Time to raise the tide so that all ships will float up and more will be able to sit in our boat :-)

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 Poon, 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

For more information, please contact:

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

Tags: Academy, Courses, Digital Strategy, social media intelligence

How do I measure my Social Media influence/reach/engagement?

Ever so often, we hear this query raised by our clients and partners. As brands divert their focus to online marketing and consequently their budgets, there is a need to seek a more quantifiable manner of measuring the ROI of their activities on the social media platform. There are various metrics on our existing platform to aid in such analysis, but in response to feedback, we have decided to carve out an entire new section in our Digital Conversation Management System version 2.5.

The new system features six main new components:

1) Social Media Metrics:

Engagement

Reach

Influence

Sentiment

2) Chart sampling feature – ability to toggle between rechecked conversations and the entire data set to generate quantitative and qualitative charts

3) Account Statistical Profiling:

Buzz & Sentiments

Conversations & Voices

Channels

4) Enhanced Social Media Equity Charts – allowing tracking of Social Media Equity (a 4d chart measuring buzz, sentiment, influence) over time and across subjects

5) Conversation Trends – provision of buzz trends within a single conversation thread

6) Bookmarking – enabling users to tag individual posts for easy follow-up and data export

Menus have also been reorganised into intuitive sections to facilitate navigation and extraction of vital data required – namely Trends, Insights, Channels, Influencers and Social Media Equity. In addition, an FAQ section and tooltips have been added to explain the various data sections.

Enhanced Metrics for ROI measurement and strategic business planning

1.Social Media Metrics

The various social media metrics newly introduced in our system enables brand managers to grasp an overview of all subjects being monitored (be it their brand, competing brands or their various product lines) in the social media space and discover market leaders and laggards.

a) Engagement (o%-100%)

The engagement metric quantifies the content creation and response level of a particular subject. The number of conversations unilaterally initiated, as well as the number of relevant comments and responses are taken into account in determining their relative engagement as compared to other subjects in the entire category. Thus, a brand that pushes out boring articles methodically without garnering responses will fare very poorly on the engagement front. Likewise for a brand that has low activity levels and relies on spill-over buzz from other articles which primary focus is not on them.

b) Influence (0-100)

Conversations by key opinion leaders online or what we term as influencers are gauged on their influence level. Their influence score is derived based on various parameters such as the total number of posts made and replies to their posts. The median of all influencers discussing a particular subject is then presented as the influence of that subject.

The higher the influence score, the more powerful the conversations relating to a particular subject is in terms of generating comments and consequently readership levels.

c) Reach (0%-100%)

The voice of a brand may be concentrated within a few key sites or virally discussed across various influential channels online. When measuring reach, we look at how deep and wide the conversations relating to a particular subject ‘travel’ among influential channels online. A high reach score indicate the ability of a subject to spread related conversations far and wide.

d) Sentiment Index for the Subject (-100%-100%)

Sentiment index looks at the average net sentiment score of all conversations within the subject. This index denotes whether the average sentiment of all buzz relating to a subject is more positive or more negative.

New Charting Features for Data Accuracy

2) Chart sampling feature – ability to toggle between rechecked conversations and the entire data set to generate quantitative and qualitative charts

By having trained social media analysts re-check the automated analysis performed by our technology, Brandtology ensures an exceptionally high accuracy and relevancy level of the data set provided to our clients. However, when doing an industry wide scan of conversations on competing products and other potential interest areas, clients typically only need an overview of the share of voice of their brands. Hence, the sampling feature allows the clients to see the share of voice clearly.

Nevertheless, to differentiate between the automatically rated sentiments & buzz charts and buzz of rechecked conversations, especially for generating visual charts, we have added a feature to allow users to toggle between these 2 data sets.

Statistical Profiling of Conversations for Deeper Insights

3) Account Statistical Profiling

The new account profile section gives a quick statistical overview snapshot of all subjects being monitored in terms of a) Buzz & Sentiments, b) Conversations and Voices and c) Channels.

a) Buzz & Sentiments

This table gives a summary of the total buzz for each subject, as well as the breakdown in sentiment for each subject. The numerical statistics are also colour coded, thus allowing you to quickly identify weaknesses or strengths of all subjects monitored in terms of buzz and sentiments.

b) Conversations and Voices

This Conversation and Voices table provides a summary of the new conversations, comments, as well as active voices engaging in a given subject.

This is particularly useful for identifying popular conversations which are garnering a lot of comments/replies, as well as identifying the number of netizens contributing to the buzz. Interestingly, this would also enable clients to quickly detect ‘hot topics with numerous comments/replies but actually fuelled by a very small group of netizens. Such abnormalities would be easily picked up from this table.

c) Channels

The Channels table shows the total number of channels where conversations are taking place about each subject and further categorises them by channel type. This would help clients to identify dominant channel types for each subject and better plan their engagement/advertising efforts.

Tracking of Social Media Equity over time for brand and campaign measurement

4) Enhanced Social Media Equity Charts –allowing tracking of Social Media Equity (a 4d chart measuring buzz, sentiment, influence) over time and across subjects

The Social Media Equity chart is a 4-dimensional chart that plots the position of a specific product or service in relation to other competing brands or other products/services within the same brand.

