Circos (www.circos.com) is a young leading technology company that specialises in extracting brand sentiments from the online consumer-written reviews and comments. The company's proprietary technologies apply semantic analysis to social media, surfacing rich insights about brands based on personal preferences. Circos’s Brand Karma product is a technology-based market research tool that helps leading hotel brands understand how they are perceived by customers. This powerful product allows clients to improve search engine

optimisation, credibly brand themselves online and ultimately, increase their revenue.

Lesson 1: Build an innovative product with a ready market
The essence of Brand Karma is the client’s ability to transform feedback from social media into notable improvements in the business operations. Social media is essentially user-generated content, built upon the interactive facilities of the web. Tapping on the widespread availability and usage of social media, Brand Karma uses complex algorithms to interpret the written comments on the social sites into numeric data for subsequent analysis. The final step in the process is the packaging of the newly found information into easily digestible reports for managers.

Imagine millions of valuable and insightful customer feedback going to naught if not for the practical and comprehensive solution that Brand Karma provides. The compilation and analysis of customer feedback is not done through typical manual processes and the carrying out of customer surveys, as is being done in most market research companies. Instead, the innovative product crawls across hundreds of web sources, including forums, review sites, online communities and blogs to analyse the comments and reviews made in such sources. This enables hospitality companies to come up with the appropriate marketing strategies and approaches to improve on the quality of their services.

Feedback from social media is also inherently more reliable than customer surveys. Firstly, they come from a perspective, untainted by the need to be politically correct, which is often the case in the conducting of manual surveys in which customers might feel embarrassed to reveal their true feelings. Secondly, the sample size obtained from social media – encompassing the World Wide Web – is evidently wider than the sample size obtained through traditional surveys, which might be subjected to geographical, manpower or time limitations.

Lesson #2: A risk-taking mentality is key
The team behind Brand Karma, Mario Jobbe, Morris Sim and George Mitchell, became friends whilst working together at Microsoft. They share a common passion for entrepreneurship, travel and technology. It was their keen foresight that social media would experience great development in the coming years that enabled them to embark successfully in this joint venture. Said Sim, “We made a huge bet when we started the company. The bet was that consumers would write their feelings about their brand experiences. In 2005, it wasn’t really clear that people would do it. The bet paid off because now there’s way more social media than editorial media and people are making their purchase decisions based on comments they’re seeing online.”

Lesson #3: Be flexible and seize opportunities
For the trio, it was a risk that definitely paid off, as the opportunities for Brand Karma are endless. It is able to correlate a brand’s performance numbers (like revenue and customer satisfaction scores) with its social media data to determine which drivers are impacting its bottom line. Some features in the software also allow for easy customisation, creative presentation and deeper analysis – making it a tool that empowers executives to carry out their functions with ease and clarity. The technology behind Brand Karma is also flexible enough to allow the brand to expand its reach to clients in other industries besides the hotel and travel industry, and also to analyse comments made in other languages such as simplified Chinese.

“Name a vertical and if there’s user-generated content then we can do it,” explains Morris Sim.

Additionally, and more interestingly, Brand Karma is able to assess the people who write the reviews, effectively breaking them down into various demographic and psychographic personas – such as Business, Leisure, Family, Honeymoon, and Staycation travelers. This enables clients to refine their marketing strategy to suit the right target markets.

Lesson #4: Be prepared to face challenges
Despite the successes that the trio could see were within close reach of them, the journey towards convincing clients to purchase their product was not exactly smooth sailing. The early prototype introduced to clients received criticism and indifference from hoteliers as the charts provided were simply too complex, necessitating its redesign. Another challenge also came during the incubation period, which took several years and was a period of immense uncertainty for them as contracts could only be signed after the final product was completed and ready for commercialisation. Fortunately, the cold calls to hotel managers paid off as the managers were impressed with the re-tooled version and requested to purchase them for their hotels.

Lesson #5: These lean times call for resourcefulness
For Brand Karma, resourcefulness is letting the product speak for itself.

The company is thankful to have received angel funding from friends and family, which helped them to incubate their technology and hire their first employees. They also succeeded in securing funding from the Interactive & Digital Media (IDM) arm of the Media Development Authority, which was instrumental in accelerating their research and development in several key areas.

Lesson #6: Don’t stop moving
Having seized a golden business opportunity despite the gloomy economic outlook, Brand Karma is not intending to slow down. It is currently working on taking Brand Karma into additional languages and verticals, and is actively hiring software engineers and analysts so that it can continue revamping its product offerings and stay competitive in the market research industry.

Entrepreneurship is clearly ingrained in the hearts of the Brand Karma founders, who profess that they have enjoyed the creativity and freedom that starting their own company has given them thus far.

Their parting words of wisdom for other aspiring entrepreneurs?

“If you can achieve balance between creativity and profitability, you’ll be very successful.”