Online Reputation Management and Tools - The next big thing?

Online Reputation Management have become extremely powerful words as far as brand management and brand promotion are concerned. Today a brand, irrespective of the industry or sector it belongs to, has to set apart a part of their spending's for online brand promotion and more importantly for steering the brand perception for favorable outcomes. Online reputation management has come a long way from being a choice to becoming a necessity. Today people are spending a massive amount of time on different blogs or social networking sites such as facebook and twitter. People form perception of brands and influence others online. People can share information at the drop of a hat and that too across geographical locations.

There is more to it than that meets the eye! Earlier, it was easy for companies, especially the ones in high technology based industries such as those in the business of manufacturing mobiles, television and computers; to first introduce their products in developed nations and then later as the technology became outdated, dump them in developing nations. Digital medium has completely changed the entire ball game of selling and buying goods. Now, an outdated technology that arrives in a developing nation and is sold at a high price has to face repercussions that can be far more damaging to them then they may imagine. Not only the product in question shall be condemned, but the brand itself would become an outcast.

Since, the process of new technology being launched simultaneously across the world is happening very gradually, so to speak, digital means of maintaining decorum in the internet space is being sought. Hence, enters the savior "Online Reputation Management". This can be done in two ways. One is by monitoring what is happening across the internet and then responding to the grievances of people. The second is to create as many properties across the internet space as possible and ranking them on the first page for certain phrases that the potential customers like you and me are going to put in Google or any other such reputed search engine.

The main issue is not really the manpower, because this problem can be tackled easily by the developed nations based companies outsourcing the work to developing countries. The bone of contention is that how does one accurately detect across the internet space the relevant queries and where people are actually talking about the brand! Enormous amounts of data to view and process, and there might be products being talked about that can cause problems for many brand simultaneously. For example: If a certain financial instrument is being condemned in a forum where there are hundreds of members and thousand who keep landing on the page through search engines day in and day out, all companies belonging to the industry are going to have a tough time! And these forums might actually be talking specifically about the financial instrument in question with experts from all over the world talking about it and giving their expert comments. Now if under these circumstances one of the brand puts aside a part of its spending for mitigating this problem, they in turn also help their rivals. Such is the paradox! But in case the brand in question is a market leader by a large margin and mainly so because of the financial instrument in question, then it turns out to be far more advantageous proposition for the brand than the offset caused by online reputation management.

Thus, emerges the need for "Online Reputation Management" based tools. There are many online reputation management and monitoring tools in the market, but none good enough. More often than not, they pick up sentences that have no real significance to the brand in question. These tools take keywords, and search the internet for those keywords. Keywords in layman's terms is a "word" or a "phrase" that best represents the brand and is being searched a lot. Generally, a keyword, as far as ORM tools go, is the brand name itself. Now, these tools give you access to graphs and excel sheets that give information such as; sentiments across the internet space, pie charts depicting the geographic distribution across the world, excel sheets that give links having the keywords in question and many other sophisticated analytics. But the important thing to note is, these tools can never gauge the emotions and the psychology of the people who are writing it. Thus, more often than not, wrong analysis is done. These tools are nothing but just scripts and lakhs of codes written to crawl websites but not feel the sentiments behind the mentions. In making these tools efficient, natural language processing will have a pivotal role to play. The day is not really far away when these tools will be so efficient that it would become the primal factor in influencing consumer buying behavior.


Ezine Article Link: Online Reputation Management and Tools - The next big thing?

BRAND - An insight into the power it beholds

"Brand" , a strong word that really means everything when it comes to a product or company. A brand has to create its own identity in the minds of its target market. And yeah, every product has a particularly defined market, that is certain, the market may be defined on the basis of the different market segmentation parameters namely demographic, geographic, psychographic, behavioral factors. Well not really dwelling deep into the marketing jargons, in short, a brand is defined for some particular group of people with similar interests. Now this group can be REALLY BIG and for example the geographic parameter might span the entire world over a period of time. Well, a brand is affected by a whole lot of other jargons such as brand name, brand value, brand association etcetera. What i would really like to focus people's attention is the inherent power that a brand has. Why do you think a person loves Sony Ericsson or an Apple product, primarily because these brands are associated with something that people perceive as amazing, and it actually boils down to their basic needs of having a great phone. In technical terms Brand Association (so much for the criptic name!). Now WHAT is it that people see in Apple and Sony Ericsson phones and WHAT is the basic need that they ASSOCIATE these brands with. The different answers to the same question could be "Quality","Durability","Utility", "technology expertise" or any other such answer depending upon the PERCEPTION of the individuals about the BRAND . More importantly the perceptions would be driven by the underlying NEED of the individual. For example, not everyone might be in search of "Quality" in a mobile phone, they may be interested in "Durability". Again, there might be combinations of several needs for some other individual, his/her interest lies in "Durability" AND "Utility" and they might really would not mind whether the phone may or may not have, say, "technology expertise".

Now if a Brand really have to perform well across geographic locations, it is absolutely necessary for them to try to bridge the gap between the "underlying needs" and "brand perception" so as to maximize sales at a premium amount and attain high market shares, all at the same time. The brand owner should seek to bridge the gap between the brand image and the brand identity as well. Aah, another set of jargons!. Brand identity is nothing but the symbols, name, trademark, communications and visual appearance or anything that uniquely identifies the brand. Brand image to a large extent depends on how the brand has been perceived by the target market of the brand. Brand image is how you actually perceive the brand while brand identity is the way the owner of the brand actually wants you to perceive the brand!. So basically if you think that Sony Ericsson Walkman Phones provides very high quality music and Sony Ericsson actually wants you to perceive that it is high quality product by making use of the Walkman logo that was already a hit when they launched the walkman that ran on tape, Voila! they have achieved their success.

