A buzz in the social media cup

BANGALORE, INDIA: In early days of 2009, seven working professional joined together to start InRev Systems Bangalore Pvt. Ltd . Almost one and half a year later, this startup claims to be self-sustained and successful.

The company launched around five products including their flagship products called Buzzom, using the social media and leveraging on the opportunity, it aims to build up into a social media brand management company.

In a chat with Akanksha Prasad of CIOL, the chief operating officer of InRev Systems, Sweta Sharma shared her experiences, learning from Buzzom Premier and the road ahead. Excerpts:

Tell me something about your company, what was the idea that seeded into Buzzom?

InRev Systems Bangalore Pvt. Ltd was started around one and half years ago. InRev combines domain knowledge, trusted reporting structure and innovative applications to help companies advance their business decisions.

Buzzom is our flagship brand. When we started Twitter was still to come to India, but people were talking microblogging, Myspace, Facebook etc. We realized that there is so many information available in the Internet. Our idea was to start a social media tool to bring all the information together with the data analytics and understand the brand perception.

Currently Buzzom receives 1.3 million page views per month basis. In order to bring some business in place, we started with paid version of the same tool-Buzzom Premium, which has not got more than 500 registered users.

Our grand success with Buzzom Premium has made us self sustained in just one and a half years. But we are looking for investors for future investments.

What are your favorite features in Buzzom and the Buzzom Premier and why do you think they are unique?

We have introduced many unique features in Buzzom, my favorites among them are Cross Follow. This feature helps the Twitter users to follow the various followers of your friend and allow them follow back your account. This is not available with any other third-party Twitter client.

Another feature is Follow Lock / Follow Block. At times we come across a few accounts that one don't want to follow; such accounts can be locked. This will block the user's activities but not the account. Buzzom Block does not block the user at Twitter. Similarly, Buzzom provides a hide option, where users can hide the tweet of a particular user. At times, we do not want to unfollow people, but still avoid following their tweet.

Buzzom Premier is a feature-rich paid version. It provides option of Flush (Unfollow the users who do not follow you), Grow (find and follow people who are likely to follow back) and Reciprocate (automatically follow your followers).

After meeting success with Buzzom Premier, what is the roadmap ahead?

We plan to become a social media brand management company. We are building complete brand management tool for companies to engage with the customers and promoters. Buzzom Brand Monitoring would be a platform where a brand can communicate with their loyal customers or promoters and increase their brand value.

We have many new features for our products like Buzzom Premium. We would introduce sentiment analysis for brands to segment mentions and people with respect to sentiments and analyze deeper.

We are working on new tool called Social Ads, where bloggers can use online advertising platform. Advertisers can advertise on these blogs and direct traffic to their website, while the bloggers can earn money for hosting the advertisements on their blogs.

Our target market is the small and medium enterprises and every individual that needs branding and marketing but have limited budgets. We are looking at event for the start ups, who are looking afresh for brand building.

What are the trends that you see in social media? What suggestions would you give to the social media users?

The first point to understand in social media is there are few golden rules, which I would call as 'R's (regular, real, relevant and reciprocative). We use social media largely because of this. The users should be regular in their activity, they should be real, authentic and should be reciprocative to topics, questions.

We have observed that a lot of people use social media, especially Twitter, for self branding. Twitter is all about that, but the users tend to spam their own profiles with irrelevant information. It is the very information that needs to be relevant and real. People like to communicate with people and that is what social media all about.