Hello. I’m starting this blog by sharing one of the first presentations I gave when I came to Switzerland. Firstly, what is it about? Online Research.

If you listen to everything, you listen to nothing.

Thanks to a project I did for Novartis in 2008, I developed a methodology for listening to the web. The problem is that when you need to scale up, you need to be a scrawler. This is where I met LinkFluence. A team able to listen to the web in multiple languages was what I needed to ensure a good start for the digital strategy I was working on with Generali Insurances.

With this project, I faced a booming market of tools and agencies positioning themselves on the topic. The link economy is still what it was 15 years ago, and the experience at Linkfluence took over the new players in the market. My goal with the presentation was to present all the processes, from asking yourself the right questions, finding a partner and collecting data to defining or adjusting your strategy. In our case, Generali Switzerland wanted to go online, especially on social media. What angles to take? What content strategy to adopt? Where to go? Are you going online to talk positively about insurance? Let’s be honest. This is tricky even for big companies to know how to approach this. Fortunately, listening to the web is like being a fly on the wall. You listen to potential customers and know what to bring them to their table. In our case, Facebook presented the most extensive reach, but we didn’t want to go as a company selling insurance. So, we prepared a series of articles, posts, and contests related to the sport Generali was sponsoring. By creating games, we mechanically activated the community to come and visit the page and then hook the audience with interesting articles about sailing, tennis and more.