This bubble chart is based on 4 factors – Average Sentiment, Average Influence, Buzz Share and Time. The x- and y-axes represent the average sentiment and influence respectively, with the size of the bubble indicating relative buzz share. The time factor can be adjusted to show the movement of individual bubbles along the chart over a specified time period.

The Social Media Equity chart helps to gauge relative position not just amongst competitors but also amongst a brand’s stable of products and services. This is especially useful for product development departments to track the performance of various products.

In this latest release of our DCMS, the Social Media Equity charts allow brands to track the performance of various subjects over time. In particular, this would be useful to track performance before a campaign, during a campaign and after a campaign to see if a campaign has resulted in a positive and sustained effect on a brand’s social media equity.

Deeper Conversation Thread Analysis

5) Conversation Trends – provision of buzz trends within a single conversation thread

The ability to track the buzz trends of a particular conversation thread is also a new feature in the system. This allows brands to closely monitor hotly debated threads to see how the buzz unfolds. For positive seeded word-of-mouth, a long-tail effect is ideal but for negative brand conversations, it best to observe a decline in buzz after a few days.

Bookmarking of Posts for Workflow Management and Efficient Follow-up

6) Bookmarking – enabling users to tag individual posts for easy follow-up and data export

For clients and partners who are more hands-on, a new bookmarking feature will allow them to bookmark selected posts for collation into a list for further analysis or export. This will facilitate research on specific conversation topics, or aid them in shortlisting posts which require further follow-up actions.

Try out the new DCMS v.2.5

If you are keen to see a demo session of our new DCMS, please do not hesitate to contact us via contact@brandtology.com

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Tags: Channels, DCMS, Global, Influencer, Insights, Sentiments, Sites, social media intelligence, Social Media Monitoring

After some blood and sweat, I'm happy to know that our team at Brandtology pulled through and we're going to launch our new DCMS dashboard version 2.5 on the 25th June 2010!

The third quarterly Asia Pacific Digital Brand Index (DBI 10.2) shows Twitter has now established itself as the dominant online channel for news about technology brands across Asia. In October 2009, Twitter was only the number one online channel in India. Since then netizens in Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan have also made the micro-blog service their favorite venue for sharing news and views about technology brands and products. This leaves Hong Kong and China (where the service is banned), in the eight-market study, as the only Twitter hold-outs.

After nine months, tracking six million conversations, across eight Asia-Pacific markets, about 300 technology brands, across 4000 online channels – the relative consistency of our findings about the Top 10 most-discussed tech brands and online channels where these conversations were taking place is really exciting. Consistency provides a strong signal that social media could be a predictable channel planning and measurement tool – people across the region seem to be engaging each other on an ongoing basis – rather than turning up and disappearing on a whim as some people believe.

Further, three cycles of the DBI has shown a strong link between traditional marketing efforts (esp. new product introductions) and online conversations, which offers a clue as to the extent that online conversations can support/drive marketing. However, despite the success of Twitter, our experience with the data and with clients shows that brands shouldn’t rely on one particular channel (no sighs of relief just because you’ve got a Facebook page…), but rather should take a multi-channel, multi-message approach. This requires deep online insight to ensure that paid, owned, earned and social media are efficiently integrated online.

Conducted in partnership with public relations firm, Edelman, the DBI identifies the ‘buzziest’ brands, channels and topics driving online and digital trends and create insights for technology companies and marketers.

While the Asia-Pacific roll-up is interesting, the fascinating insights come at a local market level. The individual country reports are listed below.

• Australia – Press Release – Digital Brand Index 10.2 (28 Apr)
• China – Press Release – Digital Brand Index 10.2 (28 Apr)
• Hong Kong – Press Release – Digital Brand Index 10.2 (28 Apr)
• India – Press Release – Digital Brand Index (28 Apr)
• Indonesia – Press Release – Digital Brand Index 10.2 (28 Apr)
• Malaysia – Press Release – Digital Brand Index 10.2 (28 April)
• Singapore – Press Release – Digital Brand Index 10.2 (28 April)
• Taiwan – Press Release – Digital Brand Index (28 Apr)

 

Information from the previous release of DBI (2010 Q1)

Asia Pacific Digital Brand Index 2.0 by Brandtology & Edelman

View more presentations from Brandtology.

Tags: Digital Brand Index, PR

I recently read on Nathan Gilliatt’s blog (great blog!) about the “The Importance of the Analyst” and felt compelled to leave a comment to add to the conversation and also to write this short post to share.

An analyst (whether internally from the client, from the agency/consultant or from the service provider) has to have the right tools and skills to extract the relevant insights from the mountain of data.

They would probably have to deal with the following:

1. To determine relevancy of conversations (e.g. a “card” mentioned in the finance context might mean credit card but a “card” mentioned in an IT hardware context might mean “video or sound card”)
2. To determine sarcastic posts, e.g. “Great 3G phone that has 30min battery life!”
3. To configure, maintain and train the system. The usual saying of “rubbish in, rubbish out”. The analyst has to make sure that the keywords and other parameters are well configured to suit the intended goal of the listening process.

