Case studies

Business impact

IBM developed a brand management tool to help the client monitor a wide range of digital communications channels and provide real-time alerts to issues affecting their brands, industry or competitors, giving the client a chance to quickly detect and react to an emerging issue before it spreads beyond the client’s control.

Issue

Many business experts agree that a company’s reputation is its most valuable asset, but it is also one of its most vulnerable. The proliferation of electronic bulletin boards, forums, blogs and other digital communications channels represents a challenge to firms to understand what consumers and shareholders are saying about their brands and reputation. Businesses are looking to technology solutions to help monitor the vast universe of cyber-chatter with the goal of understanding the ”voice of the consumer.”

Executive summary

IBM Research and IBM Global Business Services (GBS) worked together through IBM Research Services to provide the client with a fully integrated end-to-end solution for monitoring all pertinent digital communications channels. The solution, developed by the Almaden Research Lab and dubbed COBRA (Corporate Brand and Reputation Analysis), can be customized to detect threats to the client’s reputation or brand, giving them time to identify an emerging threat before it becomes a crisis. COBRA builds on the advanced data mining capabilities of IBM Research’s Business Insights Workbench tool to help the client keep a finger on the pulse of millions of daily electronic postings.

What IBM did

GBS and Research worked with the client’s own group of research scientists to define a tracking strategy to meet the client’s needs for brand monitoring. Using COBRA’s advanced analytics capabilities, the GBS team provided the client with an automated way to collect and filter massive amounts of structured and unstructured data produced daily on the Web on news and business sites, blogs, forums, social networking sites and other digital communications channels. The results are displayed in user-customizable dashboard reports, providing the client with real-time problem and event alerts.

Because COBRA can be configured to monitor any product or issue that might be of interest to a company, in a preliminary phase the client worked with GBS to use COBRA to gauge consumer sentiment regarding chocolate. Following the COBRA engagement, IBM Research followed up with a presentation to the client on the future of analytics and other cutting edge technologies.

Capabilities applied

IBM was able to leverage its expertise in advanced analytics and business intelligence to develop an innovative approach to brand monitoring. Building on the capabilities of an existing IBM Research asset – the Business Insights Workbench – gave IBM a head start in providing an end-to-end solution that can be customized for a wide range of business uses.