Posts Tagged ‘Social Media Monitoring’
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010
Social Media is not an up and coming fad, it has already become an integral part of the new way businesses are being run and brands are being managed. Information, reviews, grouses are now broadcasted globally with a few mouseclicks, especially on Web 2.0 platforms. And these written comments do not go away unlike verbal grumblings from your best pal, they stay online forever and are seen again and again by would-be customers searching for product/service reviews. The infinite volume of conversations (think twitter) and gazillion sites on the Internet makes it impossible for anyone to track such comments efficiently in a timely manner.
That’s why its increasingly important to enlist the help of social media monitoring and measurement services to monitor, analyse and inform you of online brand threats and opportunities in a timely manner. However, data/intelligence by itself is of little use unless something is done with it.
We have put together a table on some actionable insights you can derive from listening online:
We would love your comments on our list and we welcome new suggestions.
Tags: Advertising, Branding, Insights, Marketing, PR, Sentiments, Social Media Monitoring
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Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
Conducted across eight Asia-Pacific markets (Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan), the second quarterly Digital Brand Index (DBI 2.0) continues to unveil insights about; the most discussed brands online, the most active channels and the subject areas that spark the most vibrant debate.
Researched during the last three months of 2009, DBI 2.0 found almost 1.5 million online technology brand mentions – double the level tracked in DBI 1.0, conducted July to September 2009. Other key findings from DBI 2.0 include:
- Mentions of large technology brands online doubled in the last quarter of 2009, reaching 1.5 million across Asia Pacific’s top 300 large technology brands, covering almost 3,800 channels and online sites.
- Twitter’s massive growth trajectory has seen it become the dominant channel for sharing news about technology brands across Asia, except in China where it is banned. For example, in India, Twitter represents over three-quarters of all online conversations tracked.
- Despite massive online buzz generated by Microsoft around Windows 7, Google continued to be the most discussed brand across the region, generating significant mentions in areas such as its Chrome and Android operating systems, and the Nexus One smart phone.
For marketers, the DBI can show a direct link between traditional marketing efforts and online conversations, and benchmark the extent to which online conversations drive marketing results. In terms of channels, the DBI shows that brands should not rely on a particular channel, but rather should engage a multi-channel, multi-message approach, that is defined by deep online intelligence insight.
Find out more about each country’s results or about DBI 1.0 (Jul -Sep 09).
Tags: Advertising, Branding, Competitor Intelligence, DCMS, Digital Brand Index, Insights, Marketing, PR, Social Media Monitoring
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Tuesday, December 29th, 2009
Often, companies jump onto the social media bandwagon excitedly and look around eagerly to see what they can do to be ‘in the game’.
The result? Twitter accounts and Facebook pages with unexciting contents that gradually fail to interest its followers after they follow/become a fan. Their so-called social media strategy has become yet another method to pump out advertising messages, sales and promotional information and an impersonal one way communication conduit.
This is definitely not wrong, but it is not a true social media strategy. Such an approach shows how a company has failed to understand the essence of social media and leverage on its power.
Social Media is about communication within a social network, and the most powerful aspect of it is the ability to spread viral messages and to enhance the trustworthiness of messages via word-of-mouth. It turns monologues into interactive dialogues and advertisements into conversations.
As with any successful initiative, planning is essential before an effective action plan can be crafted. Social Media is still a relatively new domain and consumer social media consumption habits are extremely fluid and fickle, hence it is of utmost importance to first research and listen to what’s being said online. If a strategy is based on wild guesses, or even calculated guesses, there is still a high chance (competitively disadvantageous) that there are blind spots that have been missed out. Look at the number of marketers with inactive twitter and facebook pages, as well as those who invested heavily in online advertising purely based on click rates.
To craft a successful Social Media Strategy, companies should at least incorporate the following elements:
1) Research and understand the social media interests of your target market.
This can be done through engaging social media monitoring/analytical services (like us) that provide analytical insights derived from genuine conversations online. Guesstimates are just not good enough. Companies may also complement this research with surveys, focus groups or their CRM analysis.
2) Find out where the conversations are taking place.
Gear your strategy to either be part of the community they are involved in, or provide a platform for your target market. Be seen in the right place at the right time. Establish a presence to cultivate a top of mind awareness when purchase decisions are being made.
3) Create content, organize activities and generate conversations that align with your target market’s interests
Based on observations of key conversation topics, create content and start conversations that genuinely value add to your prospects. Be a friend to them and provide them support and advice. Allow them to be the first to hear about breaking news and see how it quickly spreads in a viral manner. The quickest way to lose their trust and cause them to screen out your messages is to blindly push ‘buy-me-now’ messages. Engage and interest them, not alienate them.
4) Measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and refine them
Social Media campaigns are visible and much more measurable than PR/mass media strategies that rely on recall ability/no. of news clippings as ROI metrics. Measure and prove the ROI of your strategies to the stakeholders who control the purse strings. Make feedback a continuous, reinforcing loop that constantly enhances your strategies.
