Posts Tagged ‘social media intelligence’

YEARNING FOR MORE: The Brandtology Social Media Analytics Course

Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives. ~Clay P. Bedford

On June 6 -7, 2011, The Brandtology Academy was once again in full force at Nanyang Polytechnic. The two-day course provided our dynamic participants with an intensive hands-on session on social media analytics, focusing more on the actionable and practical applications of social media intelligence. This time around our target audience ranged from polytechnic lecturers to agency people and even marketing managers from major Brands such as Nokia and Paypal.

The course uncovered many exciting questions from the participants. Most of them were interested about the usability of social media intelligence in terms of campaign strategies and brand monitoring. The activity sessions not only allowed the participants to utilize Brandtology’s tools, it also gave them the chance to understand the process better from how monitoring is managed, as well as the manner in which the analysis is done.

Our utmost gratitude to the keynote speaker Shalabh Pandey, Head of Earned Media Asia Pacific, the people from Nokia, and to the members of our judging panel Paul Soon of XMAsia and Jocelyn Ng who is formerly with Edelman, for sharing their profound insights into social media.

Cheers to another successful Brandtology Academy!

– Kesavan Nair, Social Media Executive

Brandtology SMA Course

Brandtology’s client, Harbour City and their usage of Sina Weibo

Wednesday, October 20th, 2010

Last week, Brandtology’s client, Harbour City was interviewed on Marketing Interactive on their successful use of Sina Weibo to portray the 44 year old shopping mall as a hip and young brand.

Established in January 2010, Harbour City’s Sina Weibo account is named the most popular corporate account among users from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan with more than 135,000 fans.

To keep track of China’s social media development, Harbour City has been working closely with Brandtology.

Karen Tam, senior manager – promotions and advertising at Harbour City, said Sina Weibo has all the advantages of Facebook and Twitter.

She explained one post on Weibo can reach maximum eyeballs because of its ‘@’ function to keep related users in the loop, unlike a status on Facebook which is more ‘liked’ than ‘shared’, or Twitter which has limited reach in China.

Read the full article.

Brandtology & the Digital Advertising Alliance

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

On 8th September 2010, Brandtology  attended the official launch of the Digital Advertising Alliance today at Fusionopolis, Singapore. The event, graced by Mr Lui Tuck Yew, Acting Minister for Information, Communication and the Arts, aims to promote the digital advertising sector and opportunities for investment and collaborations with a $30 million investment over the next three years. The aim of the initiative is to grow digital advertising’s share towards total advertising spending in Singapore from the current 5.3% to 20% by 2020.

Official Press Release by MDA

Official Event Page

News on Straits Times Online

Photos of the event

Our Business Development Director presenting to the Minister and his entourage. From Left to Right: Mr Lui Teck Yew, Acting Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts; Mr Eddie Chau, CEO of Brandtology;Angus Fraser, 1st VP, Association of Accredited Advertising Agents Singapore ;Kelly Choo, Business Development Director of Brandtology

1st Social Media Analytics Certification Course in Asia Pacific Launched

Monday, August 30th, 2010

Global Online Intelligence Leader, Brandtology launches a new arm, Brandtology Academy to provide Social Media Analytics Courses for industry professionals.

30 AUGUST 2010 – Global online intelligence service provider, Brandtology, has launched a new initiative – Brandtology Academy which seeks to encourage retraining, education and ongoing research in the field of social media analytics. In order to raise the calibre of social media professionals, Brandtology Academy has launched Asia Pacific’s first certified Social Media Analytics Course to train a community of industry professionals and interest groups in this area.

From September 2010, Brandtology Academy will be offering a series of talks and workshops on Social Media Analytics. Through numerous case studies and hands-on workshops, participants will be able to understand the applications of Social Media in areas such as digital strategy, sales, marketing, PR, media planning, customer service and product development. The courses are targeted at industry professionals seeking a structured methodology to understanding the latest social media trends and leveraging its wide-ranging effects in their daily work. Moreover, the course also affords an invaluable chance to network with other like-minded professionals and facilitate knowledge sharing about this dynamic field.

