I did a 15 minute talk at Measurement Camp last month and I have just started using slideshare, so putting 2 & 2 together, here it is !
We at Brandwatch thought it would be a good idea to put a list together. End of year retrospectives, reviews of the year, top films and books of the year, these are all part of the fun of this here season. So, after this little intro, we’ll show you ours.
Brandwatch works pretty hard to not only find all those mentions of your brand that matter, but also to then scan these mentions for their sentiment – what thay are saying about you, what their problem is, what pleases them. To reflect this endeavour we’ve put a list together that represents those brands that have been in our system for most of the year, and that give us a solid and prevailing reading of each brand’s sentiment. We have also included a volume number for each brand. This is the number of mentions from which we analysed sentiment. You can Interact with the list to place the brands in terms of most positive, most negative. Also, the display gives you an idea of how emotive a brands is – the extent to which it elicits fevered and polarized opinion. We believe that it’s all about the numbers - the detailed breakdown of the sentiment a brand elicits in the people who talk about it.
It is worth saying that this list does not cover all the brands in our system. No where near. Just those that have reached a certain volume threshold of mentions over a significant portion of the last year, AND that our sentiment classifiers are more than happy with. So, for example, brands such as the IQ (very positive sentiment, so far) and the new Sega Sonic game (showing a fascinating mix of opinion around its impending launch) are not included here, simply because we don’t quite have enough data to confidently place them in this list. In the next few days, maybe. Each day means a new layer of data.
We are happy to place our list next to those made by other media analysers, to show-up the different angle of approach made by this particular list of ours:
It will hopefully become clear that the size of a brand – its fame – is not over-riding at Brandwatch. Our list is not necessarily so much about the size of the brand as much as it is about the sentiment the brand elicits. Consequently, a brand does not have to be a global or even a national heavy-weight to feature: we want to also find and take notice of those brands that people talk about in specailized fields. It is why companies like ‘Norton’ are in there, ADHD brands, too, and the film ‘Wall-E’, together with those monsters, Barclays and Jaguar. Enjoy!
P.S. Let me add one little thing. We are currently developing a feature which will dig even further into the data and then separate off and show those ’special’ mentions about a brand – those mentions out there which are the most revealing, pertinent, and most key, the most telling of the telling, the ones which reflect the heart of an issue around a brand. This will be coming very soon!
Bye
This summer The Metro Newspaper asked us to track the online sentiment towards this years big brother contestants. So, we put them into the system and I spent the next ten weeks monitoring daily, what Brandwatch brought back. Every morning, armed with a steaming cup of coffee i logged in and patiently scanned the content Brandwatch picked up; lots of mindful insight like the biggest topic of “ugly bitch” and inspiring comment, “did yah see nicole doin the thriller dance she fort shu was pua amazinn”
I said a silent thank you on the last eviction night …and here I reflect on what we got out of it. Well…apart from a lucrative flutter with the bookies (brandwatch correctly predicted the evictee for 8 out of 10 weeks), we built a new chart . (more…)
We are a data company. That’s to say, what we sell is data which is used for reputation management and social media analysis. But it’s the technology that mines and creates the data that we pour most of our blood, sweat and tears into. That’s to say we are a bunch of geeky guys (apart from Katja!) who build software.
One of the difficult choices we face - one that I face from customer requests, our investors and my inner Magnus Magnusson, is where to best direct and deploy our fabulous, but finite development team? Do we put more emphasis on developing a user-friendly, fast, beautiful, full of wow-factor, no-training-required front end or a robust, scalable, fast, redundant, far-reaching backend?
The answer in the past has been, 8 out of 10 times, the backend. We are after all, a data company and it’s the backend that finds, organises and analyses the data.
But that has meant that our front end has been rather restrictive which can be a pain for our users as well as we ourselves using the system. No longer! We have pushed the weights along the scale a bit towards the frontend.
Not quite balanced as this cute little diagram suggests, but on the way.
So by the End of November - oh my - what UI delights will we have in store for the unknowing world? Some maybe!
signed: your rebalanced buddy
I have a trek bike - a 4200 or something like that. It has a drum brake on the back wheel which has been getting more spongy and less effective. Almost to the point of being useless and given the state of my front brake pads, it’s something I had put on my list of things to fix. I hate that list.
Being a good citizen and signed-up member of the movement towards self-sustainability, I cycle to work and on Friday I went over to my bike to ride home and found that it had been tampered with.
The back brake had been adjusted. And suddenly it worked perfectly again.
I was, as you may imagine, rather surprised by this. And during my cycle home into the setting sun, I had a smile on my face and I secretly thanked my anonymous and selfless bike fixer.
Thank you whoever you are.
I have mixed feelings about Google. They have made billions of people’s lives easier with their search engine and they truly are an innovative company which is just so impressive for such a big organisation. On the downside, their business model works as a network effect (many searchers=more ad potential = more advertisers) so now they have critical mass, and an amazing brand to go with it, it’s going to be extremely difficult for others, both big and small to get a foot into the online information business, which in the long run is a bad thing.
On the whole though for me the name Google is bathed in an overall sense of awe. When they launch a new product, they just do such a damn good job. And this is a company that is just over 10 years old. It’s not as if we are talking about decades of corporate learning here, unlike other super performing organisation like say Toyota or Apple.
So to Chrome - their new browser. Another amazing entrance from Google. Lovely and clean. It barely takes up any screen real estate, and there are some other nice design touches like the animations on file downloading and the incognito guy. BUT the best part about it for me and in particular for Brandwatch is it’s so goddamn fast. We did some side by side tests with IE7 and Firefox3 and Chrome is 50% faster at loading our app than either of the others. And 50 is a lot of %s.
The reason, it appears, is how Chrome deals with Javascript. We use a lot of Javascript in our UI to make it as nice to use as possible and firefox in particular is not that fast at rendering it. Chrome is. It’s my new browser of choice. Google has done it again - horray! boo! horray!!
One piece of work we did for the latest release of Brandwatch was to add a ‘normalise’ option to our graphs. It was at times difficult to know, by looking at a graph, which variations in a brand’s number of mentions (or in its sentiment) where really meaningful. Quite often variations may be unrelated to the brand: it may be that more posts in general were produced on that day, or that our spider crawled better, etc. So when graphing several brands, it made sense to correlate the brands’ statistics in order to infer which variations were really important - which is roughly what normalisation does.
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We are releasing version 3.7 of Brandwatch this week. In fact we release new functionality and enhancements every other week, as part of minor releases. But this week’s update wraps up nicely the last four month’s work - and it is a nice time to look back and see the changes Brandwatch has been through.
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Just read a very interesting article on the future of search. The bottom line for me was pretty clear: Google Search is broken. Several of the core principles behind it are now obviously wrong.
Search is not about getting a list of web pages. The structure of online information is much more complex. If you’re looking for some help on a particular Java library, you wouldn’t expect Google to return you a link to every single page of a 50-page online manual: the whole manual is the information unit you’re looking for. If you’re looking for opinions on a new Wii game, you should expect a list of forums, with for each forum, some insight into how many posts refer to the game, what the overall sentiment is, etc. The posts may be on one same web page, or they may not, and this does not matter.
I’m doing some analysis using the public search engines and I’m being presented with a lot of pages that are not what I’m looking for. The date of publication is sometimes wrong when I search over a specific time period, or the information is weak - it takes a couple of minutes of my time to read the 2 lines of a blog in the search results, make the decision to open the page, wait for Firefox to load it properly then read enough of it to realise it’s rubbish and close the tab.