Not an easy task in any measure (no punt intended). The complication piles up when the client has to deal with multiple languages, geographic locations, local nuances, etc.

Whoever is looking for a truly global/regional solution has to consider these questions and to determine if there are these resources in place before committing into any “social media strategy” in the long run.

Kelly Choo

Co-founder & Product Development Director

Tags: analysts, challenges, consultant, relevancy, sentiment, social media intelligence

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Brandtology technology showcase at the International Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning Symposium 2010

08 Mar 2010

Brandtology has been invited to showcase its technologies at the 3rd International Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning Symposium will be held from 15 to 16 March 2010 at the Raffles City Convention Centre in Singapore.This event is jointly organised by the National Security Coordination Secretariat, the Defence Science and Technology Agency and the Centre of Excellence for National Security.

About 300 international participants are expected for this by-invitation-only symposium, mainly from governments, think tanks and private enterprises with a strong interest in horizon scanning.

The theme for the symposium is "Strategic Anticipation: Developing Effective Strategies for the Future". 25 speakers of international repute will be sharing useful approaches to emerging future challenges, with an emphasis on practical policy implications. A technology showcase featuring state-of-the-art software tools from Singapore and around the world would also be held in conjunction with IRAHSS 2010.

Do drop by our booth at the technology showcase Booth B10!

More info on IRAHSS 10

 

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After our team spoke with Marshall Sponder last week to explain our services to him, he has very kindly published a review of Brandtology’s Digital Conversation Management System. His blog post clearly articulates our key differentiation from self serve platforms - the highly structured customisation and data verification process for each client to ensure data accuracy and relevancy.

“Brandtology is among the “high end” platforms  ……  for large companies -  who require  precision and structure not obtainable  with self serve platforms …”

“Nothing against the self serve platforms – it’s more that once you get past the exploratory stage – a company might need to have data that is organized in a very specific way.  For example, many large corporations use custom metatags to drive automation and high end features of their sites – I know IBM.com does this because I worked on aspects of it when I was part of IBM’s Web Effectiveness team a few years back.    I noticed in Brandtology, aspects of their reporting that could support and work within that customization.”

” Also, Line of Business reputation monitoring – by country and language – not that easy to do in self serve platform – it seems to me that when you need reporting on that level – your going to have a platform like Brandtology.”

“You, the client, can drill down very atomically into the data with confidence a few people have already touched the data and make sure it’s relevant to your company and brand – obviously, Brandtology works closely with your Brand (hence the name) so they know what you want”

Thanks for the great review, Marshall. We especially liked your concluding line-
“Brandtology has what it takes to get the job done“.

Tags: review

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 at 10:47 am and is filed under Business, Digital Conversation Management System, Events, General, Marketing, Messages from VP - R&D, PR, Sales, Technology, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 4:58 pm and is filed under Business, Marketing, PR, Sales, Technology, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

RESEARCH   SOCIAL MEDIA   FACEBOOK   TWITTER

• Marketers shifting budgets to social media
• More emphasis on measurement now
• Concludes Alterian's survey

Singapore - More and more companies in Singapore are looking to invest in social media marketing in 2010, according to a world-wide survey by marketing analytics company Alterian.

Accordign to the survey, 66% respondents said they will be investing in social media marketing in the next 12 months and nearly 40% said they would be shifting more than a fifth of their traditional direct marketing budget towards SMM activities.

Alterian released the results of the company's seventh annual global survey, covering 1068 marketing professionals worldwide.

The results support other statistics from the survey which found the majority of respondents (67%) agreeing to social media's growing importance and recognizing it as ‘critical to success'.

"2010 marked the start of the digital decade for marketing. Untargeted and irrelevant marketing techniques are now redundant and the results of this survey show many in the industry recognise this. The one thing to remember, however, is that investment in social media marketing is futile without adequate measurement," Alterian senior vice president Asia Pacific, Chris Tew, said.

The survey found more than a third (36 percent) of respondents investing in social media monitoring and analysis tools, a significant percentage considering the maturity of the channel.

"This is a reflection of the growing understanding that a social media marketing strategy needs to be based on listening to customers and prospects and its ROI needs to be measured," Tew added.

The survey also explored the extent to which organisations integrated marketing technologies across their organisation.

Almost half of respondents (42 percent) said they don't incorporate clickstream and web analytics data into their customer and email database.

"This is a worrying statistic as it shows many organisations are losing any advantage that this valuable actionable insight could give them," Tew, said.

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This shows that Social Media Marketing and Measurement is "coming of age" in 2010. According to their official site, survey respondents came from Europe (36%) North America (62%) and Asia Pacific and other (2%).

2% for Asia Pacific is really a low number given that Asia is experiencing high growth in terms of Social Media Marketing and Measurement. I assume this number would increase in the next survey.

I wonder how many of these company surveyed are MNCs v.s. Local v.s. SME v.s. Government (if any)? It would be an interesting

More details and summary of the findings can be found here:
http://bit.ly/8ekKZe