Well, I could easily go on and on about each point above and many other pointers, but I wanted to keep it succinct and digestible. To reiterate, planning is key in creating an effective social media strategy and listening is the cornerstone, the essential step that needs to be taken. As the saying goes, ‘if you fail to plan, then you plan to fail’.
Tags: Advertising, Branding, Buzz, Channels, Competitor Intelligence, DCMS, Insights, Marketing, PR, Reports, Sentiments, Social Media, Social Media Monitoring
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Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
A PR professional’s nightmare probably consists of the following scenario:
Company “messes up” in some way. People get wind of this bad news. Bad news goes viral (as bad news does so easily).
PR professional awakens to find out that within the last 8 hours while they were in dreamland, the entire internet is abuzz with chatter on what their organization did ( or didn’t do). The Reputation/Brand image that took them years to build, has all come crashing down within a short time frame.
Products/services in certain genres are hot online topics. Consumer experiences relating to fashion, consumer electronics, travel related services (airlines, hotels, transport), places to eat, etc are close to their heart and its something that they will talk about. People will about their good experiences or purchases, and they are more likely to do so when they’ve had a particularly bad experience.
United Airlines: A Passenger’s Musical Revenge
Some even publish them in response to the customer service he did not receive, a rather good effort too, if I may add. Great tune!! Quite an old example by now, but still a good one nonetheless.
Sure, the company in question responded finally, but the damage had already been done – reportedly $180 million in losses when United Airline’s stock plunged 10 percent after the PR fiasco. The article cautions that no one can be sure the extent of the damage actually caused by their video, but it is a plausible correlation nonetheless.
But what happens when no one is talking about you?
The opposite end of the spectrum details quite a different situation altogether. People are not interested in what you have to offer, what you are doing, nor spreading it to their friends. If you were selling a daily necessity, that might be understandable, given few people actually bother to wax lyrical about the suppleness of their toilet paper/light bulb/hand soap for example. Certain products just naturally inspire less brand advocacy.
Marketers and PR folks might not have been able to fully grasp the effects of their campaigns or engagement efforts in the past when they invest in traditional media channels. Not anymore. The outcome of Social Media campaigns are concrete and measurable because it is out there online for everyone and any one to see.
Look, social media isn’t going to be the sole driver of ROI. But what social media will do is act as an indicator of where your brand stands in the eyes of your audience, getting you closer to ROI. It’s your gateway to a live focus group. But unlike a roundtable in some offshoot mirrored room outside the Forum Shops in Las Vegas, where moderators have to pull responses and people may fake warmth toward your product or service, social media is live and unfiltered.
I’d like to end off with this nice quote I came across that says
“Listening is one part of the equation. Being able to discern what’s valuable and then act upon it is another.”
Tags: Competitor Intelligence, Marketing, PR, Social Media Monitoring
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Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
Today’s announcement of our partnership with Edelman is a huge endorsement of the importance of social media in the eyes of marketers.
Why Edelman? We believe Edelman’s push and continuous focus in social media complete that loop which clients look for a successful social media campaign.
My discussions with Edelman’s John Kerr and his colleagues have provided me with the confidence that the PR agency is very well-aware of the importance of social media to their clients. Our partnership will only increase the confidence of clients to address the social media scene which in turn improves consumer confidence in the brand.
Why is this so?
In any PR or marketing campaign, research plays a very important role in laying the foundation in achieving its objectives and goals.
There is no difference in a social media campaign.
For example, in traditional PR, the PR consultant would have to do research on the right media and for journalists to target to achieve clients’ PR objectives.
Hence, it is important for a PR consultant to identify the right channels and influencers for a social media campaign to achieve more predictable results for the client. This provides the client with more confidence in the success of the online campaign.
Research in social media is different because of the vast amount of data that a PR consultant would have to go through and organize to explain the data to the client.
Brandtology’s services, powered by our Digital Conversation Management System or DCMS, that we are providing Edelman will allow Edelman’s PR consultants to focus on what they do best: the consultancy service to their clients.
Beside research, Brandtology will also provide Edelman with real time analysis of what is being said of their clients in real time to ensure that their clients are well presented in the social media space.
Furthermore, the buzz cluster technology that Brandtology has included in the dashboard allows Edelman‘s clients to adopt a bottom-up marketing approach in which the campaign is by the consumer, for the consumer and with the consumer.
In all, this partnership isn’t just about Brandtology and Edelman, it also highlights the important role consumers play in the success of a brand.
Eddie Chau
Founder & CEO
Tags: Corporate, Digital Strategy, Insights, Marketing, PR, Reports, Social Media Monitoring
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Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
Following on from my previous post that introduced some of DCMS’s capabilities; in this post I want to showcase the analytical capabilities that it provides. Let’s revisit our Singapore Mobile Phones example and focus on the Google Phone for the first two weeks of March 2009.
