Avoid Icebergs While You Can: Why Smart Brands Use Multiple Signals to Monitor Their Reputation

If you feel like your conventional media monitoring metrics and your reputation are out of sync, you’re not alone. A recent Social Intelligence Lab study showed that 70% of brands are using multiple signals to evaluate the chaos around them that’s been created by 2025’s fractured media landscape. 

If you’re not using multiple sources of information, including at least one real-time tool, it’s almost certainly costing you both time and money. 

While you’re waiting for yesterday’s sentiment reports and reach statistics, topics are exploding in real time across TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit. If you are relying on those conventional metrics and reporting that fail to give you real-time signals, you will absolutely miss critical brand risks and opportunities.

The measurement problem: Great tools, limited context 

The vast majority of brands still rely on just one type of data, generally pulled from traditional media monitoring tools that track everything that’s said about them across a defined set of platforms.

Done correctly, this can give you valuable signals: rich sentiment analysis, reach metrics, and even historical trends. 

That’s great, but it’s slow. Updates might come a couple of times a day, and they’re certainly never showing you a live view of what’s happening right now.

Think about a modern reputational crisis; how often do the narratives involved remain consistent for a full hour, let alone half a day? What use is it to see that nobody cared on X five hours ago when your CEO messages on Teams sharing the New York Times article about you that they just saw on social media? 

If you’re working off old data, you’re working blind, and that brings the risk of overreacting to small blips that disappear immediately, or missing the tsunami of coverage that will hit traditional signals in three hours.

Traditional monitoring is also brand-obsessed. It often only shows mentions of your brand, missing the bigger context of what’s capturing everyone’s attention right now. This might not involve your brand at all, but might be a topic close to your brand’s mission statement, whether that’s employee rights, recycling, or another issue with which you might be associated. If you’re just searching for brand mentions, you don’t have the context for conversations you might suddenly get pulled into.

The Solution: Multi-Signal Intelligence

The smartest brands aren’t replacing their conventional brand monitoring; they’re making it exponentially more powerful by adding tools that give them real-time context powered by engagement data.

Signal 1: Deep brand monitoring from traditional tools

This gives you the full picture of your brand over the long view, including:

• Comprehensive tracking of all brand mentions
• Rich sentiment and reach analysis
• Historical benchmarking and trends

It’s the kind of thing that’s perfect for quarterly reviews and campaign analysis, measuring the long-term impacts of your comms efforts.

Signal 2: Live engagement data from a real-time tool 

This provides the context for decisions that need to be made right now, and includes data that reveals: 

• Instant shifts in attention across all platforms
• Global engagement data updated every few minutes
• The topics that are actually capturing audience attention
• Whether your “crisis” is really just background noise

With this context, you’re able to act on up-to-the-minute data, and influence outcomes as whatever you’re measuring is still unfolding. 

Taken together, these signals transform your existing investment into a strategic powerhouse founded on a combination of millions of datapoints about global engagement shifts each minute alongside the traditional understanding of who’s mentioning your brand.

The benefits

This multi-signal approach unlocks a multitude of possibilities, but most importantly gives you a 360-degree view of your brand that can be both forward-looking and retrospective. This allows you to:

• Start anticipating: Know what’s worthy of your attention, and be confident about who needs to be looped in as the news cycle shifts and evolves.
• Stop overreacting: Whether it’s positive or negative, attention comes in fits and starts, make sure you know whether it’s increasing or declining before making a decision.
• Target the right platform: See where content about your brand is resonating right now, and use that information to feed back into future campaign planning.
• Get global context: Understand what’s happening around the world at a glance, across multiple languages and countries.
• Give clarity to executives: Avoid confusing metrics like reach and use tangible historical engagement benchmarks to create a clear reputation management framework, ensuring  executives can see how big what’s happening now is compared to previous iterations. 

Avoid the icebergs

Navigating brand reputation in 2025 is like steering a ship through iceberg-laden waters. The sea might look calm on the surface, but danger looms just beneath, and if you’re using yesterday’s map, you’re in trouble.

Traditional media monitoring is a rearview mirror. It shows you where you’ve been, and sometimes what you just missed. But to avoid the icebergs ahead made up of sudden shifts in sentiment, viral posts gathering speed below the surface, and unexpected associations that pull your brand in, you need a forward-looking radar.

Multi-signal intelligence is that radar. It pairs the long-range perspective of conventional tools with the real-time precision of live engagement data, letting you spot trouble (or opportunity) before it hits. You’re not abandoning the way you’ve always done it, you’re adding an extra layer of data to give you the most comprehensive view available.

In a fractured media landscape moving at viral speed, brands can no longer afford to navigate blind. With the right combination of signals, you can stop reacting to yesterday and start shaping tomorrow.