Jean-Pierre Beaudoin manages the i&e Group which specialises in the management of opinion strategies. He divides his work between advising large companies or French and foreign institutions, teaching (he is Associate Professeur at Celsa, Paris Sorbonne University and is regularly invited to Moscow University) and also trade union activities at Syntec Conseil in Public Relations.

The Internet is everywhere, has it changed relations between consumers and brands ?
Before replying to this question, it is important to recall the development of this relationship over the years. About 50 years ago, a product carried a brand which indicated its producer. Fore some 30 years now, it's the brand that carries the product. It's the development of product ranges. Today, what used to be a mechanism to penetrate a market has become an interface between the market and society and public opinion often appropriates brands for its own ends instead of being "normalised" by them.

So the sense of the relationship has been inverted ?
Indeed. What is happening is the value systems, which are first not the economic values of the market but society's values, take over. Also the brand has to, within the framework of this unusual encounter, develop affinities between its own values and that of society, the logic being : the more affinities there are, the stronger will the created value be.

Is this not a dangerous situation ?
Of course, and even more so because the brand is exposed to a growing number of value systems which take into account society's values which are more diverse, contradictory and militant than ever. For example, entertainment imposes itself as a large deposit of values for a brand while it was not really expected in this territory. Proof that society's systems of values have a hold on the market !

How does the financial dimension enter into this framework ?
Finances are the determing factor in all management dimensions today. Public opinion demands more and more that companies commit themselves to values which are at variance to financial logic. Questioning a brand is questioning the power of the company that is to say the financial power. In this context, advertising logic meets its limits. Hence the rise of other communication disciplines which are better placed to understand the logic of public opinion, beyond market logics.

What are the main criticisms of brands ?
One expects brands to apprehend the world in wich they are, that they understand that societies are not simply markets. Positive sanction only comes when public opinion notices a competence of the brand in relation to a principe which it feels is important. But the "one" of public opinion has the tendency gradually to become personal especially since the explosion of the social media phenomenon on the Internet.

What advice can you give to brand managers ?
Establish you own commitments. They should be described clearly and say what each person's contribution will be. Proclaim your own reference system in relation to society's values and show that you keep them.
A company is neither an ideologist nor a philantropist so avoid false pretences.

How can the Internet be integrated into this process ?
The existence of Internet "watchers" has to be accepted, it does not mean that you have to submit to their demands but you should recognise its opponents' thesis : no disdain, no ignorance on the contrary show respect which will legitimize you in the eyes of public opinion.

All information published in the media or on the web comes from an intellectual process. Only a different intellectual process is able to analyse it. An underlying assumption which drives the evolution of news monitoring at TNS media intelligence towards the intelligence of the media.

While the company's communications departments believe that it is essential to scrutinise continually what the media is saying, some let fully automatic research systems do the work. Media content is conceived by intelligent humans but how can we evaluate, in such circumstances, the intentions of the brains which are the origin of the information ? wonders François Nicolon, Marketing Manager TNS media intelligence. It is because of this question that different transversal methodologies have been put in place in the news monitoring departments across the globe.
A mixed methodology has been adopted. It combines automatic detection with intelligent confirmation thereby guaranteeing the quality of the service. This method is started by defining and contextualising key words and monitoring themes to which they subscribe. So equipped, the automatic detection device can then carry out an initial detection on the press content, TV, Radio, numeric web sites. This phase quarantees completeness while the second ensures relevance. This second stage is where the experts come in, hundreds of readers and listeners, who read, listen, synthesize, classify, analyse and compile all the information already selected automatically.

The Web too
The same process can be done on the web, too. The detection and classification system, developed by our American subsidiary CYMFONY, identifies all new content on the conventional Internet as well as in the social media. And because the principle is very close to the other news monitoring tools, there should not be any great problem in harmonising completely the key word parameters.
Do our customers want such globalisation ? For them, the advantage of such harmonisation of the parameters seems to speak for itself, underlines François Nicolon. On the other hand opinions differ over the different ways of making the information available. Some prefer to deliver it media by media while others opt for globalisation. However, this globalisation is only on the surface because the work of confirmation will remain apart so long as intellectual competences are different from one media to another.

Exposure indicator
Apart from collecting information, it is also good to be able to see evolution graphs of your media presence or indeed those of your competitors. The analyst gives qualitative and quantitative criteria based on 15 to 30 items that are defined together with the client. For instance, this is the case of the Media Impact Unit which is given in the form of indicators or of the exposure analysis integrated into the web monitoring and the social media tool developed by CYMFONY.
Both push news monitoring into a more strategic future by including time space in media analysis.