In Conversation with the ThoughtBuzz Team

ThoughtBuzz is a feature rich and powerful 24/7 real time application for tracking public content on social media networks. While it is a rather congested space considering two other competitors vying in the same place, the team seeks to make a difference with their new product, providing brands new analysis tools to understand the sentiments of their consumers. We caught up with both founders Anshul Jain and Ashok Patro and discussed about their product, what value does it generate for customers and not to mention how they plan to be different from their competitors.

BL: Tell us about your background. What did you do before setting up ThoughtBuzz?
ThoughtBuzz Team:
Anshul Jain is the Founder/CEO of ThoughtBuzz. Anshul holds a Masters in Business Administration from SP Jain Centre of Management and an Honours Bachelors degree in Information Systems Management from Singapore Management University. A certified MCSE, Certified Ethical Hacker and Certified Citrix Administrator, he has worked for Oracle Financial Services, Singapore, managing clients such as Citigroup, Barclays and HSBC. With more than five years’ experience in social media, Anshul has led various discussions on Web 2.0 and its applications for business. He recently completed a paper on Enterprise 2.0: Dawn of Emergent Collaboration, which details how companies can use Web 2.0 tools and processes to add value to their businesses despite this economic downturn.

Ashok Patro is the Co-Founder/COO of ThoughtBuzz. Ashok holds a Masters in Business Administration from SP Jain Centre of Management and a Bachelors Degree in Telecommunications Engineering from India. He has extensive experience in the wireless industry, working for a variety of clients including Samsung and Qualcomm Inc, USA for close to 5 years. Ashok has worked on various mobile frameworks like Windows Mobile 5.0, BREW, etc, consistently achieving high performance targets in his previous positions.

From left: Anshul and Ashok.

BL: What motivated you and your fellow co-founders to set up ThoughtBuzz?
ThoughtBuzz Team: Initially when ThoughtBuzz was started in Feb 2009 our aim was to provide individuals a central place to manage their profiles on multiple social networks. However, soon we realized that such tools already exist and are pretty good so we decided that this wasn’t the right way to go. We then decided to shift focus to social media measurement when during our research we came across how increasingly important social media is to brands and companies. Almost all companies make use of social media some way or the other and they have no certain way to measure their ROI. This is where we believe we can help them and provide them with a platform to measure the impact and success of their social media campaigns. Though later we realized that there are a few products in this area, but they were a few issues which we felt are never answered like cost effectiveness, user friendliness and accuracy. Thus we target these 3 things to build upon.

BL: Can you tell us about the product ThoughtBuzz as a social media monitoring tool?
ThoughtBuzz Team: ThoughtBuzz is into media monitoring and helps companies monitor and track online conversations. It offers a full-feature analytics service with access to billions of social media conversations, as well as features such as automated sentiment and key themes. ThoughtBuzz is ideal for research, historical analysis, and the preparation of reports. It goes beyond what companies offer today and makes extensive use of real-time information. Other features such as demographics, topic intentions are also available.

BL: What are the three interesting features on ThoughtBuzz that you want users to know about?
ThoughtBuzz Team: Patent Pending sentiment analysis technology, Real time data tracking and analysis and User friendliness

BL: Who are the customers for ThoughtBuzz? How do you create value for them?
ThoughtBuzz Team: Any person or company with market presence and who get in contact with the consumers are our customers. As more and more people have access to internet and the different forms of social media, monitoring these has become very important. Thus MNCs, SMEs to PR and MR firms (taking care of their clients) and even individuals who are public figures can use ThoughtBuzz services.

We create value by following ways:

• Keep them Informed – In the tangles of the worldwide web, ThoughtBuzz helps clients determine what’s important and what’s just noise. We have analytical and segmentation capabilities so they only pick up what’s relevant to them.
• Keep them Empowered – ThoughtBuzz finds out what customers love and hate about our client’s brand and competitors’, and enables them to make timely, informed strategic decisions to win in the marketplace
• Keep them Engaged – With ThoughtBuzz, B2C companies, from SMEs to MNCs, can proactively engage in a dialogue with consumers discussing their brand and effectively manage their online reputation.

BL: How does ThoughtBuzz generate revenue as a social media monitoring tool?

ThoughtBuzz provides a monthly subscription based monitoring tool to customers. Customers can enroll for an engagement period starting from as short as 3 months to 2 years.

BL: Given there are other two competitors in the space: JamiQ and Brandtology, what makes you different from them?

ThoughtBuzz Team: Real time data tracking and analysis, User friendliness and an exhaustive list of key features are among a few things which differentiates us from the competitors here in Singapore.

BL: What are the major challenges that you encounter in your enterprise?
ThoughtBuzz Team: As the story is with any young upstart, offering a cost effective service better than the competitors and being very young in the industry makes our work even more challenging as a new enterprise.

BL: What are the three most important traits of an entrepreneur?
ThoughtBuzz Team: Focus, hard work and belief in yourself are the 3 important traits of an entrepreneur. Everyone has ideas, but the tough part is to be focused and work towards executing it what makes an entrepreneur successful. And all these without the support of family and friends is next to impossible.

BL: Thank you both for the interview and we wish ThoughtBuzz all the best in the road ahead.

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3. Interview with Kelly Choo, Cofounder Of Brandtology
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