By Tham Yuen-C

IF TALK is an indication of interest, then there is no doubt that netizens here are into technology.

A major technology brand is mentioned every two minutes in online conversations on some of Singapore's most popular websites.

And when netizens here go online to chat about technology, SingTel, Google and StarHub are the names that they bandy about most.

These were the findings of the Digital Brand Index, released last Wednesday.

Developed by public relations firm Edelman, it is the first study of its kind here that monitored 58 technology brands from Google to Samsung to Microsoft, across popular online channels.

Over three months, from July to September, nearly 800,000 online comments were collected from 4,348 channels.

The channels in Singapore included Hardware Zone's Eat-Drink-Man-Woman forum, which was most popular among those discussing technology, and Twitter Singapore. Other Web spaces tracked were Techgoondu, The Online Citizen and Mr Miyagi (for blogs) and ZDNet Asia (news site).

While SingTel led with more than 9,000 mentions on these sites, the index does not give an indication of whether this is good or bad.

That is because the index is only a quantitative yardstick of how often a brand is mentioned and takes into consideration all comments - both positive and negative - about the brand.

Sanjay Nair, director for technology practice at Edelman South-east Asia, said online conversations here revolved around products and services.

Talk about SingTel, for example, was mostly related to the launch of the iPhone 3GS, which it started selling here in July.

Data for the index was collected by Brandtology.

The one-year-old company tracks online sentiments for a handful of Fortune 500 companies as well as local banks, retailers and government agencies.

Its Digital Conversation Management System is a complex natural language processor that makes sense of chatroom chatter using algorithms.

The in-house tool trawls, sorts and analyses sentiments - in five classes from very positive to very negative - that are buzzed about a brand and its products in the myriad of online conversation channels including blogs, forums and websites.

While the index tracks only the numbers, a complete sentiment analysis - down to, say, how hot a particular cellphone model is - can be packaged from $2,000 a month.

Additional reporting by Eve Yap

yuenc@sph.com.sg

This story was first published in The Straits Times Digital Life.

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