Cerebra

Perhaps the best way to explain OBM is to tell you what it is not:

1. It is not Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) or the manipulation thereof,
2. It is not content and community management,
3. Lastly, it is most certainly not there to suppress negative mentions or to delete / hide the visibility of these mentions.

We use OBM tools to gather social intelligence so that we can compile concise reports that alerts our customers on what is being said about them. Part of this is to raise awareness of topics of conversation and provide insights so that clients can either use this information to intervene, learn or ignore if they wish.

What can OBM tell us?

As we become more social, we learn to express our love or hate for brands online. It’s the 21st century, "word of mouth" is more important now than ever to give our clients this information to enable them to make the key decisions.

At Cerebra, we use various tools to tell us the following:

• The calculated reputation of a client.
• The key influencers that affect the brand. This can be in terms of interaction rates, what they say and how credible they are.
• Brand sentiment: This tells us how customers and the general community feel about the brand. This sentiment varies in degrees of positivity and negativity.
• Ad value or brand reach: The key purpose is to calculate the exposure of each mention about a brand online and convert that into a Rand value equivalent.

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  Why does Cerebra offer OBM?

  OBM has a distinct function for our clients, separate from other reports that they may get, such as monthly statistics of their online community activity. OBM serves to inform and give insight to our clients on their customers, the broader online community and influencers that are affecting them online. We also want to provide our clients value and “the full picture”. OBM is just another way to depict the social landscape that they're a part of.

  Where is OBM heading at Cerebra?

  The first step for OBM at Cerebra was establishing quality reports and insights, which could be used on a month-to-month basis by our clients as they wished. The second step is to be able to integrate our insights and reports into the strategic operations. Whether it be for annual strategic sessions, content and community brainstorms or for forecasting and predicting the future of our clients online. As the field of OBM continues to grow, so do the possibilities for its utilisation.