Social media is gaining importance to brands in India and who better than us to tell you about this. Our sister concern WATConsult interacts on a daily basis with brands to better understand their social media needs and provide creative strategy solutions.

One of the key areas for brands in social media is social media monitoring i.e. knowing what people are taking about them. There are several social media tracking tools out there but unfortunately many of them are US centric. Hence in an initiative to track India centric conversations Edelman a global PR firm and Brandtology a social media tracking tool have jointly launched the Digital Brand Index (DBI). As part of their first initiative they tracked conversations about Technology Brands in India and here were their findings:

• There were 74,452 online conversations created pertaining to 96 large technology brands across 423 influential channels between July and September 2009
• The rate of conversation creation was averaging at one brand mention every two minutes.

The top Tech Brands Discussed were:

1. Google
2. Microsoft
3. Yahoo
4. Intel
5. Sony

• The other brands like Nokia, BlackBerry, Dell, Samsung and LG  featured in the Top 10.
• Twitter emerged as the “buzziest” channel in India with almost 60% of the overall conversation share.
• Besides for twitter other tech forums contributed 16% of the conversations amongst them.

Our Take:

While this report is a good indicator by no means is it comprehensive as Facebook updates are still not searchable or trackable (which may change soon). Also Twitter would rank higher as the amount of content i.e. less than 140 characters means there will be more conversations. Unlike blogs which will have more content but less posts. We are not aware of the methodology of this report but ideally blogs as well as the comments on them should be taken into consideration when calculating conversations. Nevertheless this does give an indication on two things; one that twitter is a sticky and active brand discussion platform in India and two the fact that 75,000 conversations were created in 3 months means a need for a serious tracking services for India centric conversations.

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