Social media was a topic that had entered into the daily vocabulary of teenagers and business executives alike. With this surge in popularity and influence worldwide the open question was what this new way of interacting would mean for businesses and whether or not social media could really be a driver of company profitability or just a nice way to share photos with friends?

Circos, a Singapore-based company, developed a business that it hoped would help to answer those questions. By using a proprietary sentiment analysis tool, Circos had mined the vast world of online reviews available on various social media platforms (e.g. TripAdvisor, Facebook) to create a dashboard of usable insights for luxury hotel brands. This dashboard, named the Brand Karma Dashboard, would display near real-time information on what people were saying about the property online, how the property stacked up against its competition and what it could do to improve.

The case starts as Frederic Langlois, Circos.com general manager in Singapore, is set to pitch the Brand Karma Dashboard to the hotel management at Singapore’s historic Raffles Hotel. The hotel had asked for an initial meeting after being refered by a current Circos client. All the same Langlois would have to sell the idea of the dashboard along with consulting services. It would not be easy as Raffles was a property known for being a historic landmark rather than a hotel with the latest technological innovations. In pitching this idea to Raffles Hotel Langlois would have to test the very concept of the Circos business model and convince the hotel management that his product could really help drive their bottom line.