Circos Brand Karma

PhoCusWright just released their top 10 trends for travel technology for 2009-2010 and I couldn’t agree more with what they said about Business Analytics and Intelligence becoming more important in the current economy.  We’ve heard many people who have expressed similar sentiments, particularly as the expected ROI on marketing dollars gets closely scrutinized.

Brand Karma is a business analytic tool for social media.  Social media’s true impact on a brand’s bottom-line must be understood for businesses to remain current, credible, and relevant.  Much of the data warehouses that have been built over the years focus on transactional business data — i.e. how has your business performed after sales.  But what about why?

How your brand is perceived in social media will increasingly hold important answers as to why your business is performing a certain way as more people rely on social media to inform their purchases.  Hence brands that understand the linkage between its performance and its perception will understand the true purchase drivers, and can therefore be very focused in aligning their organization to deliver superior value on those drivers.

For a look at the industries whose consumers are researching social media prior to making a purchase worldwide, you can check out this report from Universal McCann.

It’s been a hectic summer at Circos-land.  My wife and I welcomed a new member into our family this summer.  Also, we launched a re-branded Circos.com, and equally importantly, formally launched our b2b service, Brand Karma, which has been well-received, especially by hotel marketers responsible for managing their reputation online.  Brand Karma has been a transformational experience for Circos, and we head into autumn with cautious optimism despite the gloominess brought on by the meltdown in the financial market.

Baby Winston is an infrequent communicator — he’s quiet most of the time because he’s sleeping.  But when he needs something, he’s expressive enough to let us know that 1) he needs something and 2) how much time we have to satisfy his needs before a total meltdown.  WinstonSpeak (TM) gave me an insight into how to explain why the Circos technology is different, and why marketers in particular, should care about Brand Karma.

Many brand reputation monitoring service does an admirable job of counting frequency of mentions on a specific topic.  A smaller set also tries to evaluate valence — namely, using semantic technology to determine whether a brand mention was positive or negative.  These 2 dimensions, used together, can give brands insight into how they’re doing (for example, you can do a simple net brand index by taking the calculating the percentage of positive mentions and subtracting from that, the percentage of negative mentions).

Similarly, I can monitor the frequency of WinstonSpeak.  And depending on whether its cooing (positive) or crying (negative), I can monitor Winston’s general state of being for a specific time period.  The problem is that if the net index is unsatisfactory (i.e. more negatives than positives), neither brand marketers nor I would know what to do because we don’t know what the driver(s) of dissatisfaction was.

To get at the driver(s), we have to understand what kind of brand mention was mentioned (in WinstonSpeak, the parallel would be the type of cry emitted), as well as the intensity of the mention.  These additional semantic understanding helps me/brand marketers’ to be very targeted in addressing complaints effectively (and thereby, improving overall satisfaction).

The semantic engine powering Circos already takes all of this into account, which, when applied to online reviews about hotels and displayed within Brand Karma, tells marketers not only how well their brand is doing, but also, how to go about making it better.

And that, in this economy, is just what’s needed to achieve better ROI on marketing spend.