Kenyan social media platform seeks to fix local marketing gap

Dennis Bikamboh; Founder Pollbrand (PHOTO: File)

NAIROBI, KENYA:  The mention of social media applications tunes ones memory into virtual places where people exchange pleasantries, find new friends and among other things log into catch up with latest trends and news in the society.

The social media platforms are dominated by leading foreign firms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram among other systems.

Dennis Bikamboh, a Kenyan based entrepreneur with construction background has come up with a Kenyan social media application (pollbrand) which allows users to conduct credible polls, create and manage accounts for brands, personalities and link up with events.

Pollbrand is a Kenyan online social media and marketing platform that allows its users to be brands or create brands and allow these brands to compete in polls.

A brand in pollbrand platform is any unique creation that will attract pollbrand community to follow it, like the brand page and photos and vote for the brand when it’s competing in a poll. The uniqueness of this platform is building a brand which involves both the brand owner or creator and the pollbrand community.  

“This is through uploading brand photos, writing reviews about the brand and rating them between one star and five star,” he explains.

The platform also seeks to engage its community through polls which are used to gauge popularity and strength of brands.

A poll can be created from the system by any pollbrand user with the intention of getting opinion from other user about different brand under the same category. The user creates a poll by linking two or more brands to compete and other users are allowed to cast vote online for their favorite brands. The users can also write reviews on their personal experience about competing brands hence allowing other users to be able make informed judgment on which brand to follow and use based on other user experience.

 “I came up with pollbrand in 2016 to breathe life in our marketing industry. Besides allowing users to create brands, it offers interactive marketing tools through stuff such as memes and from this we are able to mine data on the background for intelligent marketing,” he says.

“The application also has section where individuals can conduct surveys in order to specifically target the audience. The platform has 50,000 users since launch.”

Recently, Pollbrand conducted  Mr and Miss Catholic University of Eastern Africa (Cuea) 2017 conducted on 7th, October at Nairobi's Carnivore grounds.

After its launch, pollbrand conducted the online voting exercise for Nganya (Matatu) Awards 2016 that was held on December 3 last year at Nairobi’s Kenyatta International Conference Center. Matatu enthusiasts voted for their favorite PSVs and Personnel in different categories through the platform.

The annual event involves public voting for favorite PSV / Matatu in different categories in consideration of customer service, compliance to traffic rules and regulations, commuter comfort, road safety record and positive matatu culture.

“When organizing this event the challenge was identifying what would be the most appropriate methodology to come up with the winners of different categories. An option of having a panel of judges couldn’t sail through as biasness and bribery could take a center stage considering that the matatu industry is well known for this vice.”

With no other option left SMS voting would carry the day but still with lots of challenges among them the cost per text for public to vote which meant that those with money to buy airtime would carry the day.

An online voting system would answer all these questions and overcome all the challenges. Many users who used pollbrand system in voting for their favorite matatus were impressed with how the system worked and gave their own ideas of how the website would be used as a solution to different aspect of life. 

“The transparency in the pollbrand voting system made the Nganya awards a success and through that my team was invited involved in developing for Catholic University of Eastern African a system that is currently used by the University community for voting for their student Leaders. The last six month has seen over 1200 brands created.”

Challenges

Currently pollbrand faces challenges such as lack of resources to create awareness to the public about the website and storage capacity limiting it to only doing the photos with no videos.

"In  5 years to come we look forward to be African largest social media network with over 100million users and to offer our client the best user experience in the social media world," he says in an interview with Standard Digital.