Commenting on the new Brandtology Academy, Eddie Chau, CEO of Brandtology said: “The phenomenal speed at which Social Media is developing has resulted in many experienced industry professionals grappling to understand and leverage it in the best manner. The opportunities in Social Media are boundless and can be applied in every functional area. Hence, there is now an acute need to grasp a firm understanding in order to integrate it in traditional business process to stay ahead of the pack.”

Within the various courses offered by Brandtology, participants would be able to learn about the Social Media landscape in the Asia Pacific Region, with focus on the unique characteristics of each market. For instance, although Twitter is wildly popular in most countries, it is banned in China, which has its own version called Sina Weibo, while Taiwanese prefer a micro-blog with a timeline by the name of Plurk. More importantly, the courses would also touch on the measurement and evaluation of Social Media Success, and the use of data analysis tools and services for identifying what creates viral effects online, as well as determining top influencers and key engagement channels.

“Data without analysis is meaningless. What’s more important is to be able to go beyond simplistic statistics such as buzz, views and retweets to find out the driving factors of internet word of mouth, and the overarching concerns of netizens about a brand and its products,” Dorothy, Programme Director of Brandtology Academy, opined. “Extracting actionable insights and using social media analytics to create an effective feedback loop is more important than merely finding out what’s being said and not doing anything about it.”

At the end of the course, participants will be required to undergo a rigorous certification process and demonstrate sound understanding of the key concepts taught in the course. The first two runs of the Social Media Analytics courses in September are already fully booked and the third run will commence in October. For enquiries, please email academy@brandtology.com or visit http://www.brandtology.com/academy


About Brandtology

With more than 140 staff in 12 global locations, Brandtology’s business and brand online intelligence services enable global brands to manage and glean invaluable insights from consumers’ conversations. Using proprietary technology, processes and trained professionals, Brandtology is able to provide a high degree of accuracy and relevancy in multilingual analysis, unlike any other automated monitoring tools. Astute global organisations utilise Brandtology’s intelligence in multiple functional areas such as sales, marketing, PR, media planning, customer service and product development. For more information, please visit www.brandtology.com

About Brandtology Academy
To enable industry professionals to understand and integrate Social Media into their functional roles, Brandtology Academy offers a series of talks and workshops on the use of Social Media Analytics. Through numerous case studies and hands-on workshops, participants will be able to understand the applications of Social Media in areas such as digital strategy, sales, marketing, PR, media planning, customer service and product development. For more information, please visit www.brandtology.com/academy

Brandtology at Estee Lauder Digital Media Day in NYC

Friday, August 20th, 2010

The first ever Esteé Lauder Companies Digital Media Day was held today on the 19th of August 2010, at the Metropolitan Pavillion in New York, and it was a resounding success.

The Brandtology Booth

Our Colleagues Dorothy and Jay at the Brandtology Booth

Brandtology was honoured to be invited to showcase at the event. The event was exceedingly well planned, with thought provoking speeches from the likes of the Esteé Lauder Companies leadership (past and current CEOs), brand representatives from PepsiCo, Jetblue Airways, Eastman Kodak, social media companies like Google, Foursquare and Facebook, and BazaarVoice, Forrester and Resource Interactive on the consultancy and research side of things. There was even a Guru Bar where “experts” on various subject matter like search, social media or marketing were present to answer queries from the attendees.

One key thing was the fact that the leadership was very clear about the direction that Esteé Lauder was headed with digital. How can Esteé Lauder be different? By staying ahead of the digital game, according to Fabrizio Freda, CEO of The Esteé Lauder Companies Inc. The company will invest more in the digital space in the next 3 years, creating positions worldwide to address this evolving space.

Estee Lauder staff at the event

Great case studies were shared throughout the day from the various brands. Notably, it was highlighted to the audience to “look outside your industry” for best practices by players in other verticals, and try and marry the parts of what they have successfully implemented into their own digital strategies.

The discussion was very consumer centric, with the understanding that with digital, the consumer is now far reachable than before, and also wields the power to influence millions across the globe, truly exemplifying the phrase “global village”.

Closing with a particularly memorable quip – “Like I always say, fail fast…but fail cheap”, Fabrizio’s comment immediately elicited laughter from the audience. The significance of this is that Esteé Lauder understands that social media is not a spectator sport and is willing to take some risks, willing to put time and resources into moving the entire organization forward in the digital space, and this undoubtedly will propel the company further than those who adopt the wait and see mentality.

