Interview with Kelly Choo, Cofounder Of Brandtology

If you find it hard to keep track of what consumers are saying about your brand online, you’re not alone. What might make your job harder though, is trying to decide online brand monitoring service you’ll go with. Brandtology purports to be different as it combines both technology and human oversight to ensure that your digital conversation monitoring is much more accurate. We sat with Kelly Choo, one of the co-founders of Brandtology to have a chat.

Hi Kelly, thanks for meeting with us. First, what is Brandtology?

We are a company that provides business and brand online intelligence services round the clock from a 24×7 Command Centres. Manned by trained specialists, Brandtology enables organizations around the globe to make timely and informed strategic decisions.

Brandtology’s Digital Conversation Management System (DCMS) is powered by an intelligent opinion mining and ticket-processing system which aids organizations in listening to online digital conversations generated from blogs, forums, micro-blogs, news sites and other social medium.

Brandtology serves a multitude of industries and public sectors in functions where online intelligence matters. Brandtology’s proprietary technologies, coupled with proven processes and trained specialists, enable clients to improve their brand equity, to increase revenue and to gain competitive edge.

Brandtology is about “Social Media Business Intelligence Redefined”.

When did this start?

Eddie Chau, the Founder & CEO had the idea back in 2006. The conceptualization stage, to operations, to till now took about one year from early 2009. We are now looking to expand from our current five offices.

Why did your team start Brandtology?

As social media gets more prolific, opportunities to understand what are the public’s sentiments towards a brand/organization becomes increasingly important. If you can understand sentiments and buzz in an accurate and timely manner, you will have an edge in sales, marketing, advertising, etc.

We found that organizations using existing technologies in this “opinion mining” space had many difficulties in deploying, maintaining, training and running a cost effective yet accurate intelligence providing system.

Brandtology’s Digital Conversation Management System

How has your product evolved from its initial idea to how it is today?

When we first started, we thought our customers would only be those from corporate communication/PR departments of consumer-centric companies. Until we realized that our intelligence services would be also very useful for other functions, such as C-Level executives, adverting, marketing, product management, risk management, HR etc where they would be able to take our intelligence to strategize for the next course of action in a very timely manner. Our clients are from a multitude of industries including public sectors.

Initially we didn’t have daily summary reports, and found that some of the busy executives were not logging in consistently, so we came up with a daily summary report that continues to evolve even today. We take our customers’ feedback on our service very seriously and it continues to evolve mainly driven by their needs.

Who makes up your team?

Eddie is our Founder & CEO, having previously founded e-Cop (a managed security services company) in 2000 and sold it in 2007. As a serial entrepreneur, his background has been in business and sales even though he was trained as an engineer.

Eden is our co-founder & MD based in China and handles the north Asian market. For us, this includes China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea. While our Singapore office handles the international market, mainly English, Bahasa Melayu and Bahasa Indonesia. Eden is an experienced marketer in these markets and that really helps us tap into the north Asian markets.

Alvin is our co-founder & in-charge of our R&D work in Brandtology. He was previously from Singapore Defense Science Organization (DSO) and has done a lot of work for the government in information intelligence. His PhD was in informational retrieval and neural networks, amongst other things.

Myself, I am co-founder & looking after Product Management and also involved in business development for Brandtology. I was previously involved with other start-ups and was lucky enough to have done computer security during my days in the Singapore Army.

Not forgetting the rest of our team who makes Brandtology possible. They come from a multitude of industries and that really compliment the different clients that we deal with in this company.

Your team’s information security background is very strong, was this purposeful and does this help in Brandtology?

We knew each other before the company started, and this information security background was a common denominator on how we massaged the concept. It helped immensely in the way we conceptualized the idea and deliver the service.

Our CEO Eddie, having had run e-Cop, which uses 24×7 command centers to help organizations defend themselves against intruders, leverages his expertise here in Brandtology to help organizations understand what people are saying about their brands on a 24×7 manner.

Brandtology’s 24×7 Command Centre

How different are you from other brand analysts and monitoring services out there?

We find that other companies rely on just technology for their sentiment analysis. Netizens use evolving aliases, acronyms, sarcasm, etc in different sites which makes current technologies become inaccurate. Customers also shouldn’t have the headache to figure these things out. We are providing a service that customers used to always have to do it themselves in-house.

When they buy or license technologies, they have to sieve through all the irrelevant posts themselves, even correcting the sentiments when they’re wrong. The technology won’t know the difference between M1 the telecommunications company or M1 the anti-aircraft gun or M1 the name of a highway in South Africa.

The other technologies commonly base their services on sources like blog feeds, search engines, etc. We find this to be problematic as we know that a lot of organizations target based on geographic locations and want to delve into regional information. Thus for us, we analyze where most of the traffic comes from and then target the 20% with 80% of the influence and mind share, using the proverbial 80/20 rule.
Also, because others use such search engines which naturally lag a little in terms of their updating and crawling of information, these other companies “look backwards”. However, since at Brandtology we listen to specific sites which we pinpoint as the most relevant, we can do near real-time updating. Thus, we can do both ‘backwards’ and ‘on-going’ listening of the social media.

What is Brandtology’s main competitive advantage?

We have our own proprietary technologies with some patents pending that particularly help in the Asian and globalmarkets. What is more important in any start-up is your execution and speed of adapting to the market demands. That’s what we strive to do.

What we found according to our research is that sentiment ratings are at most 50-60% accurate in a controlled domain in the English language. What we are able to achieve by coupling technology as well as human processes lets us deliver highly accurate intelligence to our clients in multiple languages.

How do you determine the most influential sites?

We do it using a variety of means, such as by traffic, in-links, local knowledge, customer’s key industries, etc.

The Brandtology Process

Who are typically your Partners?

Mainly public relations, new media advertising and digital communication group of companies. They use our services and intelligence to sell their own strategic planning consulting and execution services. It’s a synergistic relationship between us and them as we both close each other’s loop.

Are you planning to expand your team?

Yes, currently we have are about 40+ strong but would like to hire more talents and expect to reach 70-80 by end of the year.

If you had to pick, Marketing or Technology?

It really depends on the industry you’re in. If its technology driven in the B2B market, and which does not involve the mass market, I think technology is the more important of the two. However, if you are dealing in the consumer space where it then becomes a mind-share and branding game, then marketing is more important.

Looking back, what has been your moment of greatest euphoria?

That large companies are willing to spend good money on the great value that we bring.

Has there been any time that you felt like quitting?

No.

Would you have done anything differently?

We would have expanded faster into China. We have already set up an initial base there, and it’s expanding, which also includes getting clients, branding, etc, which takes time.

I read that you recently opened your Australia and Malaysia office. What other international plans do you have?

We want to be able to expand to other countries where there’s demand. Vietnam, Thailand, India, which are already covered by Singapore HQ currently, but we would need strong partners there or to establish an office depending on the market demand. In due course, we would like to expand our services to North America and Europe.

Where do you see Brandtology in one year?

As the dominant player in this industry in Asia Pacific if not globally.

Top 3 qualities an entrepreneur must have?

High emotional quotient (EQ), hard and smart working and lastly a great sense of humour to tide through the tough periods.

Thanks, Kelly! All the best with Brandtology.

Related posts:

1. Walden International Invests S$2 Million In Brandtology
2. Brandtology and SIS International Research Partner
3. TBWA and Brandtology Partnership – AsiaPac Brands to Get More Strategic Digital Offering
4. Edelman-Brandtology Digital Brand Index
5. Edelman And Brandtology Partner To Deliver Pan-Asia End-to-End Social Media Solution