Late last week,
IndoPacific Edelman and
Brandtology announced that Intel and AMD top the list of brands most discussed online by Indonesians and that Kaskus and Twitter are the top two sites for technology discussions.
These results are from the first quarterly
Asia Pacific Digital Brand Index for Indonesia. The DBI is a way to measure a brand’s prominence in online conversations across several hundred websites. This research aims to transform quantitative data from 51 of the largest technology companies in Indonesia into an insight on the primary brands and topics that generate online discussions.
IP Edelman and Brandtology tracked online conversations between July and September 2009 on more than 469 sites including various social networking sites, message boards, Facebook, news sites and blogs. It found that Intel tops the list of brands with 5,743 mentions, followed by AMD with 4,971. Third on the list was Google with 4,427.
Nine out of the top 10 brands were companies with significant inroads into the mobile industry although surprisingly, Indonesia’s largest mobile telecommunications company, Telkomsel, did not make it to the top ten. The rest of the list are Asus, Nokia, Microsoft, Acer, Indosat, Blackberry, and Excelcomindo (XL).
It is important to note that DBI does not measure brand sentiment, or at least not yet. Nanda Ivens, Director of Digital at IndoPacific Edelman, during a discussion of the results at Pacific Place, said that everyone knows that XL has been on the receiving end of some negative feedback regarding the quality of their service and as a result shot up to number 10 on the list. Ivens commented that future versions of the survey may consider taking sentiments into account for further detail and more insightful breakdowns of the results.
The index also revealed that that Kaskus (77.1%), the Indonesian online message board with the largest number of active users dominates the top ten websites that talks about technology and brands. Twitter (8.95%) and MacClubIndonesia (2.49%) are the only non Kaskus sites on the top ten list.
It is unfortunate that Kaskus, a site with dozens of forums are separated on the list into its individual forums although a more aggregated breakdown may be less relevant due to the very low percentages received by other sites. Collectively though, a combination of all news sites edges Twitter to second place with 9.65% while blogs are placed 4th.
As Indonesia’s internet-connected population grows, online engagement of customers are rising in importance. Data from Indonesia’s ISP association (APJII) say up to 35 million Indonesians are on the internet. Facebook users account for 10 million users and growing fast, Friendster users are around 8 million. Mig33, a chat service for Nokia Symbian users have around 9 million users, while Twitter, the hottest kid on the block managed to grab 1.5 million Indonesian accounts according to data from Google AdPlanner.
Facebook fails to break into the top 10 because it is simply not where conversations about technology happens, at least not on a significant enough scale. Tech mavens are far more engaging on forums and on Twitter although Ivens also mentioned that household brands have a significant showing in Facebook.
While currently this is only for technology companies and brands, the Digital Brand Index door may be opened for non-tech companies in the future.
