As much as i can gather, it's quite like hiring a spy to lurk around forums and social networks and identifying potential attacks to brands by users or highlighting certain key assessments that is sussed out from peer to peer conversations. In order to do this, they have a mix of technology and people who act as social media consultants who then help evaluate and report their findings.
What do you think? First off, let's agree that eavesdropping is not a form of communication. Assuming you wanted to know more about what people thought about your brand, or to get relevant feedback and allow ranting to happen, wouldn't the logical option be to get involved in these communities personally? I have spoken before that the 1st step to building a connection with your onground community is to establish trust and to get involved. A 2 way process is critical to really understanding what people are saying. And since it's impossible to teleport yourself to every single touchpoint, the next logical step would be to create a productive condusive environment for this to happen. Look at starbucks with their superb talkback site, or Dell whom has a home for innovation to happen .
Most people complain because they want to be heard, if these people knew their complaints were being heard by the company whom is interested to know and resolve these issues. It makes sense that those complaints would be aired in this controlled setting.
Without knowing too much about Brandtology's measuring methodologies, i can't say too much about if their qualitative and quantitative indexes are worth their weight in salt. But i can say that employing people as 1st or 2nd level evaluation fences smells pretty funky. I mean , where's the yardstick if you take into account human bias, past experiences, tolerance levels, different intepretations etc etc. These all contribute to various opinions based on various personal experiences and i'm not sure thats a good standard measure tool to gauge brand influence or reputation.
On the positives, i actually think the service has a market and a demand. Most companies are scared to death of social media because of the openess and transparency the web brings to the table. Sending out spies is probably a safeguard so they can prevent any PR disasters. But here's my takeaway point, you reap what you sow. The web is a double edged sword but any company can turn it into a powerful tool to build engagement and really use conversations as a starting point to improve and grow.
Let's look at the US, negating potential threats with offensive stealth and strategic measures didn't really help the republicans much did they? What's Barack Obama's stand on potential conflict resolution. In Iran's case,“economic engagement” and “security assurances" are tactics Obama wants to employ. In a nutshell, communicate.
There are better ways to prevent a PR disaster than employing some branding police to do your dirty work for you. Here's a tip, put on your gloves and start opening up those channels.
11 comments :
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this was posted by Kelly Choo , co founder of Brandtology.
Kelly Choo said...
Hi Melvin,
I have posted a response on Walter's blog as I can't seem to comment on your blog post.
Thanks for your views on our services… It would be rather cool if we were a spy services company helping companies to spy on people/sites. :-) We only listen to information that is in the public domain while spying would infer discovery of confidential information, which we don’t.
For the first step, we help companies effectively listen to relevant conversations, which is already done manually and painfully (through RSS feeds, searching Google, etc) by many companies we spoke to. This of course is only the first step, which many companies are just comfortable staying in.
People who complain unfortunately do it all over the Internet. As much as we would like them to all come to a centralized controlled setting, the reality is that they would go anywhere to post in their “natural environment”. If they feel comfortable in Facebook, they will complain or create a group there. If they frequent forums, they would most likely post something in that forum.
As a second step, the more forward-looking companies would also engage the community as you have rightly pointed out. They can do it themselves, get a PR company (in which we usually partner with) or directly engage us to do it. Monitoring is just a baseline that they need to gather feedback on whether their outreach is working or not. If not, how are they going to strategize to improve on it. This is really the “web-wide business intelligence” they need to effectively gather and strategize upon.
About our sentiment analysis methods, we have found that technology alone (at least those we researched on globally) can never be accurate enough to just trust the sentiment rating. Our respond to this “lack of highly trusted information” is to couple it with human + technology. Our Social Media Analysts (SMA) all have degrees/diplomas in mass communications and have been rating sentiments for traditional media previously. We have adapted that to suit our technology where the SMA would look at the topic being monitored and objectively re-confirm if the technology rated it correctly or not (thus training our system).
You are absolutely right that most companies (especially Asian based ones) are scared to death of social media because of the openness and transparency the web brings to the table. The silver lining is that we are starting to see companies evolving and accepting these engagement concepts. The whole industry benefits and the end users (like you and me) will enjoy a truly open conversation with the brands/companies they use.
I look forward to that day as I think you do too. Our team at Brandtology is happy to engage further in these discussions.
Kelly Choo (Co-founder & Product Development)
brandtology.com
Randomly fell into this spot. I think it is rather much of Brandtology to stake a claim as the world's first 24/7 managed brand and reputation services provider. Renaming a chicken hamburger as a chicken sandwich basically gives you the same thing. That said, professional eavesdroppers are fast gaining momentum in their quest to gather corporate giants are key targets since they own brands that can very well be damaged by the media (in any form).
I've seen Companies like MediaBanc and Asia Media Monitors having pioneered the way into the media monitoring business, while one offers Tonality Analysis and the other offers a more internationally accepted CARMA methodology that helps provide more confidence to clients. Nevertheless it is interesting to note that neither MediaBanc or AMM (and other media monitoring agencies) have been so bold to claim to be able to support in 'managing a brand's reputation'. I can't quite see how Brandtology is able to do the reputation managing part - that is a responsibility reserved for the client himself. The slides presentation, and the company website itself has to provide a lot more information if the company wants to impress potential clients. Supplying readers with a clear methodology, for instance, will enable better understanding of what the company actually does (apart from hi-tech eavesdropping).
That, and that 'world's first 24x7 managed brand and reputation services provider' shout-out has got to be toned down.
