Exclusive | Measuring social media: Webfluenz's Bharani Setlur

The growing influence of social media and digital marketing has led to companies reorganizing their promotional budget to include an increased portion towards new media. At the same time it has become necessary for companies to measure social media and be attentive to the noises happening on these platforms. That is where  the significance of social media intelligence and analytics matters. Knowing how your money spent on social media and digital marketing is giving returns is important. Helping companies in gauging this is Webfluenz, a sophisticated social media intelligence system that listens, monitors and engages with social media and the real time web. A multi-lingual platform with the ability to identify consumer sentiments in many global languages, Webfluenz uses Natural Language Processing (NLP), semantic search algorithms, advanced data mining and pattern recognition to search through social media platforms to generate some of the most sophisticated insights and actionable real time intelligence.

 

Speaking to Adgully, Bharani Setlur, CEO, webfluenz.com says, “The competences include over 90 languages that can be monitored with specific natural language processing capability in 24 languages that provide for superior sentiment and other text based intelligence analysis.” Webfluenz was recently ranked as one of the top 15 monitoring tools in the world out of 200 such tools reviewed by Swiss publisher Goldbach Interactive in their Annual Monitoring Tool Report for 2012. Along with partners, Webfluenz has presence in South East Asia, Western Europe, East and South Africa and South Asia.

 

Consumer / market moves at a pace that every company has to keep up with. Decisions made on data that is not contextual and relevant has always been central to management’s ability to grow and sustain a business. Social media intel is a sophisticated augmented information set when analyzed in detail provide actionable insights. Says Setlur, “today most of our clients fully understand and most have been taking advantage of the intelligence that we provide.” Webfluenz’ systems have been built to acquire relevant information from social media and the real time web. This data is analyzed by sophisticated algorithms that produce an accurate insight into what people are talking about online.

 

Webfluenz works with most of the major agencies in the advertising, public relations, marketing and research space, some of the biggest global names in advertising & marketing industry viz. Omnicom Media Group, GroupM, Havas Media, Starcom Media Group, MEC, Hakkuhodo, Euro-RSCG-Siren as well as global PR agencies like Burson Marsteller, Ruder Finn and Weber Shandwick. It has relationships with TNS Global across Asia and among the clients are some big advertisers like American Express Bank, Nivea & Hamley's toy store in various parts of the world.

 

The company’s main competitors are North American and European companies. As for marketing and pricing strategy, Setlur says, “our pricing and strategy for India is no different for the rest of the world. Our products and solutions are sold at a universal global price. Our strategy has been to let our customers judge for themselves the quality of our offering.”

Going forward, the company is also exploring a few conversations for partnerships and capital infusion. Adds Setlur, “we entered a quick expansion phase over the past six months. First it is critical for us to grow the business in a sustainable way, ensuring the quality we provide from a product, solution and service perspective.”