Ever used the Internet to do your research for making your next purchase?   I would say most of us do.  It could either be looking for a new phone or checking out what the latest gadgets have to offer.  This is just two of the typical scenarios that as consumers is where we would normally want more information.  The question then, is how do we look for for it?  There is typically, Google Search of course!  Yes, most of us would just rely on Google’s returned results and start from there.  For the more hardcore folks, there are known forums that contain enthusiastic forumers that will do reviews, share complaints, questions and answers and so on.  These forums offer a lot more insight into various good as well as the bad from real users.

From a company’s perspective, wouldn’t you want to know where all this information is residing?  You would want to protect your brand or get some immediate feedback on your product.  Wouldn’t you want to know if your investment in all that marketing and advertising paid off?  To do so, you would probably need to go through the same process of finding the information manually, using search engines or browsing through known forums.  This will take a lot of time and effort, and I mean a lot!  To consolidate all the information manually will become very tedious and cumbersome; not to mention how often you do it to ensure that everything is up to date?  It will be an uphill task without help.

Now, allow me to demonstrate how Brandtology’s Digital Conversation Management System (DCMS) can help.  Let’s look at a scenario where as a corporate personnel of company ABC and I’m interested to gauge the online buzz/chatter for the Google phone in the Singapore.  For illustration purposes, in this example I’ve identified over 80 channels in Singapore that relates to the mobile phone industry, where their sites include: ChannelNewsAsia, GameAxis, Hardwarezone Forum, SGClub, SgForums, SingaporeBikes, Stomp, Electric Newpaper, VR-Zone and YoungNTUC.

Focusing on the month of February 2009, the chart from DCMS below illustrates an overview of the various subjects that I am looking at.  Apple iPhone came up top with the highest buzz at 1796 posts and Nokia in second at about 568 posts with Google Phone at 514 posts.  The colors in the chart depict the sentiment ratings, for example with Google Phone, it had 218 very positive, 30 positive, 213 neutral, 11 negative and 42 very negative posts.  (Light Green = Very Positive, Dark Green = Positive, Blue = Neutral, Orange = Negative and Red = Very Negative).

Next, we would want to know generally what is the online chatter about.  With our focus on Google Phone, from the Buzz Cluster in DCMS we observe the following.

The green colors reflect a positive sentiment towards those phrases mentioned.  Light green represents very positive and the darker green represents positive.  The size of the font represents the frequency; the bigger the font the more frequent its being mentioned. Some of the key phrases give you clues into the posts.  For example “SingTel HTC Dream”, “Better than iPhone”, etc.

Next, let’s look at the Buzz in February for the Google Phone.  A reference point to note here is that Channel News Asia featured an article that SingTel was bringing the Google Phone to Singapore on the 20th Feb.  It is obvious that the chatter or buzz on the online media space has increased on the 20th and hit a high of 47 for the 21st Feb.  This shows a correlation between the announcement and sparking off interest amongst the online forumers.  The benefit of this Buzz chart is that you can use it to gauge if an event or announcement is successful at generating buzz amongst online media users.

The ability to determine the buzz only gives you an overall picture in its totality.  That may be enough for some, but what if you want to drill down into its details?  The next chart below illustrates how DCMS can breakdown where the buzz come from.  From here you can see that the channel with the most buzz is from Hardwarezone’s forum “Smart PDA, PDA phones and GPS SIG” followed by “Eat Drink Man Women”.  The intelligence you get here can be used for targeted advertising; choosing the channels that has the most relevant buzz.

So far, I’ve mentioned about buzz, how about the number of bloggers/forumers? You may have a lot of buzz, but it could just be from one or two bloggers.  At times, you may want to know the number of unique bloggers that have mentioned your product or brand.  This is where you can gauge the “viral growth” or spread in online media.  The diagram below is DCMS’s Voice Growth chart.  It shows the number of unique new voices for each day and the cumulative number of voices over the February time period.  Like the Buzz chart, you can see that there was a significant number of new voices that grew from the 20th to the 22th after the announcement from SingTel on the 20th.  If the announcement was actually a promotional event, this is a very good indicator to determine its success in spreading the word.

In summary, I’ve shown you briefly several features of DCMS’s capabilities and I hope it gives you an insight on how it can help you.  For my next blog entry I’ll demonstrate further its analytical capabilities and how it provides transparency in the online media information we gather.

Stay tuned for more updates.

Cheers!

Dr. Alvin Chan

Co-Founder and Vice President for R&D