Thailand’s Zocial Inc enters Indonesian market to offer two products in social network monitoring. Partnering with media conglomerate MNC Group, Zocial targets Indonesia’s large population and its enormous enthusiasm in Internet and social networking. It is Zocial’s first expansion outside Thailand and it’s planning to localize the products in several Asian countries over next few years.
Zocial offers two flagship products, named ZocialEye and ZocialRank. ZocialEye is a comprehensive system to monitor consumer behavior and what are they talking about in social network services about brands or products, whether they like it or not. ZocialRank, in the other hand, is a ranking system that comprehensively delivers information about brand popularity and its competitors in major social network services, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Foursquare in ten Southast Asian countries. If we take a peek at ZocialRank, overall Yamaha Indonesia is the most popular brand account in Facebook and sits at number 5 in Southeast Asian region.
As cited from e27, Zocial will send employees from Thailand to Indonesia to get a good idea of what their customers are like in the largest country in Southeast Asia. The role of MNC, Zocial’s founder Pawoot Pongwittyapanu explains, will be under sales and marketing, which includes data research and analysis for their customers. While they will have Thais to support the team in Indonesia, he is looking at having everything run by their local team with support from their headquarters. Zocial expects to form a team of about seven to nine people in the first three to six months.
This is not the first time for MNC Group to build partnership with foreign online services. Previously MNC has teamed up with Rakuten to build Rakuten Belanja Online and with Tencent to promote WeChat (and other Tencent products) in Indonesia. One interesting finding is that all MNC partners in online business are all originated from Asian region. Maybe MNC thought Asian region is a unique market that only can be understood by Asian’s own products.