William Lauder, Executive Chairman, The Estee Lauder Companies Inc

Digital Brand Index 10.3

Friday, August 13th, 2010

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:

Information from the previous releases of DBI

Brandtology to Speak at Strategic Online PR & Media Relations Asia on 24-25 Aug

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

We will be speaking on Day 2 of the Conference, on 25th August 2010 at 1.45pm

Social Media Conversation Analytics – What you should know about Engagement, Influence, Reach   and Sentiments
•    Fundamental changes in communication creation and content distribution due to Social Media
•    Why Online Conversations are important
•    Insights from Conversation Analytics
•    Technology and Trained Professionals to ensure high volume and accurate analysis
•    Tying back insights to fundamental business goals

Main Conference: 24 – 25 August 2010
Venue               : Anson III & IV, Level 2
Time                 : 9.00am – 6.00pm
The event will be held at the M Hotel, Singapore.

Other speakers at the conference include senior executives from Dow Jones, BBC, Barclays, Intercontinental, Vocanic, Burson Marsteller.

See you there!

The Importance of Community Management in Social Media

Friday, July 16th, 2010

According to a recent McKinsey & Company survey, online community members visited Web sites nine times as often, stayed five times as long, and represented 65% of sales. A 2006 survey of midsize and large companies suggested that 89% of them had adopted at least one of six community-building tools, such as blogs, wikis, social networking, or content-tagging. This is to say that the wide gap of social media reach between it and the consumers is getting slimmer. The fact that community management has played an undeniably significant role in attaining these figures stands strongly.

How does community management supplement the need of consumers for more reliable and accurate concepts? Community management isn’t just online issues management and discussion moderation anymore. It’s a far more fundamental business role, one that ties together responsibilities from a number of different places, both online and off.

Community management has evolved in its sense from basic online engagement where listening, monitoring, and getting involved in discussions online are the driving mechanisms, to touching and supporting many of the other areas of the organization to deliver content, provide insights and feedback, deliver subject matter expertise, and act as a bridge both inside and outside the organization.

This perpetuates the idea of making a community the central resource for information and intelligence that can help people do their jobs better as questions and topics that customers are interested in related to social media are tackled. Community management becomes a channel for sales, customer service and communication in that it functions as a hub for many different disciplines integrated with online and offline efforts such as customer/client service, PR, marketing, business development, building relationships, creating contents, responding to conversations about the brand and the content, ensuring input/feedback gets channeled to the appropriate internal functional group, managing tools – mostly social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc) and blogs, and planning and developing strategies for increasing engagement and conversion.

All these, however, sound hypothetical without guidelines tailored for people involved in achieving the goals for community management. So, to catch some relevant ideas, Michael Brito, VP for Edelman Digital, discussed the three lessons to consider when managing a community :

  1. Embed within your community – Spend time getting to know others in the community and engage in simple and personal conversations.
  2. Don’t just focus on monetizing – The most important strategy to drive revenue for a business is to build the community, earn members’ trust, and delicately ask for their permission to market your service.
  3. Don’t just listen, get the community involved – Building a strong loyalty is not just listening but also acting and embedding yourself within the community and becoming a trusted voice there.

The major goal here is to provide infrastructure and management that drives awareness and a sense of connection to the brand with tens of thousands or millions of customers.  Customers benefit greatly by interacting and building relationships with other customers, as well as getting introduced to affiliated product and service providers who can help them maximize their value. To end this note, William Azaroff (who pioneered ChangeEverything.ca) aptly mentioned that social media, when executed well, engenders great trust among the users and participants. He added that the beauty of social media is that it spills over into people’s lives, because people are in the driver’s seat.

Twitter downtime may mean its time to downplay twitter

Monday, July 5th, 2010

Twitter is down, yet again.

Recently, twitter fans must have noticed the increased frequency with which they encounter this broken robot. With huge volumes of tweets overwhelming the twitter servers, one has to question if twitter will continue to be a reliable platform for communication, between peer to peer and from businesses to consumers.

