Asia Pacific Digital Brand Index (DBI) – Looking Back and Moving Forward

Looking back, Brandtology has reached a new milestone of having run the Asia Pacific Digital Brand Index with our partners at Edelman Digital APAC for a year now and I’m happy to say that it has been an astounding 4 releases of the DBI so far.

In summary we have so far covered:

• 8 million posts,
• representing the perspectives of millions of Netizens,
• talking about 350 technology brands,
• housed in 4,000 regional online channels,
• across 8 Asian markets.

The Top 10 most discussed technology brands in the 12 months (ending June 2010) across our eight Asian markets:
1.    Google
2.    Microsoft
3.    Apple
4.    Samsung
5.    Intel
6.    Nokia
7.    Sony
8.    Hewlett-Packard
9.    Yahoo!
10.    Research in Motion

Google consistently placed top in the past few studies even though we have removed keywords like “google it” to remove irrelevant mentions of the brand in the study. This shows that Google is indeed a brand name to be reckoned with and they should be exploiting it for other product extensions like Google Laptop, Google Tablet, Google Blender, etc (ok, I kid on the Blender part, but who knows what they will release next?).

Some of the macro-trends in the social media landscape across Asia are:

1. Online chatter grows and the growth is startling: 800,000 posts in the first DBI and now up to 2,000,000.  Can brands still afford not to be part of the conversation?
2. The Twitter Phenomenon: Are we going from a web of pages to a web of streams and updates? However, in China, Sina microblog is gaining more prominence.
3. Tech brands joining the conversation: Growth of creating local, regional and global fan pages in Facebook. More engagement opportunities rather than simply one way communication.
4. Telcos and mobile chatter dominates: Local telcos are prominent in the Top 10 brands across all countries. On top of service, it is also driven by the hottest mobile phones they sell.

Moving forward, the DBI will continue to evolve and there will be more interesting angles to demonstrate how these top technology brands are leveraging on the growth of social media to build more content and engaging with the community.

Feel free to provide us your feedback/comments on the DBI!

The releases for the fourth Asia Pacific Digital Brand Index (10.3) for the various countries are as follows:

• Australia – Digital Brand Index 10-3
• China – Digital Brand Index 10-3
• China – Digital Brand Index 10-3 (Chinese version)
• Hong Kong – Digital Brand Index 10-3
• India – Digital Brand Index 10-3
• Indonesia – Digital Brand Index 10-3
• Malaysia – Digital Brand Index 10-3
• Singapore – Digital Brand Index 10-3

Information from the previous releases of DBI

Tags: Digital Brand Index, Digital Strategy, PR, Regional, social media intelligence, Social Media Monitoring