Let’s imagine that I want to study the chatter for Google phone. First thing on my mind would be, how is its buzz and sentiment? The Story Line chart in DCMS provides an overlay of two charts; the buzz and the sentiment. You can see this in the chart below, where the bars are associated with the axis on the left and the sentiment line is associated with the axis on the right. With sentiments the DCMS scores it in the range from -100 (most negative) to 100 (most positive). For this two week period, there is a slight decrease in the buzz towards the end with slightly negative sentiments.
The next two charts below reflect the trend of both the buzz and the sentiment. Here we are displaying the actual values and the 10-days moving average. In both cases, you can observe that the trend is moving towards less buzz and becoming more negative.
Next thing on my mind now, is to compare against other brands. How does the Google Phone compare with Apple iPhone, Nokia and Samsung? The charts below plot comparisons between Google Phone, Apple iPhone, Nokia and Samsung; one for buzz and the other for sentiments. This is very useful to make intuitive comparisons.
The above charts show separate features that are based on buzz and sentiments but we have several properties such as influence, sentiment and buzz. What about combining them? Now, based on all these three properties, how does Google Phone compare against the others? The next chart below is what we call the Social Media Equity Chart. It uses the three mentioned properties and lays it on the chart to give you and intuitive indication of where your product/brand stand. Where you want your product/brand to be, is on the top right as possible with the biggest bubble. This is because, moving upwards give you an indication that more influential people are making posts, moving right gives you an indication that posts are more positive and the size of the bubble is indicative of more buzz.
So far, I’ve mentioned mostly about buzz and sentiment, making comparisons and the like. Now, what if I want to do some advertising on a forum. Where should I put it? And ensure that its the most relevant. In DCMS with have a chart that shows you the top 10 buzziest channels. This is illustrated below. Not only do we show you the buzz but also the sentiment of the buzz in that individual channel. This will allow you to find suitable target channels to advertise where there is more chatter, at the same time you have an indication if the forumers are for or against you.
To further aid the case of advertising at the right channel. The chart on top 10 channels with the most number of unique voices would come in very handy. This chart will indicate to you the number of forumers that have generated your buzz. The difference here is that we are talking about the unique voice/person. So you have an indication that you can reach that estimated number of voices within the channel if you choose to advertise there.
While we are on the topic of voices, what if you want to know specifically who are making up your buzz count; voices that are making posts about your product/brand. This information is also available in DCMS. The data grid below shows you how you can uniquely identify the voice, his influence, as an author or commenter, the channel he is found, the number of posts, on average his sentiment and also list out all his posts that was made.
In addition to all the charting capabilities, DCMS offers a lot of transparency to the information that is used. In almost all of our charts, you can go right down to the posts that was used, to even the actual details of the posts that includes the thread for context. With every post, we also include a reference to the original source with a URL link.
In summary, I’ve gone through several of the analytic features that DCMS have to offer. I hope it gives you a much better insight into how it can aid in your analytical processes. If you have any further question, always feel free to drop me a note or leave a comment. For one of my upcoming blog entries, I will do a case study on the performance of mobile phone brands in Singapore to look at how much buzz they generate and how’s their online sentiment like.
Stay tuned for more.
Cheers!
Dr. Alvin Chan
Co-Founder and Vice President for R&D
Tags: Competitor Intelligence, Corporate, DCMS, Digital Strategy, Reports, Sentiments, Social Media Monitoring
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Saturday, March 21st, 2009
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
Tags: Buzz, Channels, Corporate, DCMS, Digital Strategy, Reports, Sentiments, Social Media Monitoring
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Saturday, March 14th, 2009
We have come a long way since we started our humble beginnings of building our first prototype in my apartment. I remembered the days and nights we spent experimenting with various techniques and solutions to be able to deliver what we set forth to do. We got our first prototype done successfully which convinced us that we are able to proceed with a viable business. Followed by more sleepless nights, Version 1 of the Digital Conversation Management System made it to public view. This allowed us to obtain a lot of feedback and constructive criticisms from clients, we listened and with a lot of hard work from the team, we came up with Version 2.0 at the start of this year. But we didn’t stop there, again we listened and look at areas that we could evolve …..
Today I’m very proud of what we have achieved and very pleased to announce the release of Version 2.1 of the Digital Conversation Management System.
Some of the new features in this release include:
- Simplified chinese version.
- Enhancements made to the graphical interfaces.
- All charts are exportable to PDFs.
- All data grids are exportable to EXCEL.
- Buzz clusters are now color coded to reflect sentiments.
- Identified conversations can be tracked and displayed.
- Improved search functionalities.
- Ability to custom select channels for flexibility in analysis.
We sincerely hope these new features will delight our clients and as always we are constantly listening, so do let us know if you have any questions or suggestions on how we can help you further.
PS- To find out more about our Technology, please click here
Cheers!
Dr. Alvin Chan
Co-Founder and Vice President for R&D
Tags: Corporate, DCMS, Social Media Monitoring
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