BrandsEye Online Reputation Management for Big Business ONLY

by Nic Haralambous on 13/03/2008

Twitter is a terrible thing. I was about to leave work when I entered in to a debate with Zoopedup, ChristopherM, Unodewaal, adii and SimoneBiz. And that was me. Writing another blog post.

BrandsEye (thanks for the sneak peak Rafiq) was launched a few days ago. Online Reputation Management is the name of their game. Sounds great and I was interested immediately.

However after going through the site I found nowhere for me to register. Duh. Obviously, Quirk doesn’t chase cents and rands. This is what I was told on Twitter. Now that’s all well and good and makes sense to me but at the end of the day, as adii noted, Technorati can manage your online rep. This is very basic, but it can be done. Then throw in basic Google searches and Google notifications for your brand or name and you are pretty good. And guess what? The services I’ve just mentioned are free.

I do understand that Quirk is targeting larger business. Let’s be honest no-one else online is going to pay US$750 for the service. So they are targeting a specific market and i grasp and respect that.

But let’s compare this service to other major services online.

News: Many newspapers used to charge for their services (the content). That faded quickly because people can get the service elsewhere either cheaper or for free.

E-mail: Gmail is free. Hotmail, free. Yahoo mail, free. All major and important services to businesses. I know of many, many larger business who use Gmail as their primary e-mail service. I also know many who forward on their paid-for e-mail to their Gmail account for simplicity reasons. Again, not a paid service.

Service is currently being rendered as public property. Facebook, YouTube, Flickr (pro account costs +-US$25) are all major online sites offering great services that are free or extremely cheap for a pro account.

Why hasn’t BrandsEye opened with various entry level? Big Business packages all the way through to small-time bloggers looking for some brand awareness?

This might be in the pipeline, but as SimoneBiz stated with such ease, don’t worry they will roll out a “Lite” version for individuals in the future. Why? Why would they have to make it a “Lite” version? Why can’t it be fully locked and loaded with all the bells and whistles that high-paying customers would receive?

Because that’s not capitalism. And if they do that then their high-paying customers would get pissed off. So basically if Quirk is planning to expand BrandsEye in to lower-end markets they will never make it a free service and if you aren’t willing to pay top-dollar (yes, dollar) then you wont really be able to get the most of their services ever.

Instead I am going to sit with my Google Alerts, Technorati searches, Twitter alerts and word of mouth (or sight of finger/typed word) to keep abreast of my brand online.

nharalambous@gmail.com

There are 11 comments in this article:

  1. 13/03/2008Rob Stokes says:

    Hi Nic… thanks for the link love!

    Quite simply it all comes down to target market. For small businesses, tools like Google Alerts and Trackur are fantastic, and much like SAP doesn’t have a “lite” version, its not our goal to compete in that market. We are more than happy for you to sit with your Google, Technorati and Twitter alerts as you are currently doing. But trust me, if you were a bank, you’d quickly come up short.

    Anyone can track mentions online, i don’t even consider that a USP of ours. BrandsEye goes much further than just that, it offers corporate marketers an opportunity to quantify their online reputation – something i can tell you they are crying out for and larger brands are prepared to pay for. In fact many are already paying thousands more than we are asking for very little more value – hence our price point, we are looking to the upper end of the market.

    The lovely Simone was on the right track with her comment about us needing to recoup our investment. But the point is, we wouldn’t have spent millions developing it, if we were catering to the $10/month Google Alert market… there just isn’t a sustainable business model there at the moment.

    Anyway, sorry we obviously pissed you off so much. I think we’ve got a pretty good product and the clients using it certainly think so. At the end of the day, we’re just trying to make a living. To be honest, I’m pretty proud that we’re a South African agency competing on the global stage with a globally innovative product… and I ain’t running off to Silicon Valley…
    Cheers
    Rob

  2. 13/03/2008Nic says:

    Hey Rob! Thanks for the great response. Just to clarify, you didn’t piss me off at all!!

    I was just wondering out loud. I see your point and you do make some good ones that I don’t disagree with at all. Like I said in the post, you know your target market and that is respectable!