The intermittent downtimes will results in gaps in data and affect the larger overall trends in social media intelligence. Also, the high volumes of information within 140 characters frequently amount to little more than passing comments with no constructive evaluation or ways to move forward.

Nevertheless, Twitter will continue to be an important social media platform for consumers to update each other about their lives, and to identify the latest trending topic happening in the online world. That is, if the latest trending topic does not come in huge volumes like the recent avalanche of World Cup tweets which constantly crashes the platform.

Twitter was never built to be long term, which is typical of many Web 2.0 companies; in this case, that meant choosing an unsuitable technical architecture, as a post on the Twitter blog describes:

Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected as a messaging system, however. For expediency’s sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practices that are more appropriate to a content management system. [This has] introduced a great deal of complexity and unpredictability….This is, clearly, not optimal.

Popularity is indeed a serious double edged sword for Twitter.

The Mobile Phone Battlefield on Social Media

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

At the very beginning, cellular phones were large bricks we used to call other people, a new tool of communication. But as time passed and consumer electronics improved, mobile phones continued to get smaller, stylish, and ultimately more useful. Well, the hottest things in the market now aren’t called smartphones for nothing.

Consequently, the market for smartphones has become a large, anything-goes battlefield for cellphone makers, each trying their best to capture the essence of the ultimate smartphone and put it in a box. As technology continues to improve, the demands of consumers also continue to be greater. And with every mobile phone brand trying to meet these demands, there is almost always a mobile phone model that suits our style and needs.

Using the May 2010 data of Brandtology Mobile among English-language channels, issues regarding mobile phones can be monitored. Data from international English-language channels including the United States and Singapore shows that bloggers are the most active netizens when tackling the monitored mobile phone brands. These include Apple, RIM, HTC, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson, and suggest a growing culture of product testing and reviews of mobile phones offered by these brands.

Operating System
May 2010 Brandtology data shows that blog entries and reviews on new smartphone models basically focus on operating systems and overall physical design. For instance, one blogger complained about Google Nexus One and commended HTC Incredible when tackling Android phones, giving emphasis on faster and more ergonomic user interface employed in the latter model. The same blogger also had difficulties using Google Nexus One as a professional phone and preferred a BlackBerry.

Another blogger also expressed disappointment with the Motorola mobile phones, citing how the brand is slow in developing its operating system, effectively making the phone brand lag behind major competitors. The company’s apparent concentration on the United States market is also criticized as European and Asia-Pacific markets are left out by Motorola.


Service Providers/Carriers

The carrier by which a phone model operates is also a hot topic for netizens. For markets like the United States, negative views are given to phones that are exclusively available on AT&T (Apple iPhone, for instance) because of the highly saturated 3G network that hinders the full utilization of smartphones. Verizon is seen as a better service provider with a better 3G network. Keeping this in mind, those who are not eager to buy a particular phone model end up choosing mobile phone models based on their preferred carrier.

Applications
Applications available for download are also a point of discussion for most bloggers. Apple iPhone applications, although largely popular, are criticized for its “Disneyland” quality where relatively safe and Apple-approved contents are the only ones allowed for download. In contrast, the Android platform has a more free approach not only in its choice of applications but also when it comes to application developer policies.

Picked up by most netizens are the feud between Apple, Adobe and Nokia. While the Apple-Nokia patent lawsuit focus on Nokia innovations supposedly used in several Apple products, the Apple-Adobe feud stems from the lack of flash support on Apple devices,  which continues to hinder the viewing of flash videos and applications.
Apple’s refusal to allow the use Adobe’s flash-based application developing tool for Apple iPhone is also criticized, as Apple is seen to be forcing their products on consumers.

Customer Support
Another important issue for netizens is customer support, especially for smartphones that can be very complicated to use at times. A netizen, for instance, has been continuously complaining on Twitter about the poor customer support from Motorola.

HTC’s abandonment of the HTC-Singapore Facebook page as a customer support outlet also received many backlashes from netizens. Aside from disappointment from netizens, HTC-Singapore was perceived to be “anti-social” and “confused” on how to answer queries and address consumer complaints. This emphasizes the importance of using social media as a way to address the concerns of mobile phone users, especially with the amount of time spent by users online.

Truly, there is more to a mobile phone than meets the eye.

 
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