Asia Pacific Digital Brand Index

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve revisited why I never pursued a career in research – it’s seriously hard work! However, many weeks of hard slog have resulted in a great pay-off, with the launch of the Asia-Pacific Digital Brand Index (DBI), a regional study of online conversations about major technology brands that Edelman APAC conducted with our partners Brandtology. All the details are on this site – but it spans eight APAC countries and incorporates 800,000 mentions of 233 major technology and telco brands, spread across over 4,000 online sites. Whew!

After looking through the data, we decided to focus on country-by-country launches and results, because (mock shock, horror), when you roll the results up at a regional level, the insights become less meaningful. If anything, this exercise has reinforced just how hyper-local social media environments, channels, topics and successful brand engagement really is.

It’s a point well-made by Blair Currie in a recent MEDIA post. However, my point is not that regional social media strategies are not important, but that any expectation that regional silver-bullet targeting, content and engagement strategies exist is misguided. The recent downturn really stressed local over regional and for social media this is also true. Regional marketers still have a very important role to play – esp. in terms of social media policy and strategy formation, driving best practice, benchmarking/measurement and central creation of strong online content. The more that regional marketers can gain a deep understand what’s hot in key markets, which people and sites are most influential for a particular topic and what other firms are doing that is successful or can be learnt from, the more valuable they become.

Shared insight and measurement also helps to better connect regional and local colleagues, so we hope that the DBI helps in the age-old debate about measuring the impact and effectiveness of social media. This is especially so in comparing the performance of brands in markets and across the region – that’s why we created a series of indices that help local and regional marketers to find a common language and measurement benchmark around important areas such as conversation volume, engagement (or mentions per unique voice) and channel volume and breadth.

Just because I know you want to know, here is the ranking of the most discussed technology brands across the eight markets in Asia Pacific:

1. Google
2. Microsoft
3. Nokia
4. Samsung
5. Sony
6. Intel
7. AMD
8. Apple
9. Yahoo!
10. Dell

Disclosure: Edelman represents technology brands around the world, many of which are included in the Digital Brand Index.

With 800,000 pieces of data to review, there’s a whole range of other interesting insights, but more on those at a later date. Would love any questions or feedback you have on the DBI (apart from how bad I look on the below video, ok?!) – let me know.

NOTE: This is a mirror of a post that I did for the MEDIA blog