Pulse Blog

New Delhi, India, Sept 14, 2011 – Pulse today announced the appointment of Mukta Prakash as its Client Development Manager for the India subcontinent market. While Pulse has operated in India since April 2010, it is now also focused on servicing its growing domestic client base. Prakash comes to Pulse after many years in the industry previously with Toluna, Paradigm Precision Sample and ICICI Bank.

Betchay Sangalang, Regional Client Development Head commented “We continue to invest heavily towards our India operations, both from a fulfillment and client development perspective. India represents a strong growth market for us, and we are committed to hiring the best talent available to strengthen our position”.

This appointment comes after various other key appointments in India over the past year, with ex-Nielsen veteran Sandeep Verma and ex-Toluna Client Development Naveen Babbal joining the group.

About Pulse Group PLC
Pulse Group PLC is Asia’s leading Digital Research Agency. Its full-service capabilities encompass brand related insights, measurement, sentiment analysis and Consumer 2.0 across Asia-Pacific. It also manages one of the most established Asian Online panels www.planet-pulse.com – an online community of survey respondents throughout Asia-Pacific and Middle East.

Please visit Pulse Group PLC www.pulse-group.com for more information.

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By Andre Farsandi – Head of Pulse Buzz

Pulse has started to delve deeper into the Social Media Analytics space recently with the suite of product offerings. Is this a niche offering, or something that has a wider appeal?

Social media with no doubt has an impact with anybody and everybody today, and online research/measurement is a crucial part of it. As a leading digital research agency we always strive to be consistently relevant with the latest trends, and we are fully aware of what has recently developed into this.

An example is ‘Pulse Buzz’, our latest online buzz analytics solution. Pulse Buzz collects and analyzes online conversation about brands, products, and companies. This tool analyzes millions of online conversations, across the globe, in most languages, and in real time. Key analytics are provided to clients in an easy to read, cut-through-the-clutter, and executive summary format.

But how does social media relate to online research from a Pulse perspective?

Our vision to adopt Media 2.0 technology remains. With this in mind, what interests us the most is due to the fact that many B2B and B2C companies are now coming to grips with the proliferation of online channels of communication. We can still remember where we were in the industrial media era, we were sort of passive and found many protocols and bureaucracy as an internet user whenever we wanted to share our opinion to somebody else’s posts, articles, or writings. And in terms of offline media networking, we could only access magazine, newspapers, or brochures and so on, and it took really a long time before you could finally provide your response on somebody else’s article or writing, again because of the bureaucracy and staticness of offline media. But now, all has changed. In this online and social media era, we have found more freedom in expressing ourselves. For example, if you read a comment/post/writing on a social networking site on the internet, you can immediately reply and react by posting what you are thinking about that post/comment/analysis, on the spot. For this purpose, a reliable buzz monitoring

tool is crucial to understanding where online conversations are taking place, who is saying what, and if the discussions are positive, negative or neutral. The steps are always about listening, measuring, and finally engaging in the right order. Listening to social media is a lot more than just collecting posts and monitoring buzz. You need insights, measurements, and the ability to act on the conversations you uncover. Using apps to track what is being said about your brand is the easy part.

But what do you do once you’ve found pages and pages of brand mentions?

Not all social mentions are created equally. When you’ve been promoting your brand for a while and the conversations start happening all around you, you need a way to sort through them, categorize them, and systematically reply – according to comment worth. There’s not much in the way of software that will help you do this perfectly just yet, but the program we have is a good place to start and we can support you on that.

So, you’ll really need to read each social mentions, carefully looking out for questions, or some sort of valuable contribution that you can add to the conversation. In the end, social media is all about planning, organizing and reviewing, especially when it comes to monitoring your brand online. There is going to be a lot of sentiment, positive or negative about your brand. But the reason you monitor your brand on social media, is so that you can jump in on conversations that are already happening – good or bad.

How does Pulse execute such a solution?

Simple, as mentioned above, listen to your customer’s voice, measure, and act from there. Such feedback is really helpful in our experience. And when that happens definitely damage control is far more important than thanking someone for their compliment to your brand. And we are considered very lucky to be positioned in Asia as this market is really active and sensitive in terms of online posting and such comment can be found massively everywhere. So this has basically been requested by our clients to be an additional offering, qualitatively, aside from our very own market research solution, with online methodology as the spearhead of the business, quantitatively. So that our clients can make a good preparation on how they want to compete with their competitors and this will be relevant and useful to plan their sales strategy, consumer insights, product development, competitive intelligence and brand/campaign monitoring or tracking. This is how we look at it and why we build Pulse Buzz as an pre-emptive insights for our clients, where the benefits are to measure marketing effectiveness, manage crisis pro-actively, do effective online public relations, benchmark your competition, identify new market opportunities, get market insights in the most cost effective manner.

By Mandy Chee – Head of Pulse Communities

Pulse has always been known as a provider of Online Panels to the Market Research Industry via it’s proprietary panels www.planet-pulse.com . Why has it started to build Branded Online communities for large brands?

The world today is buzzing about WHY… WHEN…HOW… TO ENGAGE, GET CLOSER with consumers… and GAIN INSPIRATION on product innovation. All this boils down to the ultimate goal of bringing the BRAND TO THE NEXT LEVEL. The most notable emerging trend nowadays is that brands are jumping into the social media wagon. Brands started to build blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter handles, etc. Little do we all know these social media sites would play a crucial role in creating ideation and loyalty for the brand.

Supplying brands with more relevant information about target consumers is one of the advantages of social media sites. However, the information still cast doubts on the accuracy, credibility and randomness / representativeness of the consumers who utilize such social media channels. Bigger brands such as Unilever, Kraft, Estee Lauder deem social media as an important tool to closely engage consumers with their brands; however they need more and want more – that is-, INSIGHTS + MOVEMENTS + a One-to-One approach.

These brands do not just stop there! And are craving for more and more relevant information that would move their brands to the higher ground!

Most of the brands started to seek one-to-one relationships and are demanding for more insights. Now, they are more inclined to move to the trend of building branded communities.

What triggers Brands to get involved with branded communities?

Here are some obvious advantages:

• An environment for consumers to discuss your brand / organization in a controlled environment
• Increases loyalty by having community
• Generates thousand of ideas
• Provides a rich source of qualitative insights
• Provides more comprehensive quantitative feedback
• Reduces mid – long term external outsourcing of research

Having facebook is supplementary to brand-building enhancement and it entails most of the relevant, meaningful and insightful conversations which usually take place in a close community.

It is just a matter of time to see more brands starting to EXPLORE this powerful tool and to CAPITALIZE on its core benefits!