Konnect Insights is a Social Listening and Market research tool built on Big Data technology. It is used by top brands to understand conversations all over the web. It gives detailed reports on how you are faring vs your competition in the industry based on online conversations on blogs, forums, mainstream news and social media.
Sameer Narkar is the Director and Chief Software Architect of Konnect Insights. He is an Electronics & Telecommunications engineer with more than a decade’s worth of experience in software. After a career of 7 years in Software industry the work on Konnect Insight began in December 2011.
Sujata Sangwan interacts with Sameer Narkar and spoke to him
Your view on the current market scenario and future landscapeWe can see that the brands are reaching out to people in different and innovative ways. This engagement is not just restricted to responding only to their own customers. Brands are also trying to reach out to prospect customers. This is only possible when you are listening to conversations which are related to the industry and not to a brand in specific. Most of the brands in the current scenario are conducting social listening in order to connect with their targeted audience & customers. This enables higher customer retention while also providing a scope for customer acquisition
What level of spending is there on Web? Ad spending seen growing at 15.5% in 2016, driven by digital in 2016. The year 2015 saw ad spending grow by 14.2%, higher than GroupM’s estimate of 12.4%, to Rs.49,758 crore. Ad spending in India was estimated to grow 15.5% in 2016 to Rs.57,486 crore with digital advertising expanding at the fastest pace of 47.5%.
Please explain your market focus?Today Konnect Insights is being used by top brands from Automobile, Telecom, BFSI, Entertainment, IT & Pharma. The focus is to reach out to more brands in these sectors as they can leverage Konnect to understand what their customer & future customers are talking about them over the web. Social listening and analytics has a huge market with a total market size of 5.40 Billion USD and we want to be the market leader in this space in a year’s time.
Share your line of business priorities for next 1 year?Konnect Insights is the most preferred tool by many brands and agencies today because of our own search engine capabilities. For us it is important that we make our search engines more robust. Today we crawl close to 25 million websites and as we are going global we will be further improving on this. Our key motto is not to miss any conversation. Intelligent dashboards in Konnect Insights powered by this data are getting very intuitive, we want to further focus on our ‘Konnect Recommends’ module to help brand managers take informed decision based on data. Every single brand from Automobiles, Aviation, BFSI, Entertainment, Telecom, IT, Pharma need Konnect Insights and we are making sure we offer best solutions.
What challenges you faced – in terms of taking your product to the market, convincing your customer about its benefits, etc.?When there are existing players in the market and you want to be a leader in the space then the only way out is to build a better product. We are very thankful to our first few customers who helped us with valuable feedback. Yes there were challenges in knocking the door but once we were in people just loved our product. This happened because we worked very closely with our first few customers to build the best social listening product.
Throw some light on your business and revenue modelKonnect Insights is a SaaS based application. It works completely on 'pay as you go' model. Our customers are brands from BFSI, Telecom, Automobiles, Aviation, Entertainment, IT and few others. Digital Agencies and PR agencies are also our customers.
What makes Konnect Insights unique from others dealing in same sector? Konnect Insights is built on top of in-house search engine so you do not miss any conversation from anywhere on the web. You have access to historic data from the web.
Konnect Insight also has an excellent UI / UX that makes working on analytics fun. There are customized dashboards that makes complex reporting very easy.
What platforms does it cover?It provides rich data from news website, blogs, discussion forums, google+ and social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram & YouTube. We make sure that we can always provide a real time data coverage to our clients.
How the Web is evolving for the brand managers?A brand manager needs to monitors market trends and keep a track on the marketing activities to ensure the right message is delivered for their product or service to their targeted audience. Online conversations have an impact on how your brand is perceived. Brand managers have to make sure that people are not talking negative about the brand and if they are they try to understand the reason and offer a proper solution. They also want to pick up positive mentions of the brand to help the brand advocacy. Listening hence becomes the key.
What trends are you witnessing with regards to customer engagements on social media?Earlier, the customer engagement on Social Media was usually restricted to customer support or was dependent on the content pushed by the brands. Now brands are looking at innovative ways to interact with customers and also looking at generating leads. Brands are listening to a broad set of conversations, analyse them and then they devise an engagement strategy based on the learning.
