How the ORM market is developing in Uzbekistan: trends and experience from Index agency
The ORM services market has become an important part of the strategy of large and medium-sized businesses in Uzbekistan. Timur Abdulin, head of the Index agency, discussed how companies' attitudes toward reputation management have changed.
How the ORM Market is Developing in Uzbekistan: Trends and Experience of Index
August 15th marked three years since the founding of Index, one of the first reputation marketing agencies in Uzbekistan. In connection with this event, Timur Abdulin, the agency's director, discusses how perceptions of investments in ORM (online reputation management) have changed within local businesses and why companies are increasingly seeking reputation management specialists.
Three years ago, clients' requests were exclusively for information monitoring and PR campaigns—indeed, only large businesses understood this, primarily after they had already experienced information attacks. Today, medium-sized businesses are also starting to work with reputation management, and large companies are already consistently including ORM as an annual expense within their PR or marketing budgets.
ORM is evolving: there is a growing demand for monitoring closed communities, which are the main source of information outbreaks long before a crisis is needed. Index is already adept at addressing this and is implementing predictive analytics for its clients.
There are numerous tools for anticipating information attacks. Monitoring systems are the basic entry point for managing a company's information space. However, they aren't always sufficient—automated systems only read indexed sources, leaving approximately 15-20% uncovered. To address this, Index has developed its own software that helps clients see messages from communities that require pre-moderation.
Timur Abdulin notes that ORM remains an area where AI tools will never fully replace the work of human analysts and moderators. Tone of speech, the ability to distinguish between speech patterns and dialects, and understand the cultural characteristics of a region are crucial aspects of managing reviews and reputation in general.
"We also educate the market—we hold several specialized annual events, some of which are industry-specific." This spring, we held the first GR Day in Uzbekistan, where we educated marketers, press secretaries, and information policy advisors at government organizations about existing information threats and how to address them. "We have experience working with state-owned companies; we invited them to speak and also brought in leading reputation management experts from Russia," added Timur Abdulin.
In addition to the basic ORM tools that local businesses should be using, Index is tracking several interesting trends that will gain significant momentum.
It so happens that Uzbek businesses have somewhat transcended the era of SERM and review sites, when audiences began actively using search engines—their primary focus was already on mapping and AI tools. For example, in Google search, the majority of a user's attention during a specific query remains on the search engine's AI help. Therefore, it's much more important for local businesses to embrace GEO (reputation optimization within neural network responses) this year. Neural networks will replace SEO as the primary determinant of consumer brand opinion. A clear trend in this direction is to allocate separate budgets for managing search results in ChatGPT, Google, Yandex, and other in-demand AI assistants.
Reputation specialists at Index can help companies develop a comprehensive reputation strategy, shape their image, and build a strong reputation in the media.
Phone: (+998) 33-404-66-00.
Website: indexpr.uz
Instagram: @indexpr.agency
Telegram: t.me/indexpr
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