I was at a Business School today to attend an event and met a few people from the industry. Here is an interesting conversation I had with somebody I met. Let’s call him Mr. X.
Mr. X – So what do you do?
Ram – I am an entrepreneur and run a software product company called Circus Social. We do social media monitoring and analytics; and have offices in Singapore and Bangalore.
Mr. X – What exactly is social media monitoring?
Ram – In simple terms, we fetch data, and a lot of it, from multiple social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit etc. and also from several blogs, forums and news sites. We then process and augment this data (with sentiment, gender, removing spam etc) and allow marketers to get insights from this data. We show them trends, insights, a lot of charts and graphs and allow them to make better business decisions.
Mr. X – So you are a big data company. Sounds like tough work. What kind of business decisions can be made?
Ram – Yes, we are indeed a big data company. Currently, our clients are enterprises, typically marketers, who would like to know their customers better, research their markets, analyse their competitors, identify top influencers, get real time alerts on topics of interest etc. We are also launching our SME product shortly.
Mr. X – So, do you invade people’s privacy? Isn’t this data private?
Ram – We only crawl data that is already publicly available. Anything that is private or protected by you is completely out of bounds for us. We do an incredibly good job of collating all of this data in our platform and marketers find tremendous value in quickly viewing trends from 10,000 feet but also in the ability to drill down to understand the “why” and “how” behind the trends.
Mr. X – Will this be useful for my company?
Ram – If people are talking about your company, your brands or topics that you are interested in tracking, you will definitely find it useful.
Mr. X – Where can I get more information?
Ram – Here’s my business card. Please visit our website. where you can find a lot more information about what we do and a list of some of our clients. You can also sign-up for a free demo.
Mr. X – Sounds good. Thank you!
Ram – You are welcome!
