement manager, Nissan AMIE (Africa, Middle East, India and Europe) said in a statement, "We went through a very extensive vendor selection process, and were impressed with Synthesio's sentiment approach (human plus technology) and the breadth of their offering -- both in terms of global coverage, and the fact that they could offer listening and analysis through an easy to use query tool."

Farkas says that, for Nissan, the company is doing a customized monitoring system to collect all mentions of the company, vehicles and brands across the Web in those countries and then breaking it down further to get insights on various topics of conversation, in terms of buzz on things like vehicle price, safety, or marketing communications.

Nissan gets an online dashboard that it can use to view the data on an ongoing basis in various categories like sentiment, and then qualitative analysis reports on trends based on top influencers, web sites. "Online monitoring and analysis is becoming more and more prevalent," says Farkas.

"The novelty here is that huge global brands -- we work with Toyota and Microsoft -- understand that there's value in being able to monitor their presence on a global scale with a centralized system. Also, a lot of companies are using data across the enterprise, whether in market research for product development, or PR, or advertising purposes on how to do better creative for different campaigns in different countries."