Circos Brand Karma

I was on a panel with Karthik Siva at the Asia Luxury Travel Market in Shanghai where we discussed traditional vs. “new wave” branding.  Karthik is the visionary behind Global Brand Forum.  The panel was moderated by Siew Hoon Yeoh of Web-in-Travel (aka WIT), the conference where we launched Brand Karma last year.  Though he represented traditional marketing and I represented “new wave,” I found much in common with his thinking.

One such common perspective revolves around the purpose of a brand and its importance today.  Luxury brands have long understood the need to define a unique purpose and have been fulfilling it by manifesting features to not only justify their price point, but also to retain customers.

But what about non-luxury brands?  Does price trump all?

I don’t think so.  Some of the businesses that have filed for bankruptcy actually used price as a key differentiator (e.g. Mervyns) or resorted to using price as a tool to stimulate volume (e.g. General Motors, Eddie Bauer).

Hoteliers around the world are dropping prices.  At the same time, in the eyes of travelers, hotel stay experiences have become more generic.  I hear a lot more statements like “I can’t tell the differences between these hotels,” and “the rooms are all pretty much the same.”  I also see it on the trend graphs in Brand Karma.  If customers don’t feel passion for their product, hoteliers may have to use pricing as the strategy because it typically has an immediate impact of driving volume… at least for a while.  But that’s not sustainable in the long run.  Both General Motors and Eddie Bauer created products that customers didn’t want to buy… eventually even lower prices didn’t work because both brands failed to inspire or stand for something that consumers cared to spend any money on.

Hence hoteliers, if you haven’t already done so, now might be a good time to do a quick check up on your brand purpose.  You don’t need to hire a consultant to do this.  Just answer these questions honestly:

1. Why does your brand exist?
2. How is that relevant today?
3. What are you and your staff doing to deliver on the brand promise?
4. How is what you’re doing different from what your competitors are doing?
5. Would your customers agree with your answers?

The answer to question 5 is critical, and the impact of a “no” or “I don’t know” could be devastating.  Check out AT&T’s change in its upgrade policy for the iPhone and also the site about consumer credit card rules for a sense of how things could evolve.

As a starting point, take a look at what’s been publicly expressed about your brand.  This will give you a pretty good idea, whether you agree or not, at how your guests really felt about their stay experiences.  Because their reviews are public, their words also shape potential customers’ impression of your brand when they research your brand — which has a direct impact on whether consumers book a room at your property or not.

Finally, even when not reviewing your brand, users express strong opinions about what ought to happen, echoing general consumer sentiments or raising expectations.  This may have a significant impact on the relevance of your offering.  For example, Gary Arndt recently tweeted something I’m sure many travelers think of:

• “So many places say they have ‘internet’ but do not mention if it is free or if it is just a computer in a common area”
• “I know free wifi is becoming the deal breaker for me and a lot of other people. Hotels should take note”

How influential will people like Gary Arndt be?  His tweet currently reaches over 72,000 followers.

Circos is hiring software engineers in Singapore and we invite qualified graduates to apply.  We’re looking for smart technical students who can think out of the box.  If you make it, you’ll work with a team of talented developers building innovative technologies to make the web even more useful than it already is.

Email your resume to: career.sg@circos.com.  You can check out what we’re hiring for at http://www.circos.com/careers/

I want to spend a little bit of time explaining the type of software engineer we’re seeking.  To succeed at Circos as an SE, you need to have strong CS fundamentals and excel in writing code.  The interviews that you will go through will primarily test your technical aptitude.  To help you prepare, here are 5 tips:

1. Know your fundamentals!
2. Be prepared to prove your “expertise,” in other words, don’t BS about what you know.
3. Don’t expect to know the answer to every question.
4. Knowing the right answer but not being able to explain how you got the answer is worse than not getting the right answer.
5. Listen to the question and understand what we’re asking before attempting to solve it.

We recently just considered over 100 students who applied to work at Circos and did not make a single offer because everyone who had applied encountered problems in one or more of the areas above, with the great majority not advancing because they failed the “knowing the fundamentals” test.

We understand that personality and fit is important, but at Circos we want to make sure that you’ve got the right level of technical aptitude before we consider personality and fit.

A final word of advice (and for interviewing with any company): arrive on time, leave your cellphone at home or on silent, and be professionally presentable.

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.

The Obamas will be moving to Washington this weekend, and will temporarily be residing at the Hay-Adams Hotel on Lafayette Park. While I’ve never been there, Brand Karma shows it having pretty strong social media in a competitive market like Washington DC. Maybe the incoming first family will write a review after their stay

Last week Mario and I attended Web in Travel in Singapore, and then its companion conference, ITB Asia.  We met a lot of people, showed them Brand Karma, which we’re very proud of, and made lots of new friends all over the travel industry.

One major concern on several travel executives’ minds is: how will social media affect my brand reputation  and how do I manage it?  After demoing Brand Karma, we received warm receptions that we hope will turn into fantastic partnerships.

