Olga Sternik, BrandSpotter : Social Media Monitoring Tool for Russian market

Olga finished Moscow Aviation Institute in 1989 as Master in Applied Mathematics and in 1990 as Master in Software Programming and Information Systems. Started working in some Soviet institution as a software engineer and doing PhD work in her Alma mater, but USSR collapse changed the situation dramatically. Had to leave this way for long years. Worked as a call-center operator, then as a secretary in one of the newly started corporations, in 1993 started her own business in export-import trading. Faced the shortage in software for business, designed a software for her own office network that solved all tasks of documents processing inside the company - recording goods flows, creating customs declarations, invoices, tax reports. Discovered that the system provides more profit on the tax optimisation, loss prevention and salaries cuts than the purchase-and-sale gain in price.In 1996 Olga transformed her company into consulting company and started creating software for businesses, in 1998 turned to the newly coming opportunities - the Internet started its growth in Russia. Up to the beginning of the new century brands wanted Web marketing, the market was empty, and this was an interesting new niche. Being a blogger from 2001, Olga guessed that blogosphere marketing, community building, marketing in social networks are shaping as a future big trend, and started the Sterno.Ru company - a digital marketing agency, which now has 60 employees in three offices in Beijing, Moscow and Fleet, UK. Olga speaks to YourStory about her latest product – BrandSpotter.

How did BrandSpotter and Sterno come about?

BrandSpotter was born as a social CRM for internal use in 2009, we developed the first version of the system as an answer to our own needs. We at Sterno.Ru had accumulated much experience in building and managing project groups of moderators answering customers’ questions in social networks, this is a popular service we sell to brands. They needed listening tools, brand mentions filtering tools, tools for collecting statistical data for analysis. We just wanted to create a useful dashboard for all this purposes to cut endless working hours of doing simple routines. But as soon as we started designing, we realised that in a year it will be a system needed by everybody on the market, and I found a private investor who provided finance support for a bigger development team, and in early 2010 we registered BrandSpotter as a new company.

Detailed features of Brandspotter

1. Features concerning blog listening:

- we search all blogs and social networks in Russian filtering all mentions of your brand, you products, your ads - you set all words and topics you are interested in, and get the real-time flow of all mentions in one feed

- emotion recognising: our AI analyses linguistics parameters of all the entries (blog posts, comments, statuses etc with mentions of your query set) and marks this mentions as positive to your brand, negative or neutral

- filtering in real time: your team of SM managers may choose filtering on negative mentions only to see immediately all links for entries where to come and answer to unsatisfied customers

2. Features concerning analysis:

- source report (which websites, forums, soc.networks, twitter etc. - where they talk about you much or less, where they talk mostly negative or mostly positive)

- author report: who mentions you often, regularly? are they your fans or you haters? how influential they are (how many readers do they have)?

- general statistics report: how many mentions dayly, what percent of all entries this is (what is the interest to you in general), what is the average emotion tonality of the mentions - all in dynamics, with all reasonable data filters (choose dates period, time step, sources)

- comparing to your competitors (you must pre-set the competitors and search queries for them)

- downloading any data as an Excel report

- full Excel reports with many pages for all data and all mentions send on your e-mail - weekly and monthly

3. More data: stats on your own communities and pages, additional methrics

- submit URLs of your brand communities and we will monitor stat data: how many followers subscribed, unsubscribed, how active they are (do they post and comments on your page, or are they just dead nicknames whoes owners had forgotten of you long ago?)

- we calculate your general "brand health" in soc.media using data mentioned above and some formulas we created and try to give you a most generalized picture of your reputation and interest to you from people

- all this is also can be watched online on your account in the system, and included in the Excel reports we send, for you slow and thoughtful reading :)

Visit Sterno here : http://sterno.ru/en/