So, in the smallest of the nutshells possible, here are the jargons of  "BRAND", simplified!

Ezine Article Link: BRAND - An insight into the power it beholds

Smartphones - Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Blackberry, iPhone, Samsung?

The new breed of mobile phones, the smartphones are taking over the mobile market and there are several variants flooded in the market. Which one to choose is the question that needs to be solved. Giants of mobile phones, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Blackberry or iPhone, all of them trying to make their niche in the clutter of smartphones, each of them master in their own right!
iPhone has managed to get maximum market share in the Americas while in European countries, Blackberry and Nokia still have presence at large. India and China and other Asian countries are dominated primarily by Nokia and Sony Ericsson. Each company trying to get into the markets of the others by adding new features every now and then. If we look at the strengths of each of the manufacturers, Nokia is known for its amazing variants, their latest offering E7 smartphone seems promising and they have, if i have to speak from an Indian context, launched the phone at a premium price before Sony Ericsson is launching a similar phone in their XPERIA series ie. Sony Ericsson XPERIA Pro. What could be the primary reason behind it?
The reason being simple, symbian operating system, after enjoying popularity over the past decade, has been overshadowed by the android operating system. Although, Symbian is the proprietary operating system of Nokia, they must try and come up with phones that are android driven, primarily because they might be able to fight more effectively against other competing phones. Blackberry is known for its amazing operating system Blackberry OS, but they are more known for their secure form of email sending communication.
iPhone is also at a very high position when it comes to features in smartphones. Steve jobs has done a tremendous job in making iOS a success. Also, all one has to do is browse "App Store" and download whatever application one wants. Nokia also has its own "Ovi Store" on similar lines. iPhone are also known for its stylish and sleek designs. Android driven phones have, again on the similar lines of "App Store" and "Ovi Store", a on phone "Android Market". But the number of free applications available on Android Market is far more than their counterparts. Sony Ericsson one of the leading manufacturers of android based phones has made an entire series of XPERIA phones based on Android technology.
Sony Ericsson is known for its amazing quality of phones be it aesthetic sense, battery life, operating system, the processor speed and design. Another giant in the smartphone market Samsung is also competing heavily with its counterparts, primarily in the Asian market. They have come up a combination of phone series, some of which run on Android, while some others run on their proprietary Operating System "BADA OS". If one has to talk about the camera and picture quality, it is generally noticed that given a particular megapixel, Sony Ericsson phone cameras are far superior than any of their competitors' cameras.
Pricing for all the phones shall vary based on the geographical area, the competition amongst the companies in the area and hence no insight can be given on this aspect with certainty, but since Sony Ericsson, iPhone are famous example of companies using market skimming strategy, you can safely assume that they shall try to sell their products at a premium price basing the hike in the price on their "quality" of product. Nokia and Samsung on the other hand, if i have to speak from an Indian market aspect, would try to have two sets of phones, one would be highly prices but generally not higher than competing Sony Ericsson or Apple phones, and another set of phones which would be affordable and would be if not very low, moderately priced thus trying to use market penetration strategy and try to reach the middle class income bracket. Thus one must choose their phone after doing thorough research in and around their neighborhood, you never know your phone of your dreams might just be cheaper there!

Ezine Article Link: Smartphones-Nokia,Sony Ericsson, Blackberry, iPhone, Samsung?

Facebook, Twitter, Orkut - are they mere social networking sites?

All of us are on these social networking sites aren't we? In fact in today's world a person who is not on these social networking sites is not at all alive! People come on these sites for so many reasons. Some come there because their friends have joined these sites, some come there because they feel the need for affiliation, some join because they want to increase contacts.

But off late, a new trend has started. One can find companies as well on these sites. Well what could be the reason? The answer to such a simple question is a little complicated. They come there for brand promotion, well this is pretty obvious and is implied. But how many people out there know that it is also becoming a source of new product development and market research! Social networking sites have slowly evolved from branding and promotion tools to market research based tools. Facebook is a famous social networking site which has recently added this new tool that allows you to ask questions through polls. Now these are very clear cut market research tools that can be used for new product development and to understand what their customers want!

People are talking about stuff all the time. Be it blogs, social networking sites and a number of other places.Yes, i agree, there are many blogs and websites where people are paid to write about, but there are genuine people as well. The future of market research lies in developing web market research tools. Either, positive stuff or negative stuff, people are thinking, tweeting, posting every second. Tools are being developed in these spheres that are capable of identifying these "keywords" and then looking at the entire sentence and interpreting the sentences to give a sense of the sentiments the speaker or say tweeter has about it. A major branch of computer science, natural language processing, has been dedicated for understanding the interactions between computers and human languages. Though natural language processing is currently more concentrated in the fields of robotics and allied subjects, but it is slowly being used in the application of developing business intelligence tools and data mining. Numerous web analytic tools are available nowadays on the internet. There are some that give real time information along with demographic segmentation to some extent, with around 80% accuracy. There are some companies which have started to use social networking sites as a tool to have e-commerce webpage where in you can buy and sell stuff through these sites.

The time has come, now the social networking sites are not mere socializing tools with friends and colleagues, they have become mammoth tools for companies to try and SOCIALIZE with their potential and current customers and make big bucks out of it!


Ezine Article Link: Facebook, Twitter, Orkut - are they mere social networking sites?