One of the reasons that these conferences went so well for us was because of a meeting we had with a prominent VC as the market fell apart.  VC meetings can go any number of ways, especially in this market, but this one, I have to say, was world class awesome.  My favorite nugget:

• Don’t sell vitamins; sell painkillers

Thank you.  That made a world of difference.

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.

A very wise person once told me that there were three ways to look at things that don’t go my way. On the eve of Chinese New Year, I thought I’d share what has guided me through some dark days.

The essence is simple. When a series of bad things and seemingly overwhelming obstacles keep appearing and reappearing, you’ve got to decide for yourself if whatever is happening is:

1. not right, in which case you should get off the ride.
2. bad karma, in which case you go to your patience reservoir and stick it out until the good karma comes, and it will
3. the “everything happens for a reason” principle, so even if you don’t understand why now, you’ll be thankful for it later

I had the opportunity to connect with an ex-MSFT friend who founded and is running DocVerse and I was reminded of the euphoria and difficulties of year 1. For us, it wasn’t all fun, but we made it through. Later in the afternoon I talked to another entrepreneur who rode through the roller coaster of lots of funding, then wondering where the next paycheck would come from, then IPO, then got acquired. His words, “the journey is the reward” was another reminder.

These guys, and many others whom I met through DEMO and other venues, took the attitude of 2 or 3 when things weren’t going their way. And I admire and respect them for it. So I salute them, and all the entrepreneurs out there who persevere and keep going.

As far as Circos is concerned, the day we launched I sent this to the team:

The last few days have been long and exhausting, but you should be proud of what you’ve accomplished.
Our little company was persistent enough in pursuing our vision, brave enough to put it out the world, and now we will be gracious in listening to feedback.
We all reserve the right to wake up smarter tomorrow, therefore, we can always be thankful for people thinking on our behalf.
The road ahead is made of more hills and valleys, but the rest stop we’re at is on top of a crest. I’m glad we’re here as a family, so I hope you can enjoy the view before we start driving soon again.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you all again for making this happen.

Happy Chinese New Year. I hope that this year is a prosperous year for all of us. I also hope that if you’re in the valley, this post will help you gain the perspective you need and help you do the right thing for you and your dream.

After a busy few days at DEMO in Palm Desert last week, we’re back at home in the Bay Area and Singapore. Here’s the video of our team on stage during the general session at DEMO.

We’re already working to add new categories and cities, as well as requested features to www.circos.com. Stay tuned…

We’ve been fortunate to localize one of our products, meferral, into Simplified Chinese less than a year after releasing it.  I think the term ‘localization’ gets thrown around quite a bit in the tech world, especially in today’s global economy, so I’m writing today about what we’ve learned about localizing a web application into another language.

I think the biggest realization you have when you start localizing a web application is that it involves a lot more than just translating all of the English words on your web site into the desired language.  We’ve learned that there are several important steps to good localization:

Product Preparation – just because you want to offer your product in a new language doesn’t mean it’s ready for the people who read and speak that language.  So it’s important to take a step back, look at your product and feature set, and try to understand how it will work for the users you’re localizing it for.  This involves a bit of product management and even marketing.  It’s easy to say, “we’re localizing our product into Simplified Chinese, so it will be used by people in China,” but obviously you need to figure out much more about who your users are.  It’s almost always necessary to have someone in your company (or someone you can talk to) who reads and speaks the language of your target users, so that you can better understand what their needs are.  After considering all this, make the appropriate interface and feature adjustments to your product so that it’s well-suited to the users and language in the market(s) you’re targeting.

Technical Preparation – this is often the most difficult step, as you need to make sure your product is prepped to handle multiple languages.  For languages like Simplified Chinese, this means making sure your database can handle double-byte characters, figuring out the relationship between the existing English version and the new localized version, and preparing strings for translation by moving them into string tables or XML files.

Translation – I think this step is often the first to come to mind.  After moving all of the interface and content strings into a file, find someone who knows both languages to translate everything.  Often there are thousands of strings, so this can be a time-consuming step.

User Interface Adaptation – different cultures have different standards for what’s expected in user-interface design and information architecture.  For example, we learned that our English interface for meferral was too simple for Chinese users, who expect a lot of content on each page.  So it’s important to review the interface with some beta testers in the target demographic who can tell you what works and what doesn’t.  Additionally, sometimes translated words end up looking a lot longer or a lot shorter in a different language, which impacts the look of links and buttons.

Reviewing and tweaking – after everything’s been translated and loaded, allow time for a comprehensive review to fix translations in the context of the site, clean up the translated UI, and fix any other issues which tend to come up.

Hosting – if you’re launching a site for users across the world (and across one of the oceans in particular), it’s often a good idea to setup a hosting environment in the local market.  This improves site performance dramatically.

Support & Maintenance – once you have a site with registered users in a local language, you’ll need people who can respond to support issues, either by phone or email.  Again, this is where it’s great to have bi-lingual people on your staff.  Alternatively, you can partner with a company in the local market who can help you manage support for your localized site.

So in summary, localizing is a pretty big step to take when you consider all of these components.

Our first localized version of meferral will be launching very soon – needless to say, we’re excited to see all of our work come online.