Perhaps time will tell.
Hi Kelly, First off ,apologies you couldn't post here. Thanks for taking the time to reply to the article, my article(s) mostly target backward or counter productive philosophies that people or organizations adopt. In most cases, what i would like to see happen rarely does. The evangelism of social media best practices is still in it's infancy and all of us including yourself hope that our efforts as evangelists will pay off sooner rather than later.
Your comments are certainly valid and consistent with the mission and value you hope to bring to your customers and i thank you for clearing up some question marks i raised in my article. Certainly spying is not always confined to a breach of confidentiality, as most husbands who will atest to when their wives take a peek at their mobile call logs. :) But i do apologize if my use of the word insinuated the former.
As to your methodology, as it is the core of your ability to analyze and deliver reports, we won't be able to ascertain how accurate or robust it is till it kicks off. To which aspect, i wish you all the best in growing as a company and thriving business.
Hi Clarissa, thanks for stopping by and i agree that some transparency could help Brandtology position their methodology with better confidence. I suppose at this stage, their techniques will remain very much with them and and their client list. But you are right, time will tell.
Melvin
Hi, Clarissa.
Thank you for visiting our site, we appreciate your comments.
As for the claim of being “the world's first 24x7 online managed brand and reputation services”, we had no intentions of trivializing the works of MediaBanc, Asia Media Monitors or other similar organizations in any way. In fact, we are glad they helped pave the way for media monitoring to become an integral part of public relations.
However, Brandtology is indeed, the first to offer round the clock monitoring that is focused solely on social media. Our command center runs 24x7 to provide fast, accurate, real time social media monitoring to help keep our clients on top of their game. Our proprietary technology tightly coupled with our process driven by our very unique ticketing system, trained personnel and our command center infrastructure, are constantly and consistently advancing to suit the social media landscape round the clock globally.
The analysis provided by our highly trained staff enables our clients to see how their existing and potential customers perceive, experience and rate their products and services. We provide clients with information and support that enables them to effectively manage their brand and reputation inside and out of the world wide web. But more importantly, as we help our clients listen to how the public perceives them, we also help them improve their products and services to match the continuously evolving market.
I hope these clarify some of the questions you have regarding our services.
Thank you, Clarissa.
Have a good day.
Kelly Choo (Co-founder & Product Development)
brandtology.com
Hi All-
This is my first post on any blog ever and its a pleasure being a part of this communication.
First and foremost I would like to thank Kelly for the compliments for Asia Media Monitors and how we, with the help of great people, innovative technology, extensive coverage and rigorous research, our suite of products allowing our more than 4000 clients the insight to communicate with relevant journalists and editors, monitor their interests across all media, and analyse their brand or message.
I truly acknowledge the game Brandtology is playing with assisting Communication specialists achieve their organizational goals, being their social media "eyes" (I would not like to call that eaves dropping or spying), because after all that information is public and up there to be monitored and analyzed to make better strategic decision.
To reply to Clarissa's post, I would like to draw attention to the fact that AMM is a media intelligence company and not a Public Relations company. By monitoring across print, broadcast, internet (News & UGC) sites we keep our partners up-to-date with what is being reported about their organisation or industry so that they can profoundly influence their communications decision making and to manage their brand reputation. The issues we monitor and highlight for org's prevents crisis' in the first place as it assists them in strategizing brand comm before hand. We are the leader in helping leading companies and Government agencies track their image and communication campaigns globally. And we help multinational corporations analyse their positioning and profile, local market issues and competitors. I hope it clears out that how boldly we manage brand reputation.
In the end its lovely to type my first blog and looking forward to a good conversation.
Cheers,
AK (Account Management Team - AMM)
Apologies. I took A MONTH to reply to this, and when I came back I find it interesting that both media intelligences (Brandtology AND AMM had replied to my comment). Wow.
As a media practitioner myself (I work as a Media Relations manager for a foreign conglomerate), here's a small tip from the client side: cut the fancy labeling, and at the end of the day, clients like us don't exactly fancy reading the long list of bombastic sounding labellings. Monitoring news favouritability is just that - monitoring news favouritability. We're looking for budget-friendly, practical solutions that give PR people like us the time to strategise for solution, and to justify the hefty retainer fees, we need to know what you can provide, and we need to know that in SIMPLE ENGLISH. If everything about your company is available online and we don't have to meet up to witness a presentation, it's even better. As far as I'm concerned, neither Brandtology or AMM can do that yet. However, AMM's website seems a lot more comprehensive.
And PR people like me, we're not too keen on meet up with defensive sales representatives, directors, accounts managers. I'm only typing this because I like healthy competition, but really you guys don't have to go all out to do promotions on someone else's blog like this.
Out.
I think using open source web crawlers is a free way to launch 24/7 monitoring services based on configured criteria.
In addition, Google Alerts does something similar. It's free too.
Technically speaking, how would Brandtology handle the possibility of their web crawlers getting permanently blocked by webmasters? Once you get blocked you have to get a new IP address and what happens when you run out of it?
Without a doubt, Brandtology has their work cut out for them. If they don't raise another 5M for the next FY, we can say bye bye. And I am rooting for Brandtology (and another company harro.com) simply because I want them to prove that its possible.
The problem with media intelligence is that you have to either have very very high quality insights, or you have to be really cheap (which defeats the business).
There is also a sea of agents from PR practitioners to ad agencies who all conduct, sell and provide media intelligence for their clients.
The valuable assets that Brandtology is creating is the database and processes, which without a buyer is worthless.
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