    I agree 100% that it’s fantastic to see local startups competing on a global level and by the sounds of things succeeding fantastically! :)

    It’s just never a good thing to have something launch and applaud it blindly, I was just playing devil’s advocate.

    The linklove is always given happily and let’s be honest this type of post and response situation can only do well for BrandsEye! :)

  3. 13/03/2008FeistyFemale says:

    Nic – great thought-provoking post [as always].

    Rob – I think you have a winning product here. It is damn enticing if you are into PR, measurability and ROI…you have that feeling of just having to have it.

    With this in mind I really do think you could do well with a “light” version of this as it would imply having the basics automated for the small/medium sized company as opposed to them keeping tabs on the communication for a number of clients and doing the searches manually [time consuming as you know].

    Working on a variety of communication campaigns can become problematic using just Google alerts and “manual” searches to track client communication. It is time consuming and rather chaotic keeping tabs in an online environment on multiple clients.

    I sincerely hope that this is something that we can look forward to in future.

  4. 13/03/2008Charl says:

    Ive been using Brandseye and it is very powerful a combination of technorati and google alerts wont come close to this type of identity coverage

  5. 13/03/2008SaulK says:

    I think ultimately the question is would a small business really need something like this? Would a blogger like yourself need a product to help with online identity? I think not.

    This is a relatively specialised product that would be of little relevance to small business for whom day to day issues are considerably more important.

  6. 13/03/2008Adii says:

    After yesterday’s “debate” I forgot about this post this morning… I must honestly say that I don’t agree with Rob here – I think everything with regards to Brandseye is great (or sounds great, as I haven’t tested it) and I think their business model is spot-on. But fact is that they’re missing out on a massive market here… I’m not saying that I have the answers or the right business model, but looking at other great online services (Basecamp for example) – they have packages to cater for the different needs of ambitious bloggers and corporates alike.

    I also don’t like the sound of a “Lite” version. Limit me on capacity, but not features. Should be interesting to see where Quirk goes with this.

    I do however agree that it’s great to see SA companies making bold moves online! (Adii tips his hat at Quirk)

  7. 14/03/2008Theo says:

    There is a very real alternative at a much lower price: $11.95 per month. Check out http://www.attenalert.com/ (even includes video matches).

  8. 14/03/2008Tim Shier says:

    Hi Theo,

    While Attenalert could be an alternative, in some cases, it is very limited in its functionality and for all intents and purposes its Google Alerts with a little more interface (sorry Attenalert).

    BrandsEye on the other hand provides this functionality but provides a great deal more in terms of a brands ability to quantify, report and manage their reputation.

    Tools such as attenalert compete with other Brand Monitoring products such as Google Alerts and Technorati “Watchlist” but don’t provide any of the rich information around the public perceptions of a brand.

    BrandsEye takes every mention and, with a little human input, allows for rich tagging of information. This provides information far beyond the brand knowing that ‘the mention happened’ (as is the case with Google Alerts) but rather to know the impact that a particular mention has on your reputation, to flag it as relevant and deal with it – in real time.

    For example of a key distinguishing factor, BrandsEye provides rich, completely customizable, graphs of your reputation over time and the ability to draw out particular mentions. For example: all mentions of a member of your staff, which come from a consumer generated media, have high credibility and have bad things to say about their brand can be displayed and managed. (similarly an RSS feed for this combination can be setup so that as soon as a mention appears the relevant person is notified and can respond).

    It is this level of sophistication which differentiates us and Reputation Monitoring Tools and makes the product more relevant to businesses. I think this is an important distinction, its “more relevant to” not “only for” business and therefore justifies the cost.

    BrandsEye’s watching ;)

    Cheers,

    Tim

  9. 30/03/2008BrandsEye - the online reputation monitoring tool says:

    [...] thing that popped into my mind was that I am already able to track my brand (Alex Ion for example) for free, using services like [...]

  10. 30/03/2008TightReviews.com » Blog Archive » BrandsEye - the online reputation monitoring tool says:

    [...] thing that popped into my mind was that I am already able to track my brand (Alex Ion for example) for free, using services like [...]

  11. 23/11/2008Brad says:

    AttenAlert.com is now free apparently. Acquired by